Over the weekend, the United States carried out a large-scale military strike against Venezuela and abducted President Nicolas Maduro in a major escalation that sent shockwaves across Latin America.

On Monday morning, US President Donald Trump doubled down, threatening action against the governments of Colombia, Cuba and Mexico unless they “get their act together”, claiming he is countering drug trafficking and securing US interests in the Western Hemisphere.

The remarks revive deep tensions over US interference in Latin America. Many of the governments targeted by Trump have little appetite for Washington’s involvement, but their armed forces lack the capacity to keep the US at arm’s length.

Latin America’s military capabilities

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more on its military than the total budgets of the next 10 largest military spenders combined. In 2025, the US defence budget was $895bn, roughly 3.1 percent of its gross domestic product.

According to the 2025 Global Firepower rankings, Brazil has the most powerful military in Latin America and is ranked 11th globally.

Mexico ranks 32nd globally, Colombia 46th, Venezuela 50th and Cuba 67th. All of these countries are significantly below the US military in all metrics, including the number of active personnel, military aircraft, combat tanks, naval assets and their military budgets.

In a standard war involving tanks, planes and naval power, the US maintains overwhelming superiority.

The only notable metric that these countries have over the US is their paramilitary forces, which operate alongside the regular armed forces, often using asymmetrical warfare and unconventional tactics against conventional military strategies.

Paramilitaries across Latin America

Several Latin American countries have long histories of paramilitary and irregular armed groups that have often played a role in the internal security of these countries. These groups are typically armed, organised and politically influential but operate outside the regular military chain of command.

Cuba has the world’s third largest paramilitary force, made up of more than 1.14 million members, as reported by Global Firepower. These groups include state-controlled militias and neighbourhood defence committees. The largest of these, the Territorial Troops Militia, serves as a civilian reserve aimed at assisting the regular army against external threats or during internal crises.

In Venezuela, members of pro-government armed civilian groups known as “colectivos” have been accused of enforcing political control and intimidating opponents. Although not formally part of the armed forces, they are widely seen as operating with state tolerance or support, particularly during periods of unrest under Maduro.

In Colombia, right-wing paramilitary groups emerged in the 1980s to fight left-wing rebels. Although officially demobilised in the mid-2000s, many later re-emerged as criminal or neo-paramilitary organisations, remaining active in rural areas. The earliest groups were organised with the involvement of the Colombian military following guidance from US counterinsurgency advisers during the Cold War.

In Mexico, heavily armed drug cartels function as de facto paramilitary forces. Groups such as the Zetas, originally formed by former soldiers, possess military-grade weapons and exercise territorial control, often outgunning local police and challenging the state’s authority. The Mexican military has increasingly been deployed in law enforcement roles in response.

History of US interference in Latin America

Over the past two centuries, the US has repeatedly interfered in Latin America.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the so-called Banana Wars saw US forces deployed across Central America to protect corporate interests.

In 1934, President Franklin D Roosevelt introduced the “Good Neighbor Policy”, pledging nonintervention.

Yet during the Cold War, the US financed operations to overthrow elected governments, often coordinated by the CIA, founded in 1947.

Panama is the only Latin American country the US has formally invaded, which occurred in 1989 under President George HW Bush. “Operation Just Cause” ostensibly was aimed at removing President Manuel Noriega, who was later convicted of drug trafficking and other offences.

Imagine, if you will, a scenario in which the newly crowned NFL sack king Myles Garrett is tasked with teaching the Muppets about the fundamentals of football, and you’re maybe about a quarter of the way toward appreciating the league’s almost cartoonish dominance over what remains of the American monoculture. Picture the 6’ 4”, 272-pound collection of fast-twitch muscle fibers bearing down on Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his eternally harried lab assistant, Beaker, in a hands-on demonstration of the ouchiest branch of Newtonian physics—MEEP!—and you’ve got yourself an analogy that’s been all done up in distressed felt and crushed ping pong balls.

It ends badly for all of Kermit’s showbiz pals. A blindside hit reduces Fozzie Bear to a muddied scrap of area rug, while whatever’s left of Miss Piggy will get hosed off Garrett’s cleats and redirected to the Wilson plant in Ada, Ohio. Up in the balcony, even Statler and Waldorf have stopped cracking wise. Scooter had a family!

If entertainment fare has long been shut out of the annual list of America’s biggest TV and TV-adjacent events—the last time a scripted show found a toehold among the top 100 was in 2019, when the series finale of The Big Bang Theory scared up 18.5 million viewers—the NFL also has made short work of much of its sports competition. Having accounted for 83 of the most-watched transmissions in 2025, the Shield put up its second-best numbers on the books, trailing only its run from two years ago, when it nearly ran the table with 93 entries. (A surging college game helped put this year’s football tally at an even 90 entries.)

For all that, the real hero of the 2025 list may well be Nielsen. As much as the NFL kicked off the season by suggesting that the audience for such tentpole events as the Super Bowl and the Thanksgiving Day slate have been undercounted, an upgrade of the company’s methodology—especially as it pertains to an expanded out-of-home sample—has gone a long way toward putting such concerns on pause. (Executives have been complaining about Nielsen practically since it began its 75-year reign as the currency czar, but no pretender yet has managed to supplant it as the underwriter of the $70 billion-and-change TV ad market.)

On the day the jaw-dropping ratings for the Thanksgiving games were released, NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder gave Nielsen props for beefing up its OOH scrutiny, noting that the efforts to track these impressions in all U.S. TV markets helped “capture the viewership in a more accurate way.” CBS’ Chiefs-Cowboys broadcast averaged 57.23 million viewers, smashing the previous regular-season record by 36%. Strip away all the holiday co-viewing that took place across the nation and CBS’ Tryptophan Bowl turnout would have been closer to 35 million.

And while TV execs rarely make an effort to shout out Nielsen, Fox’s Mike Mulvihill wasn’t stinting in his praise. “Nielsen takes a lot of criticism in this business, but you have to give them credit for the fact that through their rollout of out-of-home measurement, the scorekeeping in this business has finally caught up to the reality,” Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics told reporters during the post-Turkey Day media scrum. “Sports does have [the power] to bring us together and facilitate shared experience, and the numbers finally reflect the reality that’s been in place for many, many years, and it’s a welcome change.”

The impact of the new method of counting the house is perhaps best appreciated by looking back to the 2023 list. While last year’s top 100 was a bit of an outlier, thanks to a frenzied presidential election cycle, the 2023 tally is particularly instructive when you start digging into the back portion. The cutoff for our latest list was 17.39 million viewers, whereas the count from two years ago halted at 15.03 million viewers. Transpose the 2023 data with the current chart and the bottom quarter drops off into the void. In other words, the new-look Nielsen has helped recapture a sufficient volume of impressions that 27 of the broadcasts that made the cut two years ago wouldn’t have been eligible for inclusion in today’s ranking.

If the Nielsen data should go a long way toward ensuring that the NFL will continue to maintain most, if not all, of its legacy TV partnerships—during the post-Thanksgiving huddle, Schroeder made a point of crediting “the power … and reach of broadcast TV” for doing a lot of the heavy lifting—the streaming giants are an increasingly invasive species. Events that were exclusive to streaming platforms accounted for eight of the 100 items on the list, up from three in 2024, and nearly all the trad TV broadcasts were enhanced by a non-linear simulcast. (Peacock and other digital outlets now account for 11% of NBC’s Sunday Night Football deliveries, up from 5% just a few years ago.)

For all that, an argument can be made for the exclusion of at least one streaming event, as the stateside audience for Netflix’s presentation of the Sept. 13 Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford bout was determined without any input from Nielsen. Netflix’s self-reported deliveries are derived via a sort of mysterious alchemy, as the company’s results are a function of the marriage of its own in-house figures and estimates from VideoAmp. As there’s no way to audit these results, the Netflix numbers radiate a heady “trust me, bro” vibe. That said, gatekeeping kept last month’s mandible-shattering Jake Paul fiasco off the list, as Netflix declined to break out the fight’s U.S.-only numbers.

Drop the unverifiable boxing deliveries, and the NFL has bragging rights to 84 of the top 100 events on the list. That quibble aside, sports all but gobbled up the entire chart, as 95 of the items on the list were devoted to football, baseball, basketball, horseracing and boxing. Political events and news programming ran off with 16 of the top spots in 2024, but in the absence of a collar-grabbing quadrennial circus, only three Beltway spectacles carved out space on this year’s chart. The other two non-sports entries were NBC’s presentation of the 99^th installment of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and ABC/Hulu’s staging of the Oscars.

As far as individual results are concerned, the humbled Kansas City Chiefs grabbed 18 spots on the 2025 list, eclipsing their dynasty-disrupting foes the Philadelphia Eagles (14) and the ever-popular Dallas Cowboys (13). Among the networks, Fox earned top marks with 26 appearances, edging NBC (23) and CBS (22), while Disney siblings ESPN and ABC combined to take 19 of the top slots. The NFL, meanwhile, drummed up 19 of the year’s 20 biggest audiences and 46 of the top 50.

Lastly, Major League Baseball staged a welcome return to the upper reaches of the list, as the final frame of Fox’s epic Dodgers-Blue Jays Fall Classic claimed the No. 25 slot. The power of a World Series Game 7 is hard to overstate, even when one of the teams involved has no stateside representation; by comparison, the 2024 Yankees-Dodgers showdown topped off at No. 84 with 18.15 million viewers. A seventh broadcast featuring the reps of the two largest media markets likely would have crashed the top 10, but New York’s farcical fifth-inning meltdown in Game 5 robbed Fox of a potential ratings bonanza.

As for the big-time sporting events that failed to secure a berth in 2025, the NBA Finals fell short despite drawing 16.61 million viewers with Game 7, leaving the league out of the winner’s circle for the sixth straight year. Women’s college basketball failed to repeat its top 100 performance of a year ago, although the men’s game returned to the fold care of CBS’ coverage of the Florida-Houston title tilt. The Kentucky Derby also stormed back onto the list after a three-year layoff, as nearly 18 million people in funny hats (including 959,000 streamers) cheered on Sovereignty’s muddy victory, a turnout enhanced by Nielsen’s OOH upgrade.

Lastly, 2025 saw a rare loss for a Super Bowl lead-out, as Fox’s broadcast of the Season 3 premiere of the Rob Lowe-helmed game show The Floor served up a record-low 13.94 million viewers, this despite the 127.71 million sets of eyeballs that were in place during Philly’s big win over KC. While nothing will ever unseat NBC’s remarkable 1996 showing—the one-hour episode of Friends that aired immediately after Super Bowl XXX notched a now-unthinkable 52.93 million viewers—as the keeper of the Muppets flame, ABC could put up some big numbers in 2027 if they were to give Kermit & Co. the coveted post-Super Bowl LXI slot.

Throw a rampaging Myles Garrett into the mix, and ABC might even have a shot at beating its most recent Super Sunday mark, a special installment of Grey’s Anatomy that drew 37.8 million viewers in 2006 after the Steelers topped the Seahawks in Detroit. Bear in mind that Pittsburgh’s victory “only” delivered 90.75 million viewers; given the new Nielsen currency and the league’s unwavering expansionist tendencies, we’ll likely never again see an NFL championship game dip below the 100 million mark.

For anyone out there still trying to compete with the NFL for the hearts and minds of the American consumer, the only valid response to the league’s latest showing can be summed up in a single interjection: MEEP!

As Venezuela enters the post-Nicolas Maduro era, former officials and regional experts warn the country may be facing not a democratic transition, but a period of deeper instability and internal conflict between possible successors that some warn could be even worse than Maduro.

Marshall Billingslea, the former assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes in the U.S. Treasury Department, said Maduro’s removal has exposed a fractured system that was never held together by a single strongman, but by competing criminal power centers now moving independently.

“The cartel has always been a loose association, with each of the mafia bosses having their own centers of gravity,” Billingslea said. “Maduro was the frontman, but he didn’t exercise total control. Now we’re seeing each of those centers spinning off on their own.”

MADURO’S SON GIVES ‘UNCONDITIONAL SUPPORT’ TO NEWLY SWORN IN INTERIM VENEZUELA PRESIDENT

Billingslea said the capture of Cilia Flores, Maduro’s wife, was as consequential as Maduro’s removal itself.

“The capture of Cilia Flores is a particularly big deal because she was the brains behind the operation and the one who cleared out potential rivals,” he said. “Her removal is equally significant.”

TRUMP ISSUES DIRECT WARNING TO VENEZUELA’S NEW LEADER DELCY RODRÍGUEZ FOLLOWING MADURO CAPTURE

Billingslea outlined what he described as five competing power centers, four within the regime and one outside it. “The removal of Maduro, and particularly the removal of Cilia Flores, leaves a huge power vacuum in the cartel,” he said. “We haven’t yet reached a new equilibrium here.”

In the interim, he foresees a high risk of internal power struggles, violence and further repression as rival factions maneuver to secure control in a post-Maduro Venezuela. But he notes that the Trump administration anticipates this and is executing a clear-eyed strategy to first secure U.S. core interests, followed by the gradual restoration of democracy, all without needing American “boots on the ground.”

TRUMP VOWS US ‘IN CHARGE’ OF VENEZUELA AS HE REVEALS IF HE’S SPOKEN TO DELCY RODRÍGUEZ

Delcy Rodríguez takes over, but power remains contested

Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s longtime vice president, was quickly installed as interim leader. But her rise has done little to reassure Venezuelans or international observers that meaningful change is coming.

Rodríguez is deeply embedded in the Maduro system and has long played a central role in overseeing Venezuela’s internal intelligence and security apparatus. According to regional reporting, her focus since taking office has been consolidating control within those institutions rather than signaling political reform.

Former U.S. and regional officials say Delcy Rodríguez’s rise has revived long-standing questions about who truly influences her decisions as she moves to consolidate power.

Those officials point to Rodríguez’s deep ties with Cuban intelligence, which helped build and operate Venezuela’s internal security and surveillance apparatus over the past two decades. Cuban operatives played a central role in shaping how the regime monitored dissent and protected senior leadership, embedding themselves inside Venezuela’s intelligence services.

At the same time, former officials say Rodríguez appears to be testing cooperation with Washington, creating uncertainty over how much leverage the United States actually holds. Some view her limited engagement with U.S. demands as tactical, aimed at buying time while she works to secure loyalty inside the regime and neutralize rival factions.

A former Venezuelan official previously told Fox News Digital that Rodríguez “hates the West” and represents continuity with the Maduro regime, not a break from it.

KRISTI NOEM DELIVERS TRUMP’S ULTIMATUM TO VENEZUELA’S VICE PRESIDENT FOLLOWING MADURO CAPTURE OPERATION

Cabello mobilizes loyalists

Diosdado Cabello, one of the most feared figures in the country, has emerged as a central player in the post-Maduro scramble for control.

Cabello, who wields influence over the ruling party and interior security, has been rallying armed colectivos and loyalist groups. Those groups have been active in the streets, detaining opponents and reinforcing regime authority through intimidation.

Sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for corruption and alleged ties to drug-trafficking networks, Cabello is widely viewed as a figure capable of consolidating power through force rather than institutions.

Jorge Rodríguez holds the levers of control

Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly and brother of Delcy Rodríguez, remains one of the regime’s most important political operators.

Rodríguez has served as a key strategist for Maduro, overseeing communications, elections and internal coordination. Recent reporting indicates he continues to work closely with his sister to maintain control over intelligence and security structures, reinforcing the regime’s grip despite Maduro’s removal.

Experts say Rodríguez could play a central role in shaping any managed transition that preserves the system Maduro built.

TRUMP’S VENEZUELA STRIKE SPARKS CONSTITUTIONAL CLASH AS MADURO IS HAULED INTO US

Padrino López

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, long considered the backbone of Maduro’s survival, remains a critical figure as well.

While Padrino López has not publicly positioned himself as a successor, analysts note that the armed forces are no longer unified behind a single leader. Senior generals are split across competing factions, raising the risk of internal clashes or a shift toward overt military rule if civilian authority weakens further.

Beyond the power struggle among regime elites, Venezuela faces a broader danger.

Large parts of the country are already influenced by criminal syndicates and armed groups. As centralized authority weakens, those actors could exploit the vacuum, expanding control over territory and smuggling routes.

Experts warned that an uncontrolled collapse could unleash forces more violent and less predictable than Maduro’s centralized repression, and the events unfolding now suggest that risk is growing.

Outside the regime, opposition leader María Corina Machado remains the most popular political figure among Venezuelan voters. But popularity alone may not be enough to translate into power.

Machado lacks control over security forces, intelligence agencies or armed groups. As repression intensifies and rival factions maneuver, her ability to convert public support into political authority remains uncertain.

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Maduro’s fall, analysts say, did not dismantle Venezuela’s power structure. It fractured it.

With armed loyalists in the streets, rival factions competing behind the scenes, and an interim leader struggling to assert authority, Venezuela now faces a dangerous period in which the aftermath of Maduro’s rule could prove more chaotic — and potentially more brutal — than what came before, experts say. For Venezuelans, the question is no longer whether Maduro is gone, but whether anything that replaces him will be better.