Mariana Parilli-Castillo’s timely essay on Venezuela (Jan. 16) calls attention to a recent program on

NPR’s Sound of Ideas (SOI) here in Cleveland. Michael Scharf, former dean of Case Western Reserve University Law School, hosted Former Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack to speak on the evolving role of the International Criminal Court in the 21st Century. Dean Scharf regularly hosts the SOI program “Talking Foreign Policy.”

Parilli-Castillo has a very comprehensive take on her two home countries, Venezuela as well as the U.S., in the wake of Nicolás Maduro being “effectively kidnapped” and “extrajudicially arrested” on “trumped-up charges” on Jan. 3.

Scharf and Van Schaack presented a complex web of legal precedents going back to WWII and the Nuremberg Trials, setting the stage for an evaluation of our present political-legal crisis. It’s too much to delve into deeply, especially given my scant knowledge of Latin American history.

But it is obvious to me that the experts failed to mention the key historical background of the Maduro coup d’etat. First, it was not the only recent attempt at removing a Venezuelan president. In 2002, Hugo Chávez was detained by forces in cooperation with the CIA, which was overturned by a mass mobilization of his Venezuelan supporters. Regime change has been a dominant feature of U.S. foreign policy: just think of Salvador Allende in Chile, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah in Africa, Sukarno in Indonesia and Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran!

Equally troubling was their lack of interest in Simón Bolívar. Discussing Latin American without Bolívar is like discussing American history without George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. As with Washington and the British, Bolivar expelled the Spanish in the 19th Century.

And we should not forget former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, to a Pan-American conference in Uruguay in 1933, where Hull single-handedly established a Good Neighbor Policy that pointedly promised Latin America “non-intervention.” Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy established his Alliance for Progress aid program in a similar manner.

As a footnote we must recall the highly decorated Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler, who wrote “War is a Racket” in 1935, in retirement. He led major campaigns into Latin America and he regretfully admitted he had been a “gangster for capitalism.” History does repeat itself.