War Visions Haunt Latin America as Fiction Mirrors Reckless Policy
As U.S. warships prowl the Caribbean and drone footage of sea “interdictions” floods the airwaves, Latin America feels trapped between déjà vu and prophecy. Foreign Policy revisits novelist Lucius Shepard, whose 1980s war fiction warned what happens when Washington mistakes imagination for strategy.
The Novelist Who Foresaw Our Headlines
In Latin America, war never disappears—it mutates, hides in rhetoric, and waits for new uniforms. This month, as U.S. destroyers glide through Caribbean waters and alleged traffickers die in explosions filmed from drone cameras, the region feels trapped between déjà vu and prophecy. Foreign Policy’s reporting connects that tension to an unlikely oracle: the late American novelist Lucius Shepard, whose near-future war stories from the 1980s now read like dispatches from the present. His lesson is unnervingly clear: when Washington confuses imagination with strategy, the jungle remembers—and it never forgets.
Shepard wrote of an America that stumbled into a second Vietnam, this time in Central America, seduced by its own machinery and illusions. His soldiers were spliced with technology and paranoia: helicopter pilots hiding their burned faces behind visors, infantry tethered to computers, and command centers where policy sounded like poetry written by ghosts. His best-known work, Life During Wartime, was a fever dream drawn from the real interventions of its era—U.S. training of Salvadoran death squads, covert missions from Honduras, and Cold War manuals that read like blueprints for chaos.
As FP has noted in its reporting and interviews, Shepard never invented atrocity from thin air; he extrapolated from official behavior. In doing so, he made American readers feel the vertigo of empire. “I never achieved enough celebrity to make a ripple in a bird bath,” he once joked—an irony FP quoted to underscore his outsider status. Yet his fiction achieved something rarer than fame: it gave language to what soldiers and citizens sense when policy loses contact with cause and effect.
That same dissonance ripples through the Caribbean today. U.S. bombers “demonstrate” off Venezuela’s coast. Naval commanders brief on narcotics interdictions while residents along the water count the bodies of fishermen. Shepard’s fiction captured that distance between announcement and reality, between what Washington believes it is doing and what people on the ground endure. “It’s not counter-narcotics anymore,” one regional analyst told FP. “It’s counter-narrative—every strike a message.”
In Shepard’s universe, war was not an event but an infection, seeping into the economies that surrounded it. His border towns became boom markets for smugglers and mercenaries, places “less a city than a symptom of war.” Anyone walking the Pacific ports of Colombia or the oil docks of Venezuela would recognize the type.
When War Becomes a Hallucinatory Policy
Shepard’s fiction was hallucinatory by design. He blurred the line between supernatural and bureaucratic madness: soldiers who could talk to ghosts, generals who believed their machines could prophesy, radio static carrying the voices of the dead. The imagery feels poetic until it becomes literal. Today’s policy language sounds no less surreal.
A White House official insists the U.S. seeks “no confrontation” with Venezuela. Hours later, a Pentagon briefing describes “surgical strikes.” A commander calls the action “interdiction”; regional officials describe the same explosion as an “attack.” The verbs keep changing; the blast patterns do not.
FP’s reporting has traced how these maneuvers bleed across borders. A strike near Colombian waters becomes a “joint operation.” Marines “reposition” rather than deploy. Advisors “observe” rather than assist. The grammar of escalation is passive, an echo of Shepard’s pilots telling ground troops, “You don’t wanna see us, nohow.” Visibility is treated as a liability, truth as a luxury.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan families recount to FP how their relatives disappeared during these operations—fishermen mistaken for smugglers, boats obliterated before warnings could be heard. In Washington, those deaths are briefed as statistics. In the villages that bury the bodies, they are evidence that the line between policing and punishment has vanished.
The distortion extends to the home front. The same administration warning U.S. citizens not to travel to Venezuela because of “wrongful detention and torture” tells judges the country is stable enough to deport Venezuelan migrants. Shepard would have recognized the logic: the hallucination that policy can hold two opposite truths until someone bleeds.
The Jungle Keeps the Receipts
Shepard’s stories never treated Latin America as a backdrop. He gave its people—and its landscapes—the power of memory. In one tale, the jungles of Brazil give birth to new predators, beasts mutated by centuries of invasion and extraction. The metaphor is obvious but earned. The region metabolizes every war, and it never forgets the toxins left behind.
FP’s correspondents find those scars everywhere. In the Darién Gap, the jungle paths once cut for contraband now funnel migrants. In coastal Colombia, gunmen who smuggled gasoline under paramilitaries now traffic people. Along the Venezuelan littoral, young men trade fishing nets for fuel drums because the cartel pays, however briefly, and it still feeds a family. Shepard’s “symptom cities” live again, rebuilt atop old war economies.
The United States rarely sees these continuities. Its missions end with televised withdrawals; its budgets roll over. But the soil keeps the memory. Rivers still carry mercury from illegal mines that funded militias; forests still hold the roads bulldozed for bases that no longer exist. Cities retain militarization in their police forces and their prisons. “Trade follows the flag,” Shepard implied—but so does trauma.
Even the ghosts return north. Shepard’s later stories, “Delta Sly Honey” and “Shades,” imagined soldiers haunted by the dead on their radio frequencies, forced to confront the voices they silenced. The metaphor became anthropology. Latin American communities have long performed ceremonies for the disappeared—rituals to name what the state erases. FP’s interviews with Venezuelan families echo that need: mothers listing the last words they heard over static, widows showing photographs too dangerous to display in public. Fiction anticipated the ritual; policy keeps providing the dead.
Lessons Washington Refuses to Learn
Shepard wrote in fragments because, as he understood, atrocities reveal themselves that way—one airstrip, one order, one rationalization at a time. Policy works in similar increments. A strike justified narrowly becomes a precedent. “Advisors” turn into “liaisons.” A “temporary” naval presence becomes a standing patrol.
The remedy, analysts tell FP, is not paranoia but precision. If the U.S. intends to coerce regime change in Venezuela, it should say so and confront the legal and moral costs. If the mission is genuinely about narcotics, measure success by the drugs kept off American streets, not by the number of boats destroyed for the cameras.
FP’s sources outline a quieter path. Begin with transparency: release casualty data, name the detainees, publish the legal authorities underpinning operations. Align security goals with humanitarian behavior—do not tell citizens to avoid a country you claim is safe for deportees—respect regional sovereignty, especially Colombia’s fragile peace process, which feels every American tremor. And, above all, stop treating Latin America as a stage for U.S. redemption.
Shepard died in 2014, still half-mythic and half-forgotten. Yet his warnings remain, now footnoted in FP’s own reporting. He understood that war is not merely fought—it seeps. It corrodes language until “defense” means attack, until “temporary” means forever, until “stability” sounds like mourning.
If Washington cannot relearn restraint, Shepard’s jungle will keep its receipts. The ghosts he imagined will feel less like characters and more like witnesses, drifting once again above rivers lit by gunfire.
The stakes, as FP’s correspondents remind readers, are not academic. They are measured in livelihoods lost, in legitimacy squandered, in the credibility of a superpower that insists it learned from Vietnam while rehearsing new ways to forget. Latin America has read this script before. Thanks to Shepard—and to the journalists who keep tracing the pattern—we no longer get to pretend we don’t know how it ends.
Also Read: Lima’s City of Graves: Where the Dead Refuse Silence
