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MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Hello, and welcome to Free Speech with College of the Redwoods. I'm your host, Molly Blakemore, and I'm here with my co-host.

KEITH FLAMER: Hello, Keith Flamer. It is a pleasure seeing you and being with you again on this interview. And also, our guest today is-- if you introduce yourself for us.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Certainly. I'm Ryder Dschida. I teach courses here at College of the Redwoods and at Cal Poly Humboldt. I teach US history, modern and colonial Latin American history. And I also teach future middle school and high school teachers, which is to say I do history education. So I prepare students going into credential programs, who want to teach social science.

KEITH FLAMER: So, Ryder, has being a teacher always been your goal?

RYDER DSCHIDA: No.

KEITH FLAMER: So talk to us about your journey.

RYDER DSCHIDA: So I originally wanted to go into the Foreign Service as a diplomat. And that's why I went to graduate school off in Washington DC, where I studied at Georgetown University with Global, International, and Comparative History. But when I was there in DC and in Georgetown, which was a really interesting experience--

KEITH FLAMER: Why was it interesting? Talk to us about that.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Well, I'm a California kid, born and raised. And being back East, in that area, rubbing elbows with the sons and daughters of diplomats with my T-shirts and washed out jeans with holes at the knees, it felt like I was in a GQ catalog. And I didn't really fit. So I moved back here and started teaching, first at College of the Redwoods, and then picked up some classes at Humboldt. And the rest, as they say, is history.

KEITH FLAMER: So you have been teaching this subject for how long?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Latin American history, I've been teaching for about six or seven years, but US history since 2016, when I was first hired to teach it.

KEITH FLAMER: I was realizing today that it hasn't been that long since the US did the invasion of Latin America. It's only been a month or a few weeks. And so I think that we lose focus on what we did. So would you mind giving us some context around what the US policy has been and how we arrived to where we are?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Absolutely. So the United States and Latin America, as far as their history together, really goes back to when Britain first started colonizing the Eastern Coast of North America. And the Spanish, of course, had started colonizing the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and South America in the early 1500s. Yeah, you could say 1492 with Christopher Columbus. But that was a couple voyages to what is now today called Hispaniola, which is the Dominican Republic in Haiti.

But since England started to colonize British North America, there has always been a relationship of one form or another between English-speaking people and Spanish-speaking people in the Americas, and of course, Native Americans.

KEITH FLAMER: So we just went in and captured the President of Venezuela, under the pretext of what?

RYDER DSCHIDA: That allegedly, he was involved in-- I believe it was Tren de Aragua, which is a gang, a cartel in Venezuela that allegedly is smuggling drugs, namely cocaine and fentanyl. That's the allegations-- into the United States. Whether or not Tren de Aragua is doing that, and whether or not it's cocaine or fentanyl is yet to be determined. But those are the allegations. To date, I don't think that former-- well, would you call him-- he is still president.

KEITH FLAMER: He's still the official president.

RYDER DSCHIDA: President, I suppose, in captivity, Nicolas Maduro-- there's yet to be any definitive proof that he is a member of any gang or cartel. Except, I guess, if you count OPEC as cartel, which it is.

KEITH FLAMER: Actually, it is.

RYDER DSCHIDA: But they're not smuggling drugs. They are regulating oil production. So yeah, the United States went into Venezuela with Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3rd, under the pretext that we were going to get this notorious drug trafficker and criminal, and bring him to justice.

KEITH FLAMER: So what we want to do is just regime change.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah. In political science circles right now and some historian circles too, there's a lot of comparison to when the United States invaded Panama with Manuel Noriega-- if you guys recall that in, I think, 1989. So there's a lot of comparison with that. But really, Manuel Noriega actually was smuggling drugs and was buying-- or was smuggling drugs from Colombia, and then moving it along into the United States.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: So in terms of geopolitical historical relationships in Latin America and the United States, would you say that this recent incursion into Venezuela fits into that same mold? Or is it off script for us? Or is there a historical context that could explain what we're doing there still now?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah. Recently-- and when I say recently, I'm using more political science and modern terms rather than historian terms. When historians say recently, we mean 70 or 80 years ago. So I'm not talking in that way.

So recently for the past 30 or so years-- so really, since the Clinton administration, the United States' policy towards Latin America has been one of haphazard sanctions, where we don't what some leaders are doing. So we're going to sanction their countries' businesses in the United States. Or we're going to stop giving them or selling them medicine or technology. Or maybe we're going to levy-- maybe a trade embargo, like with Cuba. But if we took if we dial the clock back to really the turn of the 20th century, the early 1900s, the United States was doing this sort of thing--

KEITH FLAMER: Monroe Doctrine, yes.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Well, that's even earlier to the 1800s. But if you go to the 1900s, the US was doing that all the time. And we should do well to understand-- at least I should say, as a historian, we should do well to remember that the US has a long history of military interventions in Latin America, especially the Caribbean, especially Central America, and a little bit in South America. But that stopped really being a policy that the United States overtly pursued beginning in the Great Depression.

KEITH FLAMER: So why stop?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Well, the Great Depression. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression, many US businesses didn't have the-- they didn't want to invest in Latin America or protect their investments in Latin America because there was just no money to be made. And much of what we saw or what we see with the Great Depression is this big contraction all around the world, where all nations that had been going out colonizing or investing in places and sending businesses around and people around, they pull them back in because they were focusing on their own internal affairs.

KEITH FLAMER: All right, that makes sense.

RYDER DSCHIDA: But to go to the Monroe Doctrine, that's the United States' first real concrete policy towards Latin America.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: And this is what year, generally?

RYDER DSCHIDA: 1824.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: OK, not generally.

[LAUGHTER]

RYDER DSCHIDA: And curiously, it's called the Monroe Doctrine because it's attributed to then President James Monroe. But he wasn't the guy who wrote it. It was John Quincy Adams, John Adams's son, who wrote the Monroe Doctrine.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: And it said?

RYDER DSCHIDA: It said three things. And I can't quote specifically what it said. But the first thing--

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Generally.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Generally, it said, the United States opposes further European colonization in Latin America.

KEITH FLAMER: Sphere of influence, again.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Sort of, yeah. To give a historical context to this, 1824 is more or less the end of the period that Latin American historians call the Wars of Independence in Central and South America and the Caribbean, beginning in about 1793 with the Haitian Revolution, and then ending more or less in the mid-1820s with the Mexican War for Independence.

KEITH FLAMER: The first one--

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah, we don't say Mexican Revolution because the Mexican Revolution begun in 1911 and lasted until 1938. So the Mexican War for Independence ends roughly in 1824/'26. But as historians, the dates are always a little fuzzy, so we don't really-- it lasted until the late 1820s.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: So ostensibly, the Monroe Doctrine was in solidarity with the independence of Latin America, from Europe.

KEITH FLAMER: Interesting connection.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah. So the first thing is they don't want further European colonization once the Spanish mainly have been driven out. The second point is the United States supports these new republics in Central and South America. And the third point, which I feel is probably the most important one, is the United States says it will protect these new fledgling republics from European influence.

Now the United States didn't have the naval capacity to actually do that, but that was really John Quincy Adams saying, through the pen of James Monroe, that the US is the preeminent power in the Americas-- like you said, Molly, sphere of influence. We're the top dog, so to say. And Latin American countries, for their part, were more or less willing to accept this because they couldn't defend themselves. So why not have the United States do it for them?

KEITH FLAMER: And so now, have we just gone backwards? And so have we just now implemented that same policy as we look at Latin America--

RYDER DSCHIDA: Well, I think--

KEITH FLAMER: Maybe Canada at some point in time?

[RYDER LAUGHS]

RYDER DSCHIDA: I'm not going to repeat that.

KEITH FLAMER: I don't blame you.

[LAUGHTER]

RYDER DSCHIDA: But I think that President Trump said, we're in the Donroe Doctrine, which is, of course, a play on words with Monroe Doctrine.

KEITH FLAMER: And Donald.

RYDER DSCHIDA: And Donald, yeah. But I don't see it that way because if it was the Donroe Doctrine really pulled from the Monroe Doctrine, the US wouldn't be attacking Latin American states. Or it wouldn't be--

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Influencing.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Or creating regime change. They would be protecting. If the Chinese or the Russians or the Turks or, I don't know-- it doesn't matter-- South Africans, whoever came into Central or South America and the US stopped that, that's Monroe Doctrine.

KEITH FLAMER: Oh, I see the difference.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: But did the Monroe Doctrine ever stop the United States from interfering in Latin American politics and economics and independence?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Certainly not. And the United States first started getting involved in Latin American economics and politics pretty much immediately. There's the famous Mexican-American War in 1848.

KEITH FLAMER: Of course, yeah.

RYDER DSCHIDA: The first time the United States ever invaded and occupied a foreign capital was Mexico City in 1849. And then from that point on, the US was first putting economic, shall we say, colonies in the Guano Islands off the Coast of Peru and Ecuador.

KEITH FLAMER: I've never heard of those.

RYDER DSCHIDA: They're just rocks out in the ocean that huge flocks of birds went to. And we're talking hundreds of thousands of years of piled-up bird poop that they were mining.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Guano, yeah.

KEITH FLAMER: Oh my gosh. I did not realize that.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Big business in the 1800s. It was fertilizer. And you could use the guano also to make explosives, like dynamite.

KEITH FLAMER: That makes sense. So why now? Why have we done what we've done, and why Venezuela? I mean, what do you think is the real reason why we did this?

RYDER DSCHIDA: There's a lot of reasons. I have my own personal conspiracy theories.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: We'd love to hear them.

KEITH FLAMER: Absolutely, we'd love to.

RYDER DSCHIDA: So I think that President Trump can't stand having another person in the Americas who acts the way that he wants to act. I--

KEITH FLAMER: I see. It's the psychology of this, though.

RYDER DSCHIDA: That and also, Venezuela, of course, has huge-- as far as we know right now, has the world's largest oil reserves in the world. So that's important. And the United States also has the refineries to process Venezuelan crude oil that a lot of places in the world don't have. And there's historical reasons for that because--

KEITH FLAMER: I know that.

RYDER DSCHIDA: In the early 1900s, the United States was exploring for oil in Eastern Mexico and in Venezuela and in the Caribbean. And generally speaking, crude oil that comes out of Central America and South America is what is often called sour crude oil. So that means that sour, heavy crude. So it has more particles in the oil. It also has more sulfur in the oil. So it takes longer to cook the oil into a usable product.

And the United States, in the early 1900s, created those refineries to process that oil. Other parts of the world, like in Europe, where they got their oil from was the Arabian Peninsula-- Saudi Arabia, Iran.

KEITH FLAMER: Are you talking about OPEC, again?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Mm-hmm. Well, OPEC is-- yeah, so Saudi Arabia, Iran, we got Malaysia. And those areas tend to have what's called lighter and sweeter oil. So it doesn't have as much sulfur, doesn't have as much stuff in it. So it doesn't take as much time to process the oil. So when it comes to who wants Venezuela's oil, it really boils down to who can process it. And it's the United States and Venezuela that can process that oil.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: So I don't think we can say that things are going well in Venezuela, up until--

RYDER DSCHIDA: No, certainly not.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: And so can you give us a little bit of history about why that was, what was going on there, why everybody was leaving and we were seeing energy shortages?

RYDER DSCHIDA: It's a really tragic and long history that--

[SIGHS]

--I would say begins with Venezuela first, having oil discovered by the exploratory companies. It was Jersey standard, which was--

KEITH FLAMER: Oh, Standard Oil.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Standard Oil, yeah, and Royal Dutch Shell-- so, of course, Shell Oil. And they found oil in Venezuela and Lake Maracaibo, I believe, in 1917. And the Venezuelan President at the time, that was Juan Vicente Gómez, who was basically the dictator from 1908 until 1935. If you look him up, he's famous. He's supposed to have fathered something like 70 children. He used money to build his personal highways, and rode his sports cars, all over them. Despite all that, his personal character flaws--

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Look him up. It's a good story.

RYDER DSCHIDA: It's a great story.

[LAUGHTER]

Despite all that, he was a really shrewd politician and businessman. And he played these oil companies off of each other, and started asking for greater receipts or taxes on the oil. And he eventually won a concession from both Shell and Jersey Standard to get 50% of the revenue of the oil they sold.

KEITH FLAMER: 50%?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah, that's huge. And he used that 50/50 deal that they eventually came to, to not only fill his own pockets, but also turned that around and used it to create Venezuela's early infrastructure with roads, railroads, some small factories.

And from that point in time, Venezuela's economy and industry, and dare I say, political society, has more or less been linked with oil revenue. And this gets even more-- it solidified even more in the 1970s. But before I get to that, it was a Venezuelan and a Saudi Arabian that created OPEC in 1960. And we should do--

KEITH FLAMER: [INAUDIBLE].

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah, we should do well to remember that. Venezuela was one of the--

KEITH FLAMER: Principal--

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah, the OG founders of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. And it wasn't until the oil shocks of the early 1970s, after the Yom Kippur War, when oil prices shot up because the Arabian producers of oil wanted to punish the Western allies that were allied with Israel, by skyrocketing oil prices.

When oil prices shot up, Venezuela's revenue shot up too. And the Venezuelan government realized, whoa, we can make a whole bunch of money if we nationalized oil, which they did in 1976 with the creation of Venezuelan Petroleum Limited, or as it's called, PDVSA.

Interestingly enough, though, when they nationalized oil, they didn't buy out the oil companies or go with a piece of paper or a law and say, you're ours now. They just changed the name. So--

KEITH FLAMER: Explain that. What do you mean?

RYDER DSCHIDA: So you had Texaco operating there. You had Jersey Standard. You had Chevron, Exxon, Shell. And they nationalized the companies by giving them a more Latin American, Spanish-sounding name.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Was it still a 50/50 partnership then, or was it--

KEITH FLAMER: Or did they take a larger percentage?

RYDER DSCHIDA: Good question.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Did they actually nationalize it, or was it still a partnership with all of those oil companies?

RYDER DSCHIDA: It was a partnership. And what PDVSA did was it was exploring for oil. It claimed, right?

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Mm-hmm.

RYDER DSCHIDA: It was exploring for oil. It was extracting oil. It was processing it, and it was shipping it. But really, it was just these subsidiary companies that were owned by whatever oil company they were that just had a different name. And they were the ones doing all that. Now, PDVSA did say that you have to hire Venezuelans to work.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: But they didn't own them.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Correct.

KEITH FLAMER: Interesting.

RYDER DSCHIDA: And that's the way it operated until Hugo Chávez actually bought them out in 2007. And I think that's what Trump is referencing when he said they took the oil. What he means is Hugo Chávez bought out all these companies, and they wanted back in, I guess.

KEITH FLAMER: And so then--

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Well, some of them don't want back in, though. Exxon said, there's no reason for them to go back into Venezuela because it's so expensive to do business there.

RYDER DSCHIDA: That's correct.

KEITH FLAMER: So why did we do what we did, again? So what was the overall purpose, in your mind, if it's not oil?

RYDER DSCHIDA: So to circle back, there's a lot going on here. Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez and Francisco Maduro-- and just to be clear, Hugo Chávez came into power in Venezuela in 1999. And he was there until his death in 2013. And Francisco Maduro narrowly won in an election. I think he won with 1.5% of the vote. It was extremely close. But ever since then, he's been shifting the country to more authoritarian government, and where elections still happen, but they don't recognize--

KEITH FLAMER: Sort of.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah, right, sort of. If you remember Juan Guaidó when he ran, that was 2018 or '17, if I-- the thing I always say is when we get closer-- to my students-- the closer we get to the present, the more the dates for me get blurry. And the farther we go in the past, it's fine, but yeah.

So since Hugo Chávez took over, there's been this really strong rhetoric against the United States, saying that the United States is an imperial power. It's pushing towards controlling Venezuela and the people there, which has been a really effective political, shall I say, platform that the Venezuelans have been just really resonating with.

So there's that. The United States doesn't like the fact that Venezuela is saying that the United States is bad. And then there's more to do with who Venezuela has been partnering with since Chávez and Maduro.

KEITH FLAMER: So talk about that, the revenue.

RYDER DSCHIDA: The Chinese-- since the early 2000s, China invested something like $64 billion in Venezuela, in loans that were actually quite favorable for Venezuelans. As Hugo Chávez said, they were loans with no strings attached. And what he meant by that was, historically speaking, the greatest provider of money in loans and development loans to Latin America is the United States. But when the United States made these loans, either through international development banks like the International Monetary Fund--

KEITH FLAMER: The IMF.

RYDER DSCHIDA: --the IMF or the World Bank, there were these conditions saying you have to have free elections. You have to have elections. You have to develop capitalist businesses, capitalist policies. And it was really-- the IMF and the World Bank come out of the Cold War. So there's a lot of ideological stuff there. And Hugo Chávez was a self-proclaimed socialist, so he was trying to socialize Venezuelan society. So IMF, World Bank didn't want it.

KEITH FLAMER: So similar to Cuba.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Similar to Cuba, which brings me to the other country that's doing business. You got China that's just giving the Venezuelans money in exchange for oil. And then you have the Cubans. And Hugo Chávez politically saw his movement, Chavismo, aligned with that of Fidel Castro. And he even said, I think at one point in time, that we are one government. And Cuba, since the early 2000s, has relied on Venezuelan oil to--

KEITH FLAMER: Exist, OK, got you.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: So then again, what happened in Venezuela that made the oil not as profitable? And we're seeing energy shortages and people leaving, and sanctions and embargoes, or--

RYDER DSCHIDA: So what happened in Venezuela was Hugo Chávez really oriented the country towards profiting off of oil and oil rents. There's a lot of economic levers and policy, really dense stuff. So if you're an economist nerd, that's all-- and development nerd, fantastic. I look at that stuff, and my eyes glaze over.

[LAUGHTER]

But what essentially happened was Hugo Chávez realized what we can do is we can charge companies that want to do business in Venezuela, like produce oil, rent to do it. And we will use that rent to Nash or to fund social programs-- education, buying medicine, building infrastructure, all that stuff. And that works so long as companies are in Venezuela, producing oil and paying rent. And it's even better if oil prices are high because then the rent is higher.

And that worked well until Venezuela's economy more or less collapsed in 2013 due to US sanctions. And what happened was in 2013, the United States stopped Venezuela's oil-holding company in the US, CITGO. You've probably seen a CITGO gas station.

KEITH FLAMER: Sure.

RYDER DSCHIDA: That's PDVSA's gas station. They own that. And they have refineries in Louisiana and Texas. So since they're in the United States, the US said, pooh, you can't bring oil in to refine it and you can't sell it. And that pretty much put a stop to a lot of Venezuela's rents and revenue, which caused a huge economic collapse. I believe something like 40,000 people died between 2013 and 2018 because of a lack of medical care. But they were using that oil money to buy medicine.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: So they were using oil money to do everything. And also the price of oil went down because of how much we were producing, correct--

RYDER DSCHIDA: Yeah.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: --and other parts of the world as well. So relying on those higher rents wasn't possible anymore either.

RYDER DSCHIDA: And that's a great point, Molly, because at the same time in 2013, the United States emerged as one of the leading producers of oil because of shale oil and fracking.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Fracking.

KEITH FLAMER: Oh, of course.

RYDER DSCHIDA: So as I said, there's a lot going on. When you look at oil history, there's so many moving parts.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: So we created the problem in Venezuela, though, largely, through sanctions.

RYDER DSCHIDA: Well, I wouldn't say we created it, but we created the conditions. I would say that Venezuela, because of its reliance on using oil profits to really fund its government and society, created the problem, which is pretty typical when you look at nations that rely on oil revenue to fund their governments. They always have this problem, including the United States, as a matter of fact. But yeah, the United States is not innocent of this, no.

MOLLY BLAKEMORE: Thank you for joining us for Free Speech with College of the Redwoods. And we hope that you tune in for part 2 of our conversation with Ryder. I'm Molly Blakemore, your host.

KEITH FLAMER: And I'm Keith Flamer, joining Molly.

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