The goal here is to help anyone else who may be experiencing the same problems we were and give them guidance and confidence to fix it yourself.

The sliding door on our 08 Dodge Caravan has not worked properly in years. The buttons would not open or close the door. The door would 'try' to open, but wouldn't. So we knew our buttons/wiring was not the problem. And opening the door manually would not allow us to close the door because the rear latch wasn't working right. Thus, we didn't use the door in 3 + years.

Spoiler, replacing the rear latch fixed our problems completely! Now the buttons open and close the door automatically and manually opening the door is working too.

We believe 2008 - 2017 all use the same latch.