Last year on a podcast hosted by Donald Trump Jr., Marco Rubio ridiculed the Biden administration for making “stupid” concessions to Venezuela’s brutal regime.
The Democratic president had offered dictator Nicolas Maduro bailouts and restrictions on oil exports — including a “side deal” with Chevron to keep production in Venezuela — in exchange for promises of reforms that never came.
Biden’s team should have stopped “allowing them to get the money,” the secretary of state said. “But he didn’t do that.”
Six months later, Rubio is the public face of the most aggressive action taken on Venezuela by any American leader this century, culminating in a daring nighttime military offensive last Saturday to remove Maduro from power.
By keeping Rubio as his adviser, Trump abandoned the early negotiating strategy initiated by an envoy, Richard Grenell, and set aside, at least temporarily, the administration’s perceived dislike of military intervention and nation building.
But while Maduro’s ouster is a victory for Rubio — the son of Cuban immigrants who has spent his career warning of Latin America’s communist regimes — it has left him with an unparalleled level of public responsibility going forward.
It’s unclear how much control Rubio, who harbors presidential ambitions, will be able to control.
“I think there’s a chance he’ll pull it off,” said Juan Gonzalez, a former Biden and Obama administration official who worked on Latin America. “It’s more likely to go sideways and blow up in Rubio’s face.”
In the early hours after Maduro’s dramatic capture, it certainly seemed as if Trump’s secretary of state was in the driver’s seat. The US president announced that Rubio, together with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, would “run” the South American country, giving him the chance to reshape the region as he had dreamed of doing for decades.
After the operation Trump declared, “We’re going to run everything. We’re going to fix it.”
The administration immediately walked back those claims. Rubio – previously a champion of Latin American democracy and human rights in the Senate – has had to defend it.
“They’ve given Rubio more or less what he wanted in the form of a scalpel. They’ve given him Maduro,” said a person familiar with the administration’s thinking on Venezuela.
But Trump rejected Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado – whom Rubio called one of the “bravest people in the world” – as a viable contender to govern Caracas. Instead, he left Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to serve in his place. And within a few days the regime took action against suspected pro-American traitors.
“If you have seen Rubio’s public embrace of Maria Corina, and if you have seen the administration’s rhetoric around Maduro’s oppression and brutality, you will be surprised to see that they have landed in a place where they are continuing that same oppression and brutality,” the person said.
Rubio has instead tried to manage expectations. In a media interview a day after Maduro’s capture, he declared that Washington would run “policy” in Venezuela rather than the country itself.
Now the main goal of the administration in Venezuela is to gain control over its natural resources, including primarily oil; end official ties to drug traffickers; ensuring Venezuela’s cooperation in receiving deported persons; and end Caracas’ partnerships with U.S. adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran.
Rubio said, “There is a process in place now where we have tremendous control and influence over what the interim authorities are doing and are able to do. But obviously this will be a process of change. In the end, it will be up to the Venezuelan people to decide how to change their country.”
Trump said on Wednesday that his administration has reached agreements with the regime. Venezuela will now “only buy American-made products”, he wrote on social media, and it will sell billions of barrels of oil to the US – for which the White House said it would ease sanctions.
But the Trump administration has put democratic goals, including new elections, on hold. Rubio, working to appease Trump, also knows that former constituents, including Cuban and Venezuelan Americans, have expectations from the man who recently alleged that the Venezuelan regime could not be trusted.
“I don’t think Marco Rubio wants to return to Miami in three years saying he tried his best,” said Carlos Curbelo, a fellow Cuban American and former Republican congressman from Miami. “It’s very clear to me that Marco Rubio wants to be an agent of change in America.”
Rubio wasn’t always so loyal. He ran against Trump in the Republican primary race in 2016, calling him a “fraud artist.” But as a Cabinet secretary, Rubio has worked hard to establish himself.
“Everybody loves working with him,” White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt said Wednesday.
However, if Rubio makes another run for the White House, Venezuela could be decisive.
Andrés Martínez-Fernández of the right-wing Heritage Foundation said if “the same heads of the military who embraced and weaponized corruption and narco-trafficking” were still in control by the end of Trump’s presidency, the administration’s Venezuela gambit may have failed.
Fernandez thinks highly of Rubio and the Trump administration. But Maduro’s regime is “a regime that has learned to wait for challenges”, he said.
Republicans on Capitol Hill say his former aide is the right person for the job.
James Risch, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said, “The President knows he’s got the right person in the right place, and Marco knows the region better than anyone.” On which he worked closely with Rubio for years.
The secretary of state is not the only top Trump lieutenant to work on Venezuela. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller has focused on the country as a source of unwanted migration to the US. Vice President J.D. Vance, a more skeptical voice about U.S. intervention, is also involved.
It was Rubio who led a meeting of top officials at the White House in mid-December, which included the decision to impose an economic quarantine to “organize, sequence and plan the operation, which employed US ships to interdict Venezuelan oil shipments,” a person familiar with the operation said.
In late December, Vance held “back-channel” talks with Qatar to see if Maduro would accept any “off-ramps” offered by the U.S., the person said. When that failed, Trump, Vance and Rubio became convinced that Maduro was not the “credible negotiator” needed in Venezuela, the person said.
Carrie Filippetti, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Cuba and Venezuela during Trump’s first term, said, “Rubio’s main contribution was to convince Trump that Maduro was never going to negotiate in good faith.”
In recent days, Rubio – a fluent Spanish speaker – has been the primary link between Trump and Rodriguez. Venezuela’s new leader appears to have chosen a path of cooperation rather than resistance toward Washington, including openness to a deal on oil exports.
Regional experts and Democrats are wary.
Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, said Wednesday after his second briefing by Rubio in as many days that Rodriguez is “completely untrustworthy and corrupt and hates America.” “That’s what we’re counting on? What kind of plan is this?”
Benjamin Gedan, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Latin America Studies Initiative, suggested that if his tune changes, it could spell trouble for the secretary of state.
“There’s a possibility that Delsey Rodriguez will start to show too much independence that will embarrass Trump and he’ll turn to Rubio and say ‘Wait, I thought you were controlling him,'” he said.
Additional reporting by Michael Stott in Bogota, Lauren Feder in Washington and Miles McCormick in Miami
