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Marco Rubio laid out a series of demands that Washington expects Venezuela’s remaining rulers to meet after the US captured the country’s president Nicolás Maduro, saying it would weigh its next steps with Caracas based on whether the conditions were met.
In an interview with CBS on Sunday, the US secretary of state declined to offer more detail of how the US planned to “run” Venezuela, as Donald Trump had pledged on Saturday.
Rubio said American control was currently being exercised through its naval embargo on oil exports but Trump retained the “optionality” to take further action if needed.
He said the US expected to see “changes” in Venezuela, including that the oil industry needed to be “run for the benefit of the people”, a halt to “drug trafficking” and “gang problems”, the removal of Colombian militant groups Farc and the ELN, and that its rulers should “no longer cozy up to Hizbollah and Iran in our own hemisphere”.
“We are going to judge whoever we’re interacting with moving forward by whether or not those conditions are met,” Rubio said.
The US secretary of state said he spoke to Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s second-in-command who has assumed power in Caracas, on Saturday but he did not describe the nature of their conversation.
“We’re going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what they’ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward,” Rubio said of the remaining leadership in Venezuela. “So we’re going to find out.”
On Saturday, Trump dismissed the possibility that the US could rapidly back Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition figure and Nobel peace prize winner, as the next leader of the country, or Edmundo González, who is widely considered to have won the 2024 election.
Rubio said he had “admiration” for both Machado and González but there had to be a “little realism” about Venezuela holding new elections and becoming a democracy.
“They’ve had this system of Chavismo for 15 or 16 years, and everyone’s asking why 24 hours after Nicolás Maduro was arrested, there isn’t an election schedule for tomorrow?” Rubio said.
“Of course we want to see Venezuela transition to a place completely different than what it looks like today. But obviously we don’t have the expectation that’s going to happen in the next 15 hours,” he said. “What we do have is an expectation is that it moves in that direction. We think it’s in our national interest, and frankly, in the interest of people of Venezuela.”
