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What does Marco Rubio mean for left-wing dictators of Latin America? [1]

['Stephen Gibbs', 'Hugh Tomlinson', 'Alistair Dawber', 'Charlotte Mcdonald-Gibson', 'Washington', 'Bevan Hurley', 'New York', 'Will Pavia', 'Joshua Thurston']

Date: 2024-11

When Marco Rubio was chosen to be America’s next secretary of state, one of the first to congratulate him did so from hiding.

María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, celebrated the first Hispanic American to hold the post on X: “This is excellent news for all of Latin America.”

Threatened with jail since the Venezuelan presidential election in July, which President Maduro is widely accused of stealing, she attempts to evade authorities and keep up her fight for democracy from an undisclosed location in Venezuela.

Migrants depart Tapachula in Mexico on their way to the US border. Latin America could be a key priority for Trump’s administration

Despite her situation, she saw Rubio being chosen by Donald Trump to lead his foreign policy as a reason to hope. “The senator has a deep understanding of the threats that regimes like those in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela pose to the entire hemisphere,” she added.

Rubio’s nomination has raised expectations that Latin America, seen as something of an afterthought by the Biden administration, could become a key priority for the president-elect.

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Those three nations mentioned by Corina Machado — dubbed the “troika of tyranny” by the state department in the first Trump administration — have long been in the sights of Rubio, the senior senator for Florida, one third of whose constituents are Latinos. He has previously called for US-backed regime change strategies in all the remaining hard-left outposts of the Americas.

Such a strategy might appear to go against what has been core to Trump’s foreign policy pledge for his second term, whereby “America First” will be the mantra, and intervention in the affairs of other nations — from Ukraine to the Middle East — will be radically scaled back.

Rubio’s belief in US intervention in leftist South American states appears to contradict Trump’s “America First” mantra GETTY IMAGES

One explanation for the apparent contradiction is that he views the Latin American region as an exception to the rule. He, like 19th and early 20th-century presidents, regards it as “America’s backyard”.

“Trump’s isolationist foreign policy in the world at large translates into a stronger urge to dominate the western hemisphere,” w rote Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil, in the Foreign Policy magazine this week.

Stuenkel points to comments Trump made last year in which he lamented America’s loss of control over the Panama Canal. JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, also said the US should bomb Mexico to combat drug cartels.

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If renewed interventionism is the strategy, then Rubio’s appointment makes more sense. He has previously led a more aggressive push to protect US interests in the Americas.

Rubio’s parents — his father was a bartender, his mother a maid — moved to the US from Cuba three years before the 1959 revolution. Rubio was born and grew up in Florida in the 1970s and 80s alongside the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who arrived in the US in the first decades of Fidel Castro’s rule. He has described that deeply conservative Cuban old-guard, the “exilio historico”, who pledged to rid the Americas of all communists, as his mentors.

Like them, he fiercely opposed rapprochement and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba under President Obama in 2014, describing the policy at the time as “naivety”. Later, as an informal foreign policy adviser to Trump in the 2016-20 administration, Rubio pushed for tougher sanctions on Cuba, designed to deprive military-run state enterprises of dollars.

Rubio with his wife Jeanette Dousdebes Rubio and his children. He was born in Florida after his parents emigrated from Cuba in 1956 JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP

He has pursued a similar hard line on Venezuela. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s ultimately failed policy to recognise the then opposition leader Juan Guaido as president and thus topple Maduro. More recently he has fiercely criticised the Biden administration’s lifting of sanctions on the regime. In September Rubio backed a US Senate bill to raise the existing $15 million award for information leading to the capture of Maduro to $100 million. This year he has pushed for an expansion of sanctions against the dictatorship of President Ortega of Nicaragua.

Rubio has also warned of the growing influence of China in Latin America and argued for far greater US efforts to engage with conservative governments in the region as a counterbalance. In February he flew to Buenos Aires to meet President Milei of Argentina’s right-wing government, whom he described as a “breath of fresh air”. Last year he met President Bukele of El Salvador and praised his ultra-hardline security policies, in which tens of thousands of suspected gang members have been imprisoned.

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In contrast, until this week, Biden has not set foot in South America during his entire presidency. He visited Mexico, once, in 2023. On Thursday he embarked on a six-day “farewell” visit to Peru and Brazil to attend the Asia-Pacific and G20 summits.

Significantly more active US engagement in the Americas has its risks. Stuenkel warned that a scenario in which nations were pushed to “pick sides in the brewing competition between the United States and China” could easily backfire. Regimes not in the US circle of friendship, such as Cuba or Venezuela, might yet forge even closer ties with China or Russia. If that is the case, the status-quo could be preferable to what is to come.

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[1] Url: https://www.thetimes.com/world/latin-america/article/marco-rubio-latin-america-secretary-state-90nr9qq2k

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