Maduro abduction shows influence, limits of US Secretary of State Rubio
Al Jazeera
Top diplomat has long pushed toppling of Maduro, with eye towards Cuba, but remains constrained by competing ambitions.
Washington, DC – United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not been shy about his desire to see the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Infamously, the former Florida senator even posted a series of photos of slain deposed leaders, including a bloodied former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as tensions with the US and Maduro’s government spiked in 2019.
But it wasn’t until the second administration of US President Donald Trump that Rubio’s vision of a hardline approach to Latin America and his longtime pressure campaign against leftist leaders was realised – culminating on Saturday with the illegal abduction of longtime Venezuelan leader Maduro.
Experts say Rubio has relied on an ability to capitalise on the overlapping interests of competing actors within the Trump administration to achieve this, even as his broader ideological goals, including the ousting of Cuba’s communist government, will likely remain constrained by the administration’s competing ambitions.
“It took a tremendous amount of political skill on his part to marginalise other voices in the administration and elsewhere who were saying: ‘This is not our conflict. This is not what we stand for. This is going to upset our base,'” Alejandro Velasco, an associate professor of history at New York University, told Al Jazeera.
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