WASHINGTON – The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife during a daring nighttime raid by U.S. troops on his compound in Caracas marked the realization of a longtime political goal for President Donald Trump.
But it was a personal victory for a key member of Trump’s administration: Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Nicolás Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this,” Rubio said, standing alongside Trump at a post-raid news conference at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “He was provided multiple, very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man, chose to play around. And the result is what we saw tonight.”
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been one of the primary architects of the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy, which shifted the United States away from decades-long diplomatic negotiations on human rights and other issues to the use of military force to remove a de facto leader from office.
After all, Rubio cut his political teeth thanks to powerful Cuban exiles who became top players in the GOP at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War. The political godson of hardline mentors from a local king-making county commissioner to then U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the late Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Rubio inherited a worldview ensconced in hawkish stances when it came to Cuba and Venezuela, or any country that dared to embrace the table scraps of a socialist agenda in Latin America.
