Rubio Won; Liberty Lost
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In early 2019, Marco Rubio pressed his way through a dense crowd near Colombia’s border with Venezuela, his aides holding back refugees clamoring for a handshake or a photo with the man heralding the imminent arrival, they all felt sure, of liberty for Venezuelans. With his polo shirt dotted with sweat and a Venezuela Libre cap shielding his face from the tropical sun, the then-senator made an urgent appeal to the country’s security forces: Do the right thing and defy Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian orders. “In every person’s life there sometimes comes a key moment,” Rubio said, “when they have to make a decision, a decision that will define the rest of their life.”
This may be that defining moment for Rubio, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, national security adviser, and, now, unofficial Venezuelan viceroy. Maduro’s ouster begins to fulfill an objective central to Rubio’s political identity: ending the reign of Latin America’s leftist strongmen. But it leaves a tandem goal—replacing them with democratically elected governments—nowhere closer to reality. That latter objective is instead colliding with Trump’s focus in Venezuela on oil, migration, and regional dominance. Determined to prove that military intervention will pay for itself, he’s shown no interest in giving the Venezuelan people a say in their own affairs. The disconnect poses a dilemma for Rubio, who had long advocated for widening the circle of those reaping the blessings of liberty.
Speaking to the crowd in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta seven years ago, as Washington and other governments backed what they saw as an unstoppable popular uprising against Maduro, Rubio said the United States would stand by Venezuelans until they achieved the rights they deserved. “Freedom and democracy require sacrifice,” he said in Spanish. In this case, the things that appear to have been sacrificed, for the foreseeable future, are the freedom and democracy of Venezuelans.
Across Latin America, the coups, juntas, and disappearances that dominated the 20th century are now mostly relegated to the past. The region’s gradual democratization, now complete except for authoritarian holdouts in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, found strong support from U.S. politicians of both parties. America would respect the wishes of Latin America’s voters, leaders in Washington said over the years, and gunboat diplomacy would be retired. But Trump has ushered in a new era. Along the way, he has sidelined Venezuela’s pro-democracy opposition leaders, María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, even though Washington and others recognized that González beat Maduro in the 2024 presidential election. “It’s a total change for people like Marco Rubio, who supported democratic change in the region,” Todd Robinson, who led the U.S. mission to Venezuela during Trump’s first term, told us. “I’m completely flabbergasted.”
Rubio has laid out a three-stage plan for Venezuela. It begins with stabilization, funded by the proposed seizure and sale of 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil. Then follows foreign investment in the country’s mineral and energy sectors and steps to begin reconciliation with Maduro’s opposition. Finally comes an undefined political transition. Although Trump is moving ahead with negotiations over oil, his efforts to push U.S. companies to open their wallets have so far yielded few results. And like Trump’s plans for a petro-renaissance, Rubio’s hopes for a flourishing future could yet devolve into chaos.
Rubio’s supporters say the approach reflects sober, mature statecraft designed to avoid the mistakes the U.S. made in nation building in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya after 9/11. Instead of ousting the governing class in a push for societal freedoms, Trump and Rubio have blessed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, as interim president and chief interlocutor. Other key figures responsible for the regime’s years of repressive practices—the arrest and torture of opponents, the abuse and killing of protesters—remain in place. (That includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who allegedly ordered Rubio’s assassination in 2017. U.S. officials couldn’t verify the threat, but it led to Rubio getting a security detail.) In effect, Rubio sees the current plan as a series of necessary steps on the road toward self-governance and other Jeffersonian ideals, his supporters say.
“This is learning the lesson from history and understanding that without stability, you're not going to get this other piece of it,” one person familiar with the planning process told us. “If you can be in a position where you have leadership—they are not legitimate leadership, but they’re the de facto ones running the country—and they are willing to do things that Maduro did not do and begin to make the transition, that is a better outcome than what we had under Maduro. And it’s certainly a better outcome than the way that it was approached in Iraq.”
The day after Maduro’s ouster, Rubio portrayed the operation as a blend of his high-minded goals for Latin America and the administration’s unapologetic self-interest in “America First.”
“We care about elections, we care about democracy, we care about all of that, but the No. 1 thing we care about is the safety, security, well-being, and prosperity of the United States,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “And that’s what we’re going to focus on first and foremost here.”
Rubio’s politics were forged in South Florida, where he grew up surrounded by Latin Americans who had escaped political repression or turmoil. His own family’s flight from Cuba in the 1950s played a central role in shaping his worldview. That dislocation at once spared them the abuse and privations of Communist Cuba and inculcated Rubio with a harsh view of Latin America’s leftist failures. Rubio has credited his maternal grandfather for ushering him into the Republican Party at a young age and, after Jimmy Carter’s 1979 hostage fiasco, imparting the importance of American leaders projecting strength to the world.
After vaulting into the U.S. Senate from Florida state politics, in 2011, Rubio emerged as perhaps the leading advocate for political change in Latin America—the ideal scenario for which would be dislodging the Communist bosses of his family’s home island. Rubio argued frequently for protecting the hemisphere from the influence of China, Russia, and Iran, but he always put that goal in the context of a principled struggle for political liberty and civil rights. “This is not about just Nicolás Maduro, because if you want another dictator, there are, like, seven or eight other people who are more than happy to be the next dictator,” Rubio said in 2019 with unwitting prescience. “This is about transitioning to democracy, about restoring, helping the people of Venezuela restore constitutional order.”
During Trump’s first term, the president and Rubio dispensed with the mutual hectoring of the 2016 campaign and together supported Venezuelan national assembly leader Juan Guaidó’s attempt to force Maduro from power in 2019. When Trump mused about using force against Maduro, those around him let the idea die, including Rubio himself, according to then–National Security Adviser John Bolton. Guaidó’s uprising failed, but Rubio remained a key adviser on Latin America.
The president grew fond of his onetime political foe, who shared his love of sports, and believed Rubio to be a useful advocate in the Senate. Rubio also developed relationships with others in Trump’s inner circle, working with Ivanka Trump on expanding the child tax credit.
Rubio “tells it like it is, but he doesn’t tell the president how to think or what to do,” a senior administration official told us. “He also knows how to get the president’s attention, and I think we saw that play out with the Venezuela policy.”
When James Story served as U.S. ambassador to Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, he met with Rubio more than he did with any other senator. Their conversations, Story told us, focused on Maduro’s brutality and illegitimacy; he said the two men never discussed oil.
As Trump angled to return to the White House in 2025, Trump considered Rubio as a potential running mate who brought anti-communist bona fides. Trump selected J. D. Vance instead, but Rubio became secretary of state and then, in short order, national security adviser and the archivist of the United States. He is among the tiny cohort helping Trump make major foreign-policy decisions, often in a way that avoids the government’s in-house experts. Although Rubio has been coy about whether he will launch a future presidential bid, those who know him say he retains those ambitions.
Rubio has evolved into a more sharp-edged nationalist in other ways, backing Trump’s bid to take Greenland and forcing out visa holders who criticize U.S. policies. Rubio was also a longtime supporter of foreign-assistance and media programs that the administration has scrapped under his watch. Ironically, the official purpose of Rubio’s 2019 visit to the Colombia-Venezuela border was to highlight Washington’s supply of humanitarian aid, which U.S. officials accused Maduro of blocking out of spite. In Cúcuta, visitors took in sacks of food and other necessities provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Rubio helped dismantle over the past year.
Rubio has chided critics for failing to acknowledge—as he says U.S. leaders did for too long—that all nations act in their own interests. It’s only right for the United States to do the same, he has argued, and keep out of other countries’ affairs unless they impact our own. It’s a worldview in line with what Trump outlined in Saudi Arabia in May, when he suggested that Middle Eastern nations were right to ignore the “Western interventionalists” who told them how to run their countries. (In Venezuela, however, Trump and Rubio are doing exactly that.)
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In the months leading up to the Maduro action, Rubio worked closely with the immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as the Pentagon built up a highly unusual naval and air force in the Caribbean and then began deadly strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats. Since Maduro’s capture, Rubio has gone along with Trump’s sidelining of Machado, whom the president says doesn’t command the respect of Venezuelans.
Cesar Conda, who served as Rubio’s chief of staff in the Senate, told us that Rubio’s long-term objective remains a democratic Venezuela, even if other members of the administration don’t share that goal. But, Conda added, “given the political realities, I suspect Marco was willing to set aside the Venezuelan opposition for now. As with most issues, he’s adept at working within the policy constraints of this White House.”
Representative Darren Soto, a Democrat from central Florida who knows Rubio well, said his constituents have welcomed Maduro’s departure from Venezuela. But, Soto told us, “even with a new head of the snake, it’s undecided whether we’ll see any more stability. The ultimate goal must be new free and fair elections in order to truly achieve that objective.”
In the meantime, Soto and other Democrats are accusing Trump and his advisers of harming the Venezuelans they say they’re acting to help. They are demanding the administration reinstate Temporary Protected Status—which allows foreigners to remain in the United States because of perilous conditions in their home countries—for Venezuelans. They argue that some Venezuelans who return home could be detained or murdered given that the regime remains intact. The administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans last year, saying the country’s conditions no longer justified special protections. The government in Caracas has detained people caught celebrating Maduro’s ouster and, according to activists, released only a few dozen of the hundreds of political opponents held in regime custody.
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For the moment, those concerns take a back seat to stability. “We don’t want backwards movement on those. We don’t necessarily need progress,” the person familiar with Rubio’s plans said. “Progress would be nice, obviously, but stability is the most important key here.” Asked whether the ultimate goal remains democracy and political freedoms, the person cited the need for cooperation on security, migration, cyber, and other issues, and on choosing Washington over Beijing and Moscow. “The big-picture goal in the hemisphere is to have countries that are aligned with the United States,” the person said.
To that end, Trump has issued threats in recent days against other countries and territories in his sights, starting with Greenland and Cuba. One unanswered question is whether Rubio, if he and Trump follow through with those warnings, would be willing to support a similar outcome in Havana, keeping most of Cuba’s Communist leaders in place. “If Cuba had something we wanted, would we say, ‘Okay, we’re going to take that, and then we’re going to wait on the democracy piece?’” Story, the former ambassador, said.
The last time that democracy was dangling just out of reach for Venezuelans, when Rubio gave his impromptu press conference in Cúcuta, a boy of 7 or 8 yelled the senator’s name from afar and was pushed to the front of the crowd. The boy, named Juan Ángel, was holding a half-eaten apple as he was lifted to the podium. “The children of Venezuela want freedom,” he said in his tinny little voice.
“And that’s what we want for you,” Rubio responded, reaching across a bank of microphones to shake his hand. “You’re going to be with your family in a free and democratic Venezuela, God willing.”
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting to this article.