US Secretary of State Marco Rubio: The New Architect of Policy in Latin America

Ten years have passed since those 2016 Republican primaries when he accused him of building “the wall like he built the Trump Towers, using illegal immigrant labor to do it.” The expression pointed to the hypocrisy of the current president, about whom he said even worse things: at a campaign event in Dallas, Texas, and in front of thousands of people, he called him a “professional con man.” Added to this were the 32 Cuban advisors who died in combat defending installations in Caracas against the American invader. Free at last, and with a wide range of overt and covert operations in Latin America, Rubio is described in Trump's circle as “a team player and everyone loves working with him in the West Wing” (of the White House). These are the words of the government's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who praised him for his dual role as Secretary of State or head of diplomacy and national security advisor. It is there, where the president commits one of his usual outbursts, that Rubio lends him his support, because today he does not compete with him. Secretary of the United States, Marco Rubio. By Gustavo J. Veiga, Contributor to Prensa Latina. Buenos Aires (Prensa Latina) – The megalomania of the neofascist regime that governs the United States has gone too far: its Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is the man to whom Donald Trump delegated the big stick policy for Latin America and gave a hint when he posted on his social media that Rubio could be the next president of Cuba. In the role-playing game to delineate areas of influence behind Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was tasked with executing the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. By style, he seems moderate compared to the president, but he is not. His parents arrived in the United States in 1956, before the Revolution led by Fidel Castro, and Rubio grew up in Miami, the capital of all possible conspiracies in Latin America. In that conducive environment, a den of terrorists and openly coup-plotters, the Secretary of State plays at home. His biographer, The Washington Post journalist Manuel Roig-Franzia and author of the book The Rise of Marco Rubio, defines that his future is linked to a single objective: “He is hand-in-hand with Trump to get to another place, the place where Donald Trump is sitting, which is the White House.” He rivals other hawks or high-ranking officials in the magnate's inner circle, the supreme authority of the USA with pretensions to govern a planet that has become uncontrollable. The characterization is symmetrical with the manifest destiny of a country that has spent many more years at war than in peace in the four centuries that cross its history (1776-2026). Rubio, Cuban-American, son of immigrants from the Caribbean nation, former Florida senator, a decisive politician in that southern US state and former Republican presidential candidate who once rivaled Trump, plays the libero. In football jargon applied to politics, he would be like the defender of the great guidelines of the global empire. In perspective, a result like that would leave either of the two candidates to succeed Trump in a very uncomfortable position: Rubio or Vance. According to AP, one of the politicians closest to the Secretary of State in the Senate, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee James Risch, said that Rubio's influence pushed the regime led by Trump to get involved in the use of force in Venezuela. He had hinted at it for months with preemptive attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and confirmed it with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Both operations, so far, have yielded the following balance. The midterm elections this year where Republicans continue to fall in the polls. If the polls were true, they would lose the majority in both chambers of Congress. Behind the scenes, they already call him “the quarterback” of Trump. The counterweight of balance that his boss often lacks, involved in high-voltage dialectical battles with the democratic opposition of governors, mayors, senators and deputies, in addition to journalists and critical media or famous actors like Robert De Niro who usually dismembers him in public. In his last appearance at the Cannes Festival he said that “he understands nothing about humanity (…) He has no empathy. A politician of a calm spirit, obedient, overshadowed by a president who never leaves the center of the stage. Despite being the “number two” of the Republican government, his influence is notable. He declared that if the current Vice President JD Vance “runs for president, he will be our candidate and I will be one of the first people to support him,” in an interview he gave to the magazine Vanity Fair along with several cabinet members. Trump, despite certain lobbying for a candidacy that seduces him to continue in the White House, is prohibited from running as he has completed two alternating terms. The 22nd Constitutional Amendment prohibits it. But that is another story and it is still very far away, although the marketing of caps with the inscription “Trump 2028” promotes that idea. Before the next presidential elections there is another stop. “I don't know where he is, what he is, but he is an extraterrestrial and he wants to do harm to this country”. Apparently, Rubio's dream would not be to succeed the head of state in the upcoming elections according to his expressions of a month ago. About 110 murders of presumed drug traffickers at sea and a little less of Venezuelan soldiers and civilians on land. Quite the opposite. That is what he is doing in the so-called backyard, as it has always been perceived from the United States to the extensive geography that goes from Mexico to Argentina in South America. The Secretary of State is not what he seems. He used to “bully” him. The magnate returned the favor by calling him “Little Marco” for his short stature. Although he has freedom to attack. That is the official who now handles US foreign policy, a calculating man who had two countries to intervene in his Latin America agenda: Venezuela, where the results are visible after January 3 and with a future still open. The other is Cuba, the nation blocked for over 60 years and for which he reserves all the destabilizing energy in the future steps that the extreme right government will take. “If I were in Havana, I would be worried,” he declared. If possible, by surprise.