▲ Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a fierce opponent of the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, would be Donald Trump’s Secretary of State.Photo Afp
Jim Cason and David Brooks
Correspondents
La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, November 12, 2024, p. 20
Washington and New York. President-elect Donald Trump intends to name Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio, a critic of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a fierce opponent of the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, as the next Secretary of State, according to multiple versions. in the US media (although not yet officially confirmed).
Rubio has a long history of hawkespecially against leftist governments in America, Iran, China and others, and has not hidden his criticism of the López Obrador government.
I am glad to see that the Mexican president, who has given sections of his country to drug cartels and is an apologist for tyranny in Cuba, a murderous dictator in Nicaragua and a drug trafficker in Venezuela, will not be in the United States this weekthe senator tweeted on June 7, after López Obrador announced that he would not attend the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in 2022. The Mexican president refused to participate because the host United States did not invite all the countries of the hemisphere to not include Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
He has proposed sanctioning Mexico
The Florida senator, who was briefly a Republican presidential candidate in 2016 before Trump’s coronation, has also proposed US sanctions against Mexico over the neighboring country’s agreement to welcome Cuban doctors and because Pemex has sent oil to the island from which his parents immigrated in 1956. Rubio, who has also been the ranking Republican on the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has taken a more stance. cautious around President Claudia Sheinbaum. After his election, Rubio said that “as the United States continues to face an unprecedented crisis against fentanyl and illegal immigration, I hope that President-elect Sheinbaum confronts these issues harshly.
“The United States must be prepared to face continued challenges in the future of US-Mexico relations with the growth of transnational crime, corruption and narcoterrorism”. He added: “I urge Sheinbaum, as Mexico’s first Jewish president, to support our Israeli allies in the wake of Hamas’ unjustified terrorist attack and to strongly condemn those leaders – both in our region and around the world – who are severing ties. with the Jewish State of Israel.”
At the end of August he published in X: The reforms of President López Obrador and President-elect Sheinbaum are a threat to the democratic values of our regionafter he and several other senators expressed their alarm for judicial reform in Mexico.
Rubio has not only questioned those in charge of the bilateral relationship on the Mexican side. In 2015 he blocked the appointment of Roberta Jacobson as ambassador to Mexico for her role in helping in the diplomatic negotiation for the normalization of relations with Cuba during the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The senator was also a critic of the State Department, the secretariat that he apparently will lead, for what he interpreted as an attempt to stop Trump’s plans in order to restore the sanctions against Cuba that Obama had annulled. Career people at the State Department and Treasury and elsewhere are not in favor of changing this policyhe says he told the magnate. Three days later, then-President Trump traveled to Miami and reversed the opening to Cuba.
Rubio has also criticized President Joe Biden’s policy toward Caracas. When the Biden administration lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil, Rubio stated: another foreign policy fiasco from the Biden-Harris team.
At press time, Rubio’s appointment had not yet been confirmed by the Trump transition team, although the New York Times, PoliticalReuters and CNN reported that the decision had already been made, although they warned that Trump could change his mind at the last minute.
He was a critic of Trump in 2016
The selection of Rubio is curious on the one hand, since he was a fierce critic of Trump during the campaign for the Republican nomination in 2016, taking very different positions from Trump on foreign policy. For example, Rubio successfully pushed legislation in 2024 that requires an act of Congress before a president can order the United States to withdraw from NATO, something Trump often threatens.
But Rubio offers advantages for the president-elect. As the first Republican to win more than 45 percent of the Latino vote (54 percent of Latino men), Trump could announce that he is naming the first Latino secretary of state in history. Additionally, at 53 years old, Rubio also represents a younger generation of Republicans than the president-elect.
But Cabinet meetings could be a bit tricky, Trump is famous for giving nicknames to all his opponents, and the one he used for Rubio in 2016 was little Marco (little Marco), and it remains to be seen if she suddenly calls him that.