{"id":75813,"date":"2026-01-04T13:11:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T20:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=75813"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:13:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T20:13:12","slug":"marco-rubio-stresses-u-s-plan-to-coerce-venezuela-rather-than-govern-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/marco-rubio-stresses-u-s-plan-to-coerce-venezuela-rather-than-govern-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Secretary Marco Rubio stresses U.S. plan to coerce Venezuela rather than govern it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Marco<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Palm Beach, Florida, USA<\/em>.- Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to pivot away from President Trump\u2019s assertion a day earlier that the United States would \u201crun\u201d Venezuela, emphasizing instead that the administration would keep a military \u201cquarantine\u201d in place on the country\u2019s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked how the United States planned to govern Venezuela, Mr. Rubio did not lay out a plan for a U.S. occupation authority, like the one that the George W. Bush administration put in place in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but instead spoke of coercing a Venezuelan government run by allies of the jailed leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro to make policy changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. forces will continue to prevent oil tankers on a U.S. sanctions list from entering and leaving the country until the government opens up the state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment \u2014 presumably giving priority to American companies \u2014 and makes other changes, he said on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d on CBS News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat remains in place, and that\u2019s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes, not just to further the national interest of the United States, which is No. 1, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in a testy exchange later on \u201cMeet the Press\u201d on NBC News, Mr. Rubio complained that people were \u201cfixating\u201d on Mr. Trump\u2019s declaration at a news conference in Florida on Saturday that the U.S. government would run Venezuela. He added that \u201cit\u2019s not running \u2014 it\u2019s running policy, the policy with regards to this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Rubio said on CBS that the U.S. naval force that Mr. Trump massed in the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela over recent months \u2014 \u201cone of the largest naval deployments in modern history, certainly in the Western Hemisphere\u201d \u2014 would remain in place to enforce the quasi blockade, with the aim of \u201cparalyzing that portion of how the regime, you know, generates revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he added that Mr. Trump could put U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela beyond the recent operation in which Army Delta Force soldiers seized Mr. Maduro, if it served American interests. The president \u201cdoes not feel like he is going to publicly rule out options that are available for the United States,\u201d Mr. Rubio said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A White House official said Mr. Rubio had detailed in his interviews on Sunday what Mr. Trump had meant when he used the word \u201crun,\u201d and that there was no contradiction in their remarks. The officials said top Trump aides \u201cwill continue to diplomatically engage\u201d with the current leadership in Venezuela.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday that if the current acting leader of Venezuela, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, a vice president under Mr. Maduro, \u201cdoesn\u2019t do what\u2019s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Rubio led an effort in the Trump administration to oust Mr. Maduro that was supported throughout the fall by Stephen Miller, the president\u2019s homeland security adviser, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, The New York Times reported in September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Mr. Trump did in his news conference on Saturday, Mr. Rubio focused in his Sunday interviews on oil as the main prize for the United States in its operation against Mr. Maduro, the autocratic leader of the country who is now in detention with his wife, Cilia Flores, in Brooklyn. Mr. Trump said on Saturday that \u201cwe\u2019re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Sunday, Mr. Rubio told CBS News that the oil industry in Venezuela, which is controlled by the government and under U.S. sanctions, needed to be \u201creinvested in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s obvious they do not have the capability to bring up that industry again,\u201d he said. \u201cThey need investment from private companies who are only going to invest under certain guarantees and conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Rubio\u2019s and Mr. Trump\u2019s remarks over the weekend suggested that the administration intended to force Ms. Rodr\u00edguez to allow American oil companies to invest and operate in the country under favorable conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The statements by the two men amount to an explicit declaration of gunboat diplomacy and an embrace of the kind of 19th-century U.S. imperialist policy in the Western Hemisphere that has been widely criticized across Latin America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For years, Chevron has been the only U.S. oil company operating in Venezuela, in several joint ventures with the state-owned oil company, Petr\u00f3leos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA. The Biden and second Trump administrations gave Chevron a license to operate there as an exception to sanctions imposed on Venezuela\u2019s oil industry by Mr. Trump in his first term. Other American companies had a large presence over decades in the Venezuelan industry, but left the country during two periods when the government exerted state control over the ventures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. forces boarded two oil tankers last month that were transporting oil from Venezuela to Asia. The first one, the Skipper, was on a Treasury Department sanctions list for transporting Iranian oil, and a federal court had granted the Justice Department a warrant to seize the tanker based on that history. The second one, the Centuries, was not on the department\u2019s sanctions list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For days, the U.S. Coast Guard has been pursuing another tanker on the sanctions list, the Bella 1, which had been going to Venezuela to pick up oil. That tanker changed its flag to that of Russia and renamed itself the Marinera during the trans-Atlantic pursuit, and the Russian Foreign Ministry told the U.S. government formally on Dec. 31 to stop chasing the tanker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration has said all weekend that it hopes to work with Ms. Rodr\u00edguez, and Mr. Rubio deflected questions on Sunday about why it was not supporting any leadership bid by Venezuela\u2019s main opposition figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was in contact throughout last year with figures in the opposition movement. And as a senator from Florida, he signed a formal letter of support for Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was awarded that prize last year, which frustrated Mr. Trump, who had been openly campaigning to win it himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Saturday, Mr. Trump said in his news conference that Ms. Machado lacked the \u201crespect\u201d within Venezuela to govern, even though international election experts say a candidate she supported, Edmundo Gonz\u00e1lez, beat Mr. Maduro in a 2024 election by a wide margin. The Biden administration and the second Trump administration have recognized Mr. Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In January 2025, right after starting his new job, Mr. Rubio spoke with both Ms. Machado and Mr. Gonz\u00e1lez, whom he called the \u201crightful president,\u201d and \u201creaffirmed the United States\u2019 support for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela,\u201d according to a State Department summary of the call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Saturday, Ms. Rodr\u00edguez sounded a defiant tone, denouncing the U.S. raid against Mr. Maduro and saying he was the country\u2019s rightful president. When asked on Sunday whether the United States could work with her, Mr. Rubio said: \u201cWe\u2019re going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what we know of what they\u2019ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward. So we\u2019re going to find out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Rubio also said there were no immediate plans to send U.S. troops into Venezuela to seize other officials who have also been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on drug trafficking charges, as Mr. Maduro was in 2020, during the first Trump administration. He said that had not been a consideration in planning for the operation to take Mr. Maduro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Rubio said that the United States planned to ensure that Venezuela stopped trafficking drugs. The Trump administration stated last year that curbing \u201cnarco-terrorism\u201d from Venezuela was a main reason for its campaign against the country, which has included carrying out legally questionable military strikes on boats that have killed at least 115 people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Venezuela\u2019s role in the drug trade is limited. Mr. Maduro allowed some Colombian cocaine producers to send their product through Venezuela, mainly to Europe, but the country does not produce fentanyl, which has long been Mr. Trump\u2019s stated focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked in the NBC interview whether Communist-run Cuba, an ally of Venezuela, was the next target of the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio did not deny the possibility. He said that \u201cthe Cuban government is a huge problem\u201d and that \u201cthey are in a lot of trouble, yes.\u201d Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has said for decades that the leadership of Cuba must be removed, and that toppling the Maduro \u201cregime\u201d in Venezuela would help lead to a transformation in Cuba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another interview on Sunday, on \u201cThis Week\u201d on ABC News, Mr. Rubio said that congressional authorization of the military operation to seize Mr. Maduro was not necessary because it was \u201ca law enforcement operation\u201d rather than an \u201cinvasion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also said that notifying members of Congress ahead of the operation would have led to leaks of the military plans and endangered American soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Credit: The New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author: Edward Wong<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Palm Beach, Florida, USA.- Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to pivot away from President Trump\u2019s assertion a day earlier that the United States would \u201crun\u201d Venezuela, emphasizing instead that the administration would keep a military \u201cquarantine\u201d in place on the country\u2019s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":75814,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"slim_seo":{"title":"Secretary Marco Rubio stresses U.S. plan to coerce Venezuela rather than govern it - Opini\u00f3n P\u00fablica","description":"Palm Beach, Florida, USA .- Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to pivot away from President Trump\u2019s assertion a day earlier that the United State"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1015],"tags":[1756,1179,1023],"class_list":["post-75813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-optv-usa","tag-maduro-captured","tag-marco-rubio","tag-venezuela"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75813"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75817,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75813\/revisions\/75817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}