Likely Secretary of State Marco Rubio may do this to put pressure on Venezuela

Andres Oppenheimer

President-elect Donald Trump’ s likely appointment of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state would signal a tougher U.S. stand against the Venezuelan dictatorship, which could include measures such as designating that country’s Tren de Aragua gang as a foreign terrorist group.

While Rubio has been an informal Trump adviser on Latin American issues and is well known for his hard-line views on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, his appointment could be largely due to his credentials as a hawk on U.S. policy toward China and Iran.

For more than a decade, he has been a leading critic of China and Iran’s regimes at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

But Rubio, who was born in Miami to Cuban exile parents, would be the first U.S. Secretary of State in recent memory who has a personal connection with Latin America. He would probably pay more attention to Latin America than his most recent predecessors.

Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Cuban exiles could hardly be happier about Rubio’s likely appointment.

Juan Guaidó, the former head of Venezuela’s National Assembly who was recognized by the Trump administration and more than 50 other countries as Venezuela’s interim president until he was replaced three years later, told me in an interview Tuesday that Rubio has been “a champion” for democracy in Venezuela.

Guaidó and his Popular Will party are now asking that the United States designate Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua human smuggling and trafficking gang as an international terrorist organization. Venezuelan opposition leaders have high hopes that, if the Biden administration doesn’t do it before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Rubio would do it once in office.

Putting the “terrorist” label on the Tren de Aragua gang would be an important move because there is evidence that the Maduro regime is using the criminal organization “to subcontract criminal activities” abroad, Guaidó told me. For instance, the February murder in Chile of Ronald Ojeda, a former Venezuelan military officer who had been accused of treason by the Maduro regime, was reportedly carried out by Tren de Aragua gunmen at the Maduro regime’s request, he said.

During the campaign, Trump often cited Tren de Aragua as alleged evidence of his claims that foreign criminals have invaded the United States. The president-elect claimed that the gang has taken over entire apartment blocks in the Colorado city of Aurora, and he said in his Oct. 27 campaign speech in New York that he would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to “expedite removal of Tren de Aragua” gang members.

Most independent experts agree that the gang, which originated in Venezuelan prisons, is very active in Colombia, Peru and Chile, and to a lesser degree in Brazil and Ecuador. But they say that it’s not clear that it has a major presence in the United States.

In September, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, an anti-immigration zealot, officially designated the Tren de Aragua gang as a foreign terrorist organization, saying that “we will not let them use Texas as a base of operations to terrorize our citizens.”

In July, Rubio himself congratulated the Biden administration’s Treasury Department for designating the Tren de Aragua as a Transnational Criminal Group. His statement described the gang as a “grave threat” to national security, but stopped short of asking that it be labeled a terrorist organization, which would put it higher up on the list of U.S. law enforcement priorities.

If Rubio’s appointment is confirmed, there will be a lot of speculation that he will push to designate the Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist group, and use it as a new pressure tool to isolate Venezuela’s dictatorship, and perhaps threaten it with military actions.

I doubt that Trump will invade Venezuela, because he prides himself on not having started a war, and because he will have his hands full dealing with China, Iran and other major world conflicts. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Rubio becomes secretary of state and turns Tren de Aragua into a major regional issue to put greater international pressure on the Maduro regime to restore democracy in Venezuela.