When President Donald Trump took office, he passed down one key instruction on how to handle Latin America: Make Marco Rubio happy
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But with influence has come criticism. Rubio has become too powerful, his critics say — ruthless in his efforts to control messaging and push out anyone with a role in Latin America policy who could be perceived as soft on Cuba or Venezuela, while too narrow in his focus on only a few countries in a region of more than 650 million people.
In February 2017, he organized a meeting between Trump and Lilian Tintori, wife of Venezuelan opposition politician and then-political prisoner Leopoldo López, at the White House. The president did not inform National Security Council aides of the meeting and they did not find out until after it took place, according to two former administration officials. Trump“We knew early on that on Latin America policy Trump wasn’t taking cues from career officials.
Sen. Marco Rubio says his job is to offer advice and “nudge us in one direction or another.” | Andrew Harnik, Pool/AP Photo Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, another prominent Florida Republican voice on Latin America, gave Trump full credit for his administration’s work on Venezuela and Cuba. “It’s not either of us. It’s not the secretary of State. It’s him,” Diaz-Balart said. “Senator Rubio and I are very fortunate that the president listens to us and calls us in on these issues.”
“He’s not making foreign policy. It’s Florida electoral politics, and yes, he’s successful in Florida. But frankly it’s a dereliction of his duty as chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee to ignore the majority of the region,” a conservative Latin America analyst said.when López Obrador was elected in July 2018 that he had “serious philosophical differences” with the Mexican populist, but added that “Mexico is an important partner of the United States.
In 2018, after a failed effort to install him at the State Department, he successfully placed his longtime friend Mauricio Claver-Carone into the White House as head of the Western Hemisphere Affairs at the NSC. Claver-Carone, who previously worked on Trump’s transition team and led a political action committee that worked to preserve the U.S. embargo on Cuba, was an outspoken opponent of the Obama administration’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba.
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