LatinNews Daily - 18 November 2024

Region: Leaders from Latin America including Paraguay’s President Santiago Peña, foreign ministers such as Panama’s Javier Martínez-Acha and Uruguay’s Omar Paganini, along with former presidents such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), have been quick to congratulate US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who has been picked by US president-elect Donald Trump as his secretary of state. The son of Cuban immigrants and first Latino to hold the post, Rubio, who was highly influential on Latin America policy under the first Trump administration (2017-2021), has spoken out strongly on authoritarian governments in the region such as in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The first Trump administration notably recognised Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela in 2019 as part of a failed attempt to push President Nicolás Maduro from power, and reversed the rapprochement with Havana overseen under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama (2009-2017), culminating in the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism on 11 January 2021, nine days before the end of Trump’s first term. Writing on social media after Trump revealed his choice of Rubio, Nicaragua’s former ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Arturo McFields, who publicly broke with the Nicaraguan government in March 2022, wrote that Rubio’s nomination was “good news for freedom and democracy” and “bad news for the dictatorships of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela”.

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