The U.S. State Department named two principal objectives for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Sept. 2-4 trip to Mexico and Ecuador: securing agreement for “neutralizing narcoterrorist threats,” and to “counter malign extra-continental actors.” Read “China” for the latter goal, and any government in the region that does not “cooperate” as a potential target for the former.
The backdrop for the trip is the Trump administration’s threat to move militarily against Venezuela, whose President Nicolás Maduro and his government have been designated as “a narcoterrorist cartel.”
As a large U.S. naval force assembled off the coast of Venezuela, Rubio visited U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Florida after his trip to Mexico and Ecuador was announced. There he met with Adm. Alvin Holsey and team on Aug. 29. No readout was released, only photos.
On Sept. 2, as Rubio was heading out to Mexico, President Donald Trump released a grainy video of what he identified as a U.S. military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug-trafficking boat. Rubio was asked about the strike and if the Trump administration was prepared to “take out the Maduro regime.” He replied that he refused “to speculate what might come down the road.”
It has not been reported whether Rubio directly raised the Venezuelan operation in his meetings with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and other Mexican officials. But while Rubio called their discussions “very productive,” and the two governments announced that they had agreed to create “a high-level implementation group” to meet regularly to follow up on “joint commitments and actions undertaken within our own countries” against transnational cartels, the Mexican government did not get the formal agreement they sought to emphasize “sovereignty” as the basis for U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. An unnamed U.S. official had told AFP in advance that the United States was looking for “down-in-the-weeds stuff,” not “declarations of sovereignty and everything.”
Ecuador, on the other hand, is a poster child for Trump administration-style “coordination.” Rubio repeated in his joint press conference with Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld that the U.S. is “very seriously” interested in President Daniel Noboa’s intention of reopening a U.S. military base in Ecuador. The U.S. wants “to station U.S. troops in Ecuador,” both for joint operations in the country and as a strategic base for U.S. deployments, Rubio said, because Ecuador is “in a very strategic part of the world.” (Only one obstacle remains: the Ecuadorian Constitution, which prohibits foreign bases in the country, has to be changed.)
Rubio also angrily ranted against anyone who questions that Venezuela is the major drug problem in the region. “Let there be no doubt,” he pronounced. Maduro “is a fugitive of U.S. justice. He’s not the legitimate leader of Venezuela. We never recognized him. He is an indicted fugitive causing trouble in the region, and he was indicted by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York.” Case closed!
“Cooperative governments” did not have to worry about the U.S. unilaterally taking out narcoterrorists from their countries, Rubio added, “because they’re going to help us find these people and blow them up if that’s what it takes.”
If he were serious about stopping drugs and anxious to blow things up, Rubio and his boss would do well to look first to Wall Street and the City of London’s money-laundering banks.
