In early January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with President Donald Trump and US generals to oversee a nighttime assault on Venezuela that ousted its autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro.
On Thursday, Rubio found himself explaining how the US would help Venezuela after a devastating double earthquake left many citizens trapped under rubble. The US, he said, would provide a "whole-of-government response".
"We’re already deploying search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles," he told reporters. "That’s their most immediate need right now."
"The airport there is badly damaged, so we’ll have to rely on the Department of War to deploy assets there," he added, using the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defence. "And then we’re also helping them with some overhead imagery."
Rubio’s remarks were intended to support Trump’s social media message that the US was "ready, willing and able to help". They also signalled that the administration wanted the world to know its interests in Venezuela could go beyond oil, despite the president’s aggressive assertions that his country deserved to take the Caribbean nation’s most valuable resource.
On Friday, Trump mentioned the oil during a speech at a conservative religious conference, saying: "It was a one-day war, we hit them so hard. Now we’ve taken out millions of barrels of oil, and we’ve paid for the war many times over."
The State Department said the administration has organised a disaster assistance response team with more than 250 people, including three search-and-rescue teams. The agency also said the administration was giving $50 million to at least six aid organisations and $100 million to a UN humanitarian office working with Venezuela.
After the administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development last year, it began relying on State Department offices with a fraction of that agency's resources.
The US response to the earthquake "is an opportunity" for the Trump administration, said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.
In the months since Maduro’s capture, Shifter said, the administration of Delcy Rodríguez, a Maduro ally, has taken modest steps towards allowing greater political freedoms, including the release of about half of the country’s political prisoners. But economic conditions have not improved for most Venezuelans despite high expectations set in part by Trump, who predicted the country would boom as US companies invested in its dilapidated oil infrastructure.
"There are growing concerns about the heavy-handedness of the Trump administration, sort of plundering and pillaging their country, and the loss of sovereignty and national control," Shifter said. Earthquake relief "could be an opportunity to show that the US is interested in something beyond business and oil."
After Maduro’s capture — what some call an abduction — Trump and Rubio vowed to launch Venezuela on a gradual transition to democracy. "Ultimately, in order to truly transition, they have to have multiparty, free and fair elections," Rubio told a Senate committee this month.
But the Trump administration has not suggested a timeline for such a transition, and the process has been slow to begin. Unlike previous US presidents, Trump rarely promotes democracy or human rights, and he criticises past American efforts to do so.
One small move among Venezuelan politicians occurred last week, when Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, met with a former opposition lawmaker, Dinorah Figuera, for talks on a democratic transition. The meeting, in Caracas, the capital, was the first between the country’s ruling party and its political opposition in at least a year and a half.
The State Department said in a statement that it "welcomed" the meeting, which it called "a first step in what will be a thoughtful process to secure a free and open Venezuelan society". It added that a transition agenda would include "rebuilding Venezuela’s democratic institutions", strengthening the country’s national elections oversight body, and ensuring free political discourse and participation.
But Shifter said many close observers of Venezuela were "puzzled" by Figuera as the opposition representative to begin the talks. The country’s opposition leader is María Corina Machado, a popular figure and Nobel Peace Prize winner who remains in exile, and whose ambitions to lead the country Trump has declined to endorse.
The New York Times