Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined the Trump administration’s plan for restarting its diplomatic presence in Venezuela as it seeks to forge a more prosperous and aligned ally in the hemisphere.
The administration has picked former U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Laura Dogu to lead the new diplomatic mission, which will begin in Bogota, Colombia, before moving to Caracas, Venezuela’s capital.
Dogu is the foreign policy adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, and previously served as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, as well as having other assignments in Turkey, Egypt, and El Salvador.
The State Department already has 70 local people who maintain the little-used facility in Caracas, as well as “a team on the ground there assessing it,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a public hearing on Wednesday.
“We think very quickly we’ll be able to open a U.S. diplomatic presence on the ground, which will allow us to have real-time information and interact, by the way, not just with officials in the regime and with the interim authorities, but also interact with members of civil society, the opposition,” he said. “We think we’re going to be much further along when we get them along the way.”
Rubio added that CIA Director John Ratcliffe has already traveled to Venezuela to meet with local leaders there to discuss “important items of potential cooperation.”
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Rubio’s testimony in front of the committee he used to sit on as a senator was the first time he answered lawmakers’ questions publicly since U.S. forces captured and arrested former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January.
Venezuela appointed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as acting president, though, as the No. 2 under Maduro, she was part of the government the U.S. considers illegitimate. The United States has pressed her to implement policies that are more aligned with U.S. interests, though she has started expressing frustration about the pressure.
