(Adnkronos) – “Tell the president that I want to return to Venezuela as soon as possible.” This is the message Maria Corina Machado asked to convey to Donald Trump to the deputies she met last week in Congress, according to what was revealed to the Washington Post by a person present at the closed-door meeting.
The affair demonstrates the difficult position of the Venezuelan opposition leader towards Trump, who, along with his administration, appears increasingly enthusiastic about the pragmatism of Delcy Rodriguez, the former deputy of Nicolas Maduro who became interim president immediately after the capture of the Venezuelan leader in the American raid on January three. In fact, in the meeting Machado had with the president during her visit to Washington, she did not obtain definite timelines for her return and for free elections in Caracas.
Among other members of the Venezuelan opposition, fear is spreading that Washington prefers stability, guaranteed by Rodriguez’s balancing act between Bolivarian continuity for internal politics but full willingness to open up the economy and resources, oil first and foremost, to the US, over democracy.
After all, Trump was very honest in saying that the objective in Maduro’s removal was not ‘regime change’ but control of Venezuela’s reserves: “we’ll take the oil,” he summarized. “The administration should allow Machado’s return, it should use its influence to induce political openness and structural reforms – says Diego Arena, forced to leave the country after campaigning against Maduro in the 2015 elections – order without reforms only postpones instability.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday in Congress praised the progress made by President Rodriguez in giving American companies “preferential access” to oil production and “in using oil revenues to purchase.” “It is our conviction that it is in her own interest to align with the progression of our key objectives,” he added, expressing in other terms what Trump continues to repeat, namely that the current Venezuelan leadership has been “very intelligent” in collaborating with the US to avoid the same fate as Maduro.
“We exchanged one dictator for another,” was the reply of Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic leader on the Foreign Relations Committee, emphasizing that Rodriguez has not taken “steps to diminish the considerable influence of Iran, China, and Russia in Venezuela” and that her cooperation with the US “appears tactical and temporary.”
