El Chigüire Bipolar, our award-winning equivalent of The Onion, recently ran a headline that nicely captures the domestic fatigue surrounding the months-old rhetoric of the secretary of state: Marco Rubio anuncia que ya ahora sí, de pana, de panita, pronto viene la transición. That translates roughly to: “Rubio announces that now it’s time for the transition to happen soon, this time for sure, for real, I swear.”
It was four days after a military intervention toppled Maduro that Marco Rubio first spoke of the famous three-phase that US diplomats and officials love to quote. He later laid out his expectations for the process currently unfolding. We summarized his comments from the January 28 Senate hearing:
Rubio was reluctant to provide a precise timeline for the current arrangement between Venezuelan authorities and the US. The Trump administration wants to see rapid progress, he suggested. And in five months, the situation must be different (…) In the long term, the US wants Venezuela to have a democratically elected government (…) Rubio said he wants María Corina to be part of the transition and to be able to run for election eventually.
Fast forward to July, and the messaging from out from the White House has become increasingly unnerving to many. We’ve published plenty of stuff that describes the Rodríguez regime’s response to the disaster (ultimately sluggish and dwarfed by the efforts of ordinary people and foreign rescuers) and Delcy’s inability to deploy the Venezuelan military in a meaningful way.
One must not overestimate the influence of the Secretary of State. Rubio is part of the Trump administration, and he cannot break with the president’s overarching goals.
The gringos, however, are adamant that the chavista elite has been fully compliant with aid efforts. Chief of Mission John Barrett expressed strong confidence in local authorities soon after the quakes. A picture of him amicably grabbing the arm of Diosdado Cabello before a team of US rescuers drew social media outage. So did another of Cabello sharing a laugh with a US general, garnering headlines about the Americans’ willingness to work closely with an alleged narco-terrorist.
Rubio’s priorities in the Venezuela portfolio
In the Trump government, one can identify three figures or groups that have stood out for their distinct talking points and approaches to the country.
There is Donald Trump himself, who seems exhilarated whenever he mentions Delcy Rodríguez and the oil riches the US is extracting there without transparency or accountability. The US president is still eager to use Venezuela to advance his domestic agenda; he recently invoked a CIA report on potential electronic fraud in Venezuelan voting machines, a move perhaps meant to cast doubt on election integrity in US states using that technology.
Then you have a network of whisperers and operatives around Trump, which includes both administration officials and external figures, that intend to covertly influence the Venezuela portfolio behind the scenes, sometimes attempting to lobby through journalists and social media. From the outside, the likes of Laura Loomer and Harry Sargeant featured in 2025. In the White House, one figure that doesn’t talk much but is definitely part of the “Venezuela core” is political advisor Stephen Miller, as he reluctantly admitted last week. JD Vance, a likely candidate in the next presidential race, represents the isolationist faction of the administration. And there’s Rubio, who many Venezuelans and the Machado-led opposition perceive as their ally.
Rubio remains the only relevant US official who consistently discusses the purported goals of democratization and institutional reconstruction. He is also the leading figure in the Venezuela dossier, and we believe he genuinely wants to put an end to chavista rule once and for all. His record as an anti-chavista (and anti-Castro) hawk is widely known but, as this Substack post points out, he’s had to seek a middle ground between a regime-change strategy and the Ric Grenell-backed normalization agenda revealed in 2025. A week ago, Rubio welcomed the “reconciliation and transition talks” that a Rodríguez-led delegation and a Machado-less opposition group agreed to begin on August 1. He said the US will be “very engaged” in this process, while suggesting it will operate independently. It clearly won’t. The talks are happening because the State Department is sponsoring them. Which, as it happens, is not bad news at all.
Neither Edmundo González nor Dinorah Figuera possessed significant political capital until a major player backed them. Both, too, are likely easy to guide and control.
Still, one must not overestimate the influence of the Secretary of State. Rubio is part of the Trump administration, and he cannot break with the president’s overarching goals.
One of Rubio’s main goals here is to keep the situation stable. If the recent off-the-record skirmishes with María Corina Machado were to escalate into open conflict between the opposition leader and Trump, framing the Venezuela portfolio as a foreign policy success would become far more difficult. As a Secretary of State, Rubio has become accustomed to defending Trump’s rhetoric and actions in a professional and composed tone while reassuring allied figures and governments in private (including some whom the president has publicly humiliated). This same dynamic likely governs his approach to Machado, whom Rubio insists can play a role in the transition even as Trump continues to shun her.
Machado, who has recently challenged Washington, cannot afford to break with her sole reliable, long-time ally in the US government, Rubio, if she wants to avoid a damaging fallout. Rubio, meanwhile, can’t break with Trump either if he hopes to run for president in 2028, given Trump’s grip on the Republican Party and the MAGA voter base. Rubio would probably like to engineer elections in Venezuela in a way that maximizes his political credit. With the Republican presidential primaries scheduled for the first half of 2028, showing off Venezuelan elections as a personal triumph while the GOP selects its nominee would require those elections to take place in late 2027 or early 2028.
Washington’s proxy
Rubio wants to control this process through Dinorah Figuera and a group of former opposition lawmakers from Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, the parties who backed the creation of the Comisión Delegada Figuera presides. To Washington, Figuera represents what Edmundo González was to Machado in the 2024 election: a figure with enough legitimacy who was admitted as a competitor by the chavista-controlled institutions. Just as the opposition leader needed an opposition proxy to stand in for her when she was banned from running, Rubio needs a Venezuelan politician coming from the 2015 National Assembly to claim that negotiations for democracy and reconciliation are Venezuelan-led. Neither González nor Figuera possessed significant political capital until a major player backed them. Both, too, are likely easy to guide and control.
Much like the president-elect, Figuera has shown little political ambition beyond serving as a viable, cooperative figure under these circumstances (much as González did after the Maduro regime disqualified dozens of potential opposition candidates). Figuera has described herself as “an instrument” of the reinstitutionalization and democratization process. She hopes to guarantee the participation of political parties and Machado, whom she acknowledges as the opposition’s leader but notes that she holds “a different vision.”
We expect the Rodríguez-Figuera talks to make progress before the end of 2026.
The upcoming talks will be like nothing we have ever seen, in terms of the US operating as an all-powerful actor wielding immense coercive capacity and veto power. The members of the opposition delegation, whose full roster is not yet public, are expected to serve more as liaisons in constant communication with the Department of State and Trump administration personnel, than as fully-empowered negotiators over the major issues at stake.
Figuera claims this process should lead to a trustworthy CNE and a reformed Supreme Court with new magistrates across its entire structure—not just the chamber overseeing elections. Repressive statutes passed in the Maduro era, used to seize the assets of the regime’s opponents or to punish citizens under the chavista definition of hate speech, are expected to be revoked too.
With the Delcy regime unable to make progress on multiple fronts and definitely after the government’s lame emergency response, her position before the United States seems weaker as we approach the end of the year. Our latest Political Risk Report quotes Rodríguez government sources suggesting the Trump administration wants to accelerate political developments in Venezuela ahead of the November midterms, so its ventures in Caracas can be framed as a clearer success.
We expect the Rodríguez-Figuera talks to make progress before the end of 2026. Whether that progress will translate into preparations for a new presidential election, as Machado and most Venezuelans would hope, remains to be seen