Grenell vs. Rubio: Team Trump's competing Latin America visions

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s five-country tour of Central American allies last week — the first time in a century the U.S.’s top diplomat has made their inaugural foreign trip to Latin America — was aimed at curtailing China’s growing regional influence, stemming the flow of migrants and drugs to the U.S. and identifying “safe third countries” that will temporarily hold thousands of Trump’s deportees.

Yet the administration’s first stop in the region was not, in fact, to a close friend but rather to an adversary: Venezuela’s embattled socialist leader Nicolás Maduro, whom presidential envoy Richard Grenell rewarded with a surprise visit to Miraflores Palace on January 31.

Grenell, who referred to Maduro as the country’s president and said Trump wanted a “different relationship” with the country, was on a laser-focused mission to bring back detained Americans and secure a commitment from Maduro to receive deported Tren de Aragua gang members, according to a pre-trip call with reporters held by the State Department’s Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone.

Yet the questions surrounding Grenell’s visit only a day before Rubio’s trip are just the tip of the iceberg in a series of emerging contradictions in President Trump’s incipient Latin America policy — notably between hardline hawks focused on rewarding allies and punishing enemies (represented by Rubio and his fellow Cuban-American ally Claver-Carone), and White House officials like Grenell whose realpolitik and strategic engagement with adversaries to advance national interests could prevail.

As a result, some Republican lawmakers have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to reconcile Trump’s transactionalism toward the region’s illiberal regimes with Rubio’s maximalist hardline, complicated by their razor-thin majority in Congress.

As expected, Rubio’s tour to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic notched some high-profile wins for Trump’s “America First” strategy in the region, namely Panama’s decision to let its Belt and Road Initiative membership expire, El Salvador’s offer to incarcerate U.S. convicts in its supermax prison, and the seizure of a Venezuelan presidential plane in the Dominican Republic due to sanctions violations.

These outcomes are consistent with Claver-Carone’s remarks that Rubio’s trip would kick off the “re-Americanization of the Panama Canal,” a return to a “golden age” of U.S. dominance in the region, and the inevitability that the 21st century would be an American one — not Chinese..

But at the same time, Grenell’s concurrent Venezuela mission confounded veteran GOP Latin America hands like Elliot Abrams and Carrie Filipetti, who ran Trump's “maximum pressure” Venezuela policy from the State Department in his first term. They, like Rubio and Claver-Carone, consider the Biden-era OFAC licenses allowing Chevron to operate in Venezuela — which were automatically renewed the day after Grenell’s visit — to be counterproductive, keeping Maduro afloat after his widely contested re-election in July.

While Grenell said after his trip that Trump’s first-term maximum pressure sanctions “didn’t work,” Rubio continues to pursue the same strategy.

Shortly after taking the helm at Foggy Bottom, Rubio met on Zoom with Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González, whom he called the country’s “rightful president.” Rubio then met with González in Panama on his first stop on his Central American tour. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) invited González to attend Trump’s inauguration, though Trump rebuffed a meeting with the leader, who weeks earlier met with President Biden in the Oval office.

Like Scott, Rubio and Claver-Carone's Cuban-American allies in Congress, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), are struggling to keep their maximalist hard-line toward Maduro relevant among the more pragmatic positions staked out by other GOP figures, including the one at the top, President Trump.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump regards the González-led opposition challenging Maduro’s claim to power as "losers" who "failed" despite giving them significant support during his first term. There's "no way he's going back down that road again," a source close to Trump said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), said in January that "Trump will work with Maduro because he's the one who will take office,” while Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelans because Venezuela had “made improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime” — just a day before Rubio called the country an “enemy of humanity.”

Trump’s need to fulfill his promises on mass deportations seems to be undermining the South Florida delegation's illusion of regime change in Caracas.

Its members are now lobbying Trump officials to make exceptions for their Venezuelan and Cuban constituents not to be deported, knowing these actions could drastically undermine their base of electoral support.

Rubio and Claver-Carone assure that Grenell’s face-to-face with Maduro won’t change the administration’s commitment to Venezuela’s opposition, but U.S. interests like stemming migration to the U.S.-Mexico border and lowering gas prices — which the reimposition of oil sanctions would complicate — have, for now, taken precedence over support for an opposition whose exorbitant and seemingly ineffective USAID awards during Trump’s first term have attracted more scrutiny amid the agency's unraveling.

What remains to be seen is whether Trump officials’ overtures to regional adversaries will be limited to Venezuela or whether it will extend to countries like Cuba, also the target of “maximum pressure” during Trump’s first term in office. While Rubio has already announced a return to a “tough Cuba policy,” Trump confidantes Elon Musk and Sergio Gor have both traveled to the island, where Trump has registered his trademarks and his executives have long eyed prime beachfront property.

Rubio may have been received with open arms by U.S. allied countries on his Central America tour, but leaders of many of the region’s economic powerhouses like Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, all led by center-left presidents not particularly amenable to Rubio, have been resistant to the administration’s heavy-handed impositions and ultimata, notably on the treatment of their deportees.

Unless Rubio is able to extract the sort of concessions from ideological adversaries that Grenell could in just one afternoon, some within the administration could begin to question Rubio’s ability to deliver for President Trump — setting up a potential clash that may lead to his early, albeit undesired, departure from Foggy Bottom.