US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the US will establish a diplomatic presence in Venezuela “very quickly.”
“I’ve alerted some of you that we have Laura Dogu, who was our Ambassador to Nicaragua in the past, and to Honduras, will be taking over the [Venezuela] Affairs Unit, first in Bogota, [Colombia], but ultimately in Caracas,” Rubio explained during a Senate hearing on the US operation that led to the capture of the country’s then President Nicolas Maduro.
Dogu, a career diplomat, is the current Chargé D’Affairs at the Venezuela Affairs Unit, which had been in operation from Colombia since the suspension of US-Venezuela diplomatic relations in 2019.
“We already had 70 locally employed that sort of maintain that facility, but we have a team on the ground there assessing it, and we think very quickly we’ll be able to open a US 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, with the interim authorities, but also interact with members of civil society, the Opposition,” Rubio continued, further characterizing the interim Venezuelan government as “cooperative” on while acknowledging some “hard asks” on the US end.
President Donald Trump had claimed on multiple occasions that the US currently “running” the country, a claim Rubio seemed to downplay in comparison.
CNN reported Tuesday that the CIA is quietly working to establish a permanent US presence on the ground in Venezuela.