photo caption, Rubio accompanied Trump during the 2024 election campaign. Item information
- Author, Writing
- Author title, BBC News World
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November 13, 2024
The president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, appointed Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State this Wednesday, making him the Latino with the most important post in the history of the US government.
“We will promote peace through strength,” Rubio said in X as he accepted Trump’s nomination to lead the country’s foreign policy.
Rubio, 53, is known for his hardline policies in favor of Israel and against China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. In addition, he is president of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
“He will be a great defender of our country, a loyal friend to our allies and a fierce warrior who will not back down from our adversity,” Trump said of Rubio as he made the announcement.
But his critics accuse him of changing his positions on important issues such as immigration or foreign trade to align more with the ideology of Donald Trumpwhich he has harshly criticized in the past.
Some analysts believe that his appointment as Trump’s secretary of state could provoke nervousness in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, whose governments are at the center of Rubio’s fiercest attacks against left-wing authoritarianism, he says.
“The Maduro dictatorship is coming to an internal fracture and its members know theirs status quowhich is full of incompetence, which is not sustainable,” said the Republican senator after the July elections in Venezuela, in which Maduro declared himself the winner without releasing the election records and due to the ignorance of Western countries.
“Let there be no doubt: the countries and international organizations that support this fraud of unimaginable proportions must be held accountable, as must the members of the narco-regime and its National Electoral Council,” Rubio said.
According to the news agency ReutersRubio’s election has fueled concern among some Trump allies who believe the Florida senator has a global outlook that contrasts with the more isolationist stance of far-right Republicans.
During Trump’s first term (2017-2021), for example, Rubio co-sponsored legislation that would have made it more difficult for Trump to withdraw from NATO by requiring two-thirds of the Senate to ratify that decision.
To understand the figure of Rubio, we must look at his past, and the particular way that made him one of the most influential men in the state of Florida and will soon become so throughout the deep
The son of the exiles
The alliance between Trump and Rubio was highly unlikely when they faced each other in the 2016 campaign.
Rubio was born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban parents who immigrated to the US penniless and without speaking a word of English. When he was 8 years old, his family moved to Las Vegas, where his father worked as a waiter and his mother cleaned rooms in a hotel.
Returning to Florida, Rubio managed to go to university thanks to a sports scholarship and in 1996 he obtained a doctorate in Law with honors cum laude.
In 2000, after serving as a commissioner in the town of West Miami, he was elected for the first time to the Florida House of Representatives, of which he would become president six years later, being the youngest and first of the Hispanic. initiatives to hold the job.
Undoubtedly, the life path of Rubio – who is married to a former cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins football team, with whom he has four children – is in line with the “American dream” that many understand.
In 2009, he reached the Washington Senate, attracting the attention of Republican leaders, who saw in him a possible answer to the success of the junior senator from Illinois who had just become president of the USA: Barack Obama.
In those years, With his patriotism and defense of free enterprise, individual liberty and reducing the size of the federal government, Rubio has managed to inspire the most conservative base of the Republican Party.
He opposed the economic stimulus package approved by the White House in early 2009, as well as the health care reform promoted by President Obama.
In addition, he is anti-abortion, defender of the right of citizens to bear arms, against any type of amnesty for illegal immigrants and is in favor of opening new areas for oil exploration in the United States.
The Republican Redeemer
In 2013, Rubio appeared on the cover of the magazine Timebeing proclaimed as the “Republican Saviour”, given his party’s apparent inability to respond to the massive coalition of voters who supported Obama, and which gave the Democrats wide electoral victories.
