US plays down quick return to democracy in Venezuela

would run the country indefinitely until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be arranged. He didn’t raise the prospect of elections.The president said “it would be tough” for the country’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, to play a major role, saying she lacked popularity.

Instead, he expressed a willingness to work with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, a hard-line socialist and regime stalwart.On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio played down expectations of a quick return to democracy, saying it was unrealistic. “They’ve had this system of Chavismo in place for 15 or 16 years, and everyone’s asking, why 24 hours after Nicolás Maduro was arrested, there isn’t an election scheduled for tomorrow? That’s absurd,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Chavismo, the political movement founded by the late Hugo Chávez, has actually run Venezuela now for 27 years.Rubio outlined the more immediate goals for the U.S.

in dealing with the Venezuelan regime under Rodríguez, who is now the new interim president, and said Washington would use an effective blockade on Venezuelan oil exports, as well as the threat of further military force, as leverage to force the government to change its behavior.“We want drug trafficking to stop. We want no more gang members to come our way.

We don’t want to see the Iranian and, by the way, Cuban presence in the past. We want the oil industry in that country not to go to the benefit of pirates and adversaries of the United States, but for the benefit of the people.