Mauricio Claver-Carone, the Cuba and Venezuela hard-liner tapped as special envoy for Latin America, will leave his position by the end of May, leaving Secretary of State Marco Rubio with some policy wins but without an important ally to navigate the Trump administration.

As a former Western Hemisphere director at the National Security Council under Donald Trump’s first administration, Claver-Carone was one of the few political appointees with previous policy knowledge and valuable relationships that Rubio could deploy backstage to home in on thorny diplomatic issues — and one helping him flip the narrative about the United States’ lack of interest in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In a wide-ranging interview, Claver-Carone told the Miami Herald his role as special envoy was always meant to be temporary because he could not “walk away” from his Miami-based investment firm, the Lara Fund, which he had recently helped create. He was appointed as a special government employee, a position administrations usually use to tap advisers who serve for up to 130 days during a year, a limit he has quickly filled up working “24/7,” he said. Such appointments are non-paid and allow individuals to hold on to a private sector job.

While he saw himself as “a bridge” between the White House and the State Department, Claver-Carone said he is no longer needed in that role now that Rubio has been appointed as interim national security adviser. He said that role will help the Secretary “streamline” the bureaucracy, saying “he doesn’t need someone like me, he is the greatest bridge.”

He says he remains “one phone call away,” willing to help the administration, and confident in the prospects for American companies wanting to invest in Latin America.

Claver-Carone and people close to Rubio said they are puzzled by press reports in Argentina — whose officials Claver-Carone has crossed at times — suggesting his exit was due to the two Cuban Americans not getting along. Claver-Carone said he speaks daily with Rubio, which a person close to Rubio confirmed. “The secretary is one of the most talented individuals I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

“People are spreading false rumors in an attempt to undermine President Trump’s America First agenda,” a senior State Department official told the Herald. “Special Envoy Claver-Carone has played a critical role in advancing that agenda and Secretary Rubio is grateful for his willingness to serve his country.”

A former lobbyist and director of the U.S. Cuba Democracy PAC in Washington, Claver-Carone threw his support behind Rubio’s presidential bid in 2016, paying for ads and endorsing Rubio in an email to his network of Cuban exiles. They worked closely during the first Trump administration to dismantle President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement with Cuba and shift the sanctions’ focus toward the Cuban military.

This time, Claver-Carone helped shape Rubio’s ambitious diplomatic agenda for the Western Hemisphere, helping him to improve relations with Mexico, which the special envoy sees as critical to secure President Trump’s migration agenda. “What we’ve done with Mexico has now led to the most, safest border in history,” he said, highlighting the administration’s successful extradition of cartel leaders.

It was Claver-Carone who previewed for journalists Rubio’s two trips to Latin America and the Caribbean, which signaled the administration’s firm intent to make migration and security top issues and reclaim its influence in the region.

In January, Claver-Carone also helped to put out the fire when Colombian president Gustavo Petro announced past midnight on social media that his country was backing away from its commitment to take deportations flights with Colombian migrants, igniting a diplomatic crisis that put at risk the nations’ close military alliance.

The swift reaction by the Trump administration is an example, he says, of what can be done without “bureaucracy grinding things to a halt.”

“We were able to shut down the entire visa processing in Colombia, send notices to everyone that the consular services were shut down, do enhanced screening … on all Colombian goods and write an executive order to create tariffs on Colombian goods” he said. “Something like that would take 12 weeks of pondering and 12 months of execution. And we did it all in 12 hours on a Sunday.”

Claver-Carone has also had a hand in some of the Trump administration’s most controversial actions, helping Rubio hammer out a deal with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to incarcerate Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang at a notorious prison for terrorists, which he says has created a “huge deterrent for criminal activity throughout the region”.

He said the deal also “created tremendous leverage on Venezuela policy,” because soon after Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro agreed to accept two to three weekly flights with Venezuelan deportees.

He is leaving the administration with what appears to be one last win: an assurance by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that a license to U.S. company Chevron to sell Venezuelan oil in the United States, which he and others see as a lifeline to Maduro, will not be extended.

What follows is the rest of the conversation, edited for brevity.

Q: There is much controversy about this deal with El Salvador. There are allegations of human rights violations in that prison. And we have been hearing privately from some foreign diplomats that they resent the pressure if they say “no” to accepting deportees from third countries. Do you think this controversy is going to undo what you have been highlighting as a positive?

A: First and foremost, as regards to Salvadorans and MS-13, that’s a responsibility of El Salvador. They deal with them. I don’t think there’s controversy. I would like to commend President Bukele for the extraordinary transformation of one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest countries in the world today. There’s not been a shred of evidence, a shred of evidence from any group at any time that has shown and documented any human rights violation at CECOT.

Q: Some groups of activists disagree with that.

A: I have yet to see a single shred of evidence of any type of abuse or any type of human rights violation to any prisoner, to any gang member terrorist imprisoned in CECOT. These human rights groups were nowhere to be seen when these terrorists were violating the human rights of millions of people on a daily basis.

Q: There are questions about the implementation of the agreement, about whether the people deported are members of gangs or not. What was the plan? Is the U.S. deporting criminals only?

A: Let me be unequivocal, every single MS-13 member, that’s a responsibility of El Salvador, and every Venezuelan that was sent to CECOT under the agreement, which is the only other non Salvadoran group that was agreed to, was a member of the Tren de Aragua. And any reporting and any rhetoric that’s trying to claim otherwise is simply false.

Q: Well, there are lawsuits about it, but going back to the broader issue of Latin America policy, have you felt a push back from Latin American governments, maybe resenting that U.S. foreign policy toward the region is again becoming basically domestic U.S. policy, this time around migration?

A: The media likes to paint it as us being bullies, but it’s countries’ responsibility to take their own citizens back. But here’s what responsible countries tell us all the way up and down in Central America, including Mexico: we have created not only the most secure border in our history, but a pathway that has brought security to the region because, when millions of people were crossing over countries, that was a gateway for criminal organizations, cartels and human trafficking groups.

Here’s the part that no one talks about. It was a huge drain on their economies and on their budgets, having to deal on a daily basis with the millions of people that were unfettered crossing over. Now these borders are more secure than ever, they are able to focus those resources to just basically provide security and social services.

Q: There are a lot of questions in Miami about this: The administration has restored a tough policy on Venezuela, on Cuba. The U.S. designated Haitian gangs as terrorists. The administration says these are terrible regimes, but it’s also pushing to send people to those same countries. How do you make sense of the contradiction between these two different messages?

A: I understand the balancing act, but the reality is the biggest tool that these regimes have had to survive is exporting their problems and populations to the United States. Those aren’t easy decisions, but they’re consistent with the overall migration security policy of the president. And at the end of the day, at some point, which is obviously now, the spigot needs to close. Otherwise, Venezuela and Nicaragua are also going to become Cubas, whereby they’re going to be around in the same kind of structure 30, 40 years from now, because their population and problems have been exported to the United States.

Q: What about the Cuban case, then?

A: Let me just put it to you this way. There are no greater supporters of Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans coming and staying in the United States and sending money back from the United States — and doing it all over again the more displeasure there is domestically — than Maduro, (Nicaragua’s Daniel) Ortega and (Cuba’s Miguel) Díaz-Canel. I think no one can argue the fact that those regimes want to export their population and send as much money back as possible to their regimes. At some point it has to end. And President Trump has a very clear policy line on migration security, globally. That’s the rationale. At some point it has to stop because if not, these problems will never get fixed.

Q: So how do you solve the Cuba and Venezuela problems? What can we expect from the Trump administration going forward?

A: The Biden administration, whether it was returning narco-traffickers, returning indicted Maduro regime officials, allowing billions of dollars of royalties and taxes to go directly to Maduro and his cronies, it was basically a giveaway, and got nothing in return for the United States.

What the President has done is reestablishing credibility, that you don’t get to export all your problems to the United States, to flood it with gangs, to terrorize our communities and then continue getting billions of dollars from the United States directly to the regime. How that credibility and leverage is exercised into a proactive policy, that’s where the President and the Secretary of State are headed. Also add to that a stolen election.

I think the same goes with Cuba, which is a little bit more complicated because it’s been a longer-term problem. Basically, the status quo whereby the regime sits and just watches and doesn’t have to make tough changes, tough decisions, because at the end of day, is going to be managed and fed from abroad, that also stops here. Now, the regime is going to have to make tough decisions on how to deal with its realities and its people, which is its responsibility.

In regards to both, the greatest thing that has been done the last four months is say, ‘Hey, the Free for All is over.’ Changes have to happen.\

Q: Do you expect the U.S. to have a bigger role in Haiti?

A: We have been paying very close attention to Haiti. Every Caribbean leader has told us that the Biden administration policy was basically giving up. They had essentially acquiesced to the notion that Haiti would be a country run by criminal gangs. That’s where we had to start from, which is obviously not acceptable.

These criminal gangs in Haiti are not unbeatable. The problem is not about defeating the gangs. The gangs can be defeated. The problem is how to create institutionality in Haiti moving forward. That’s the challenge. By the way, the National Police, with good leadership, good training, and good support can beat them themselves.

Q: But for a long time they didn’t receive resources from the U.S.

A: That was another fight because here’s the problem: you can send resources, but you have to make sure that there’s no corruption. There’s no lack of money that has gone to Haiti but there’s also been misuse. We have a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here.

The move that the Secretary of State made in designating the gangs as foreign terrorist organizations is very important because these groups are getting their weapons from Miami or Colombia. All the contraband is coming in from abroad, and all of these players, whether they’re in Miami, Bogota, Cartagena or Panama, they now have to ask themselves the question, do you want to be charged with material support of a terrorist organization? And we already started to see some evidence of deterrence.

We have to support the Haitian National Police and hold their feet to the fire. They have good people that can get the job done, that are extraordinarily courageous and capable. They need good leadership, and they need support. And then internationally, people need to step up their game. I think people need to be reminded that the reason that there’s no U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti is because China has been opposed. China thrives from chaos in the region. China wants to see Haiti in chaos.

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