Who is Marco Rubio?

British people are poorly acquainted with the background of Trump’s Secretary of State, and for this reason it is worth examining the writing of an American investigative reporter,  Maureen Tkacik, and watching her January 11^th interview with Chris Hedges. Here are some of things they reveal.

From childhood to leading politician

Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, from Wikipedia

Rubio is the son of Cuban exiles and was born in Miami in 1971. However, Miami was no ordinary city at the time, but a burgeoning centre of drug smuggling and criminality where enormous profits could be made very quickly. And cocaine trafficking was dominated by veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It also attracted the interest of the CIA that was interested in dethroning President Castro in Cuba.

The year after Rubio was born, his sister started dating a Cuban exile called Orlando Cicilia. Cicilia figured prominently in Rubio’s childhood, and got into the drugs business working in support of the Tabraue family that was operating an illegal operation behind the front of an exotic animal business – including predators that were reportedly an important part of the intimidating image Tabraue family sought to project.

Mario Tabraue was outstandingly ruthless and cruel, and is widely believed to be the true-life character behind the murderous screen villain Scarface, reported to have used a chainsaw to carve up the body of a federal informant who had succeeded in penetrating his operation. Cicilia was described as the front man and number two for the Tabraue family operation, and came to run a $75 million drug ring right out of his home.

During the 1980s, Rubio started working for Cicilia and, according to his own account, was earning extra income by making cages for the animals in which the company was trading, and washing his exotic (Samoyed) dogs. At the same time, Federal prosecutors were closing in on the racket and in 1987 they closed it down with a multi-agency sting called Operation Cobra arresting both Mario Tabraue and Orlando Cicilia. However, the 16-year-old Rubio and his immediate family swore they knew nothing about Cicilia’s criminal activity.

Tabraue was sentenced to 100 years in prison, but his sentence was drastically reduced as he cooperated with the Federal authorities and only spent 12 years behind bars.  Since then, he has returned to wild animal business and emerged as a leading personality in the Netflix documentary series Tiger King.

Cicilia was sentenced to 35 years in prison but was also released in 2000, after which Rubio helped him get his real estate license. Federal prosecutors never recovered the $15 million he supposedly made in drug sales. Rubio was at great pains to prevent news of his involvement with Cicilia getting out, and Tkacik tells us that:

when Univision broke the story of his ties to Cicilia’s business in 2011, Team Rubio (then a Senator) declared war on the entire network, first dispatching surrogates like Ana Navarro to pressure executives to shelve the story, then convincing a host of other Republican politicians to boycott its debate on the nonsensical premise that the network had attempted to use the information about his brother-in-law as “blackmail” for the purposes of “extorting” an interview out of him.

As Rubio grew into adulthood, he remained deeply networked within the Cuban American community, and in 1990 he gained an internship with Ileana Ros-Letinhen, the daughter of a CIA-affiliated anti-communist Cuban exile, who had just been elected the first Cuban American member of Congress. As Rubio pursued his legal studies he swiftly rose in the world of politics, working on Republican senator Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, getting elected to city commissioner for West Miami in 1998, joining the Florida House of Representatives in 2000, and becoming a United States Senator in 2011. In 2025, President Trump appointed him as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.  We now hear that Republican donors are so impressed with his performance in this role, they wish to back him for President in 2028.

Rubio’s present-day posture

While one may suspect Rubio’s sincerity in claiming to have known nothing of Cicilia’s criminal activity back in 1987, it is his present-day positions that give most cause for concern.

Tkacik thinks Rubio is the architect of a cynical policy to put drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop Latin American countries, in the name of fighting drug cartels. This may seem a bit far-fetched, but she marshals significant evidence supporting her theory:

• Rubio’s support for Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa whose fruit trading business was found to have trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.
  

• The presidential pardon of former right-wing President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández who had been arrested and extradited to the USA in February 2022 to face drug trafficking charges. He was convicted and was serving a 45-year sentence. In 2018, Rubio had personally and publicly commended Hernández for combating drug traffickers (and supporting Israel), just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped “TH,” for Tony Hernández. In the final twist to this story President Trump issued Hernández with a presidential pardon undoing years of painstaking work by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the American justice system.

  Rubio’s attitude to such a mega-criminal stands in vivid contrast to his treatment of Venezuela, never the leading player in the narcotics trade. Under his watch, the USA behaved in an unprecedentedly gangsterish fashion, by bombing a host of alleged smugglers in small speedboats, and invading Venezuela to kidnap President Maduro and his wife.
  

• for at least a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with, and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. A 1991 Pentagon analysis described Uribe, as one of the 100 most important Colombian narco-terrorists, a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar and a political figure dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels.
  

• Rubio had also praised Salvadorean and Argentinian presidents, Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, on account of their crime-fighting efforts, in spite of the former’s alliance with the MS-13 gang and the latter’s various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party the previous autumn.

Tkacik does not pretend that only right-wing Latin-American leaders collude with the narcotics trade.  However, she shows that, with Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, the USA is making excuses for right-wing leaders who have supported that trade, in a way that hopelessly mixes up its anti-narcotics and geopolitical objectives.

In fact, she goes on to cite evidence from the Iran-Contra scandal, the 1989 invasion of Panama and Venezuela that this policy did not start with Trump and Rubio. According to Peter Dale Scott, the ill-conceived and deliberately misnamed War on Drugs has been a cover for contradictory CIA involvement with drug​-traffickers for decades. Tkacik says:

Drug traffickers who were allied with the CIA’s ideological objectives were protected, assisted and/or recruited as assets, while drug traffickers who bribed or cooperated with leftists, crossed the Agency, or outlived their usefulness were set up for prosecution or discarded.

Where does this leave the United Kingdom?

Marco Rubio is a product of the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami, and has shown himself willing to pursue all sorts of extra-judicial goals. His commitment to right-wing Latin America leaders regardless of their actions, and his willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with a genocidal Israel, show him to be a major liability both to Europe and America.

The UK should keep its own counsell in foreign policy matters and at all costs avoid aligning irreflexively with the USA. And our mainstream media ought to dedicate resources to investigating politicians like Marco Rubio who enjoy major international clout.