Cuban-born GOP lawmaker warns Venezuela elections must happen in 'months,' not 'years' after Maduro downfall
A Miami-area congressman whose district is home to a significant number of Venezuelan refugees says the failed communist state should hold new elections sooner rather than later.
"It can't be years, I'll tell you that right now," said Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla. "This is what these regimes do, they just negotiate for time, try to wait you out, so you weaken your will. So it can't be — I'm talking months, I am not talking years."
Gimenez is the sole Cuban-born member of Congress, having fled the communist dictatorship as a child and settled in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood.
He was also among the first members of Congress to speak with Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the U.S. government executed strikes on Caracas before capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores.
Maduro was flown to the U.S. by the military to face trial on terrorism charges at the hands of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, said the U.S. would "run" Venezuela until the country could hold fair democratic elections — which Gimenez warned its people needed to see in the relatively near future.
"Now the number of months, you know, I don't know what the number would be, but certainly not years," the Florida Republican said. "And the people inside Venezuela need to see changes happening pretty quickly. People out here that live in the diaspora need to see that also."
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Gimenez said there were "millions of Venezuelans" outside the country "that are waiting to go back home."
"The faster that we can transition to democracy and freedom, the faster they can go back," he said.
The former Miami-Dade County mayor is a supporter of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who Trump recently said, "doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country."
Meanwhile, Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was recently sworn in as acting leader in his place.
But Gimenez said that he believed Machado could win a free and fair election in Venezuela while downplaying the distance between himself and Trump on the issue.
"I think the president is saying, and kind of rightly so, that at this point nobody in the opposition has the security apparatus needed to maintain order on the country. So you've got to deal with what you got right now," he said. "I'm not happy about it, but it's just reality. But I do think that in the end, if I were to bet right now, yeah, I think she'd win."
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He did concede, however, that a democratic Venezuela would likely have Maduro's communist supporters — nicknamed "Chavistas" still within the government.
"Look, there's going to be, what, 30% are Chavistas, right? So yeah, I'm sure there's gonna be 30%, but you can't ever let it get to the point where they control everything, control elections, control the counting of elections, etc.," Gimenez said.
"These Chavistas have already demonstrated that they will use democracy against democracy, so there has to be safeguards in place so that what happened 25 years ago never happens again."