Remember back in May, when Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told Marco Rubio that he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state?
"Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job," Rubio replied without missing a beat.
Sen. Van Hollen: "I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you as Secretary of State." @SecRubio: "Your regret voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job."
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 20, 2025
MIC. DROP. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/ZH0IAwgIYz
Well, it looks like Rubio has made some new enemies. Or, perhaps, Senate Democrats, like Van Hollen, have made some new allies. The secretary now has most of the Latin American socialist bloc feeling uncomfortable.
El presidente Gustavo Petro of Colombia, during one of his regular (presumably) cocaine-addled X rants, decided that after a week of going after Donald Trump and several other United States politicians, it was time to hit Rubio on Wednesday.
"Marco Rubio has become a sectarian obstacle in the peaceful meeting between the U.S. and the Americas," he said, adding, "The U.S. has been left isolated at the UN with the vote on the blockade against Cuba: 165 countries in favor of lifting the blockade, only seven horsemen of the apocalypse in favor."
Petro is referring to the UN’s annual vote condemning the U.S. embargo on Cuba that took place on Wednesday. Yes, 165 countries voted in favor of the Cuban regime, but that's progress. The number is usually much higher.
One of my favorite journalists, Arturo McFields Yescas, fired back and said, "Rubio knows more about Latin America than you and Lula combined, which is why you fear him so much. Today at the UN was historic — for the first time in decades, Cuba didn’t get 191 votes but 165. That’s not a victory, it’s a clear sign fewer people believe the blockade narrative. Stop the drugs and get to work." Burn, as the kids say.
Petro also invoked Rubio's name when re-posting a Semana.com article on whether he "hid a key report on illicit crops."
"They think I'm foolish, when the report shows the reality to Americans and how contrary this reality is to what Marco Rubio's congressmen reported," Petro posted, tagging Fox News. I'm not sure who "Marco Rubio's congressmen" are, though several members of the U.S. House of Representatives, particularly those from Florida, have been engaged with Petro in recent weeks.
But Petro's only the latest South American leftist to jump on the anti-Rubio train. While he's a bit more diplomatic about it, Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has made statements in recent weeks that indicated that he didn't want to work with the Secretary.
Earlier this month, after talking to Donald Trump about negotiations between the U.S. and Brazil, Lula said, "He [Trump] said that Marco Rubio will talk to the people, and I asked Marco Rubio to talk to Brazil without prejudice, because from the interviews he gave, there is a certain lack of knowledge about the country."
Of course, some of this stems from the fact that Rubio has repeatedly condemned Brazil's actions against former president Jair Bolsonaro, accusing several of the country's officials of human rights abuses and issuing sanctions against Alexandre de Moraes, a justice on Brazil's Supreme Federal Court.
The political persecutions by sanctioned human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes continue, as he and others on Brazil's supreme court have unjustly ruled to imprison former President Jair Bolsonaro.
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) September 11, 2025
The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.
The United States is sanctioning a key support network of human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes, to include his wife and their holding company, Lex Institute. Let this be a warning to others who threaten U.S. interests by protecting and enabling foreign actors like Moraes: you…
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) September 22, 2025
For what it's worth, when delegates from both countries met for negotiations in Malaysia this week, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent represented the U.S. Rubio was notably absent, but this seemed more like an indicator that the talks were only about tariffs and not about sanctions or Bolsonaro.
Being the target of hate by Latin American leftists is nothing new for our secretary of state. Venezuela's narco-terrorist-in-chief, who is currently holding that country hostage, has waged a war of words with Rubio for years. Over the last couple of months, especially after we began blowing up his drug boats in the Caribbean, Nicolás Maduro ramped up the drama, calling Rubio the "lord of death and war." (Someone get this man an Oscar.)
Earlier this month, while receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Bolivarian Military University of Venezuela, he used his time on stage to say, "Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with his indecency and immorality, has declared that Venezuelan military bases are the epicenter of drug trafficking" before adding — with a straight face — that he has no ties to drug trafficking at all and is actually working to combat it. That's a line Petro likes to use, too. Commie bros gotta stick together.
Maduro also likes to send occasional messages to Trump, warning him that Rubio "wants the last name Trump to be stained with blood for centuries" and the like.
Find someone who is as obsessed with you as Nicolás Maduro is with @SecRubio. On second thought, if you do, get a restraining order.
— SarahDownSouth (@SarahDownSouth) June 12, 2025
And we can't forget Cuba. I could write a column on this alone, but I'll keep it recent. In September, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba's Foreign Minister, gave an interview to the Associated Press, claiming that when Trump returned to office in January, he thought the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba might improve. However, he says that Rubio's "personal" agenda has prevented that from happening. He also said that he blames the State Department, not the White House, for the nature of the relationship, because Rubio "promotes the use of force or the threat to use force as an everyday, customary tool."
Recommended: A Strange Stop in Havana: Why Was a Chinese Fentanyl Kingpin Hiding in Cuba?
The truth is that this isn't necessarily about policy. It is personal. We all know that Rubio is the son of Cuban exiles and has been rightfully hawkish against Marxism and these corrupt regimes in the Western Hemisphere for most of his political career. No one knows better what the people in countries like Cuba and Venezuela deal with at the hands of tyranny each day than a man whose own family lived it, as well as a man who represented some of the largest U.S. communities of exiles from these places as a Florida senator.
It's nothing new for the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes. Now, we have the newer leftists, Lula and Petro, jumping on board. Combine that with Democrats like Van Hollen and maybe a few MSM "journalists," and I think we've stumbled onto something — a gauge of sorts.
The louder the personal attacks against our Secretary of State, the more likely that person supports Marxism, tyranny, narco-terrorism, cartels, terrorists, far-left ideologies, and all the other things that ruin entire nations.
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