Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected the notion that elections will take place immediately after the capture of authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro.
Speaking on CBS News, Rubio said "everyone's asking why, 24 hours after Nicolás Maduro was arrested, there isn't an election scheduled for tomorrow? That's absurd." "These things take time, there's a process," he added.
He went on to say that "of course we want to see Venezuela transition to be a place completely different than what it looks like today," but the expectation can't be that it will "happen in the next 15 hours."
"What we do have an expectation is that it move in that direction. We think it's in our national interest, and frankly, in the interest of people of Venezuela," he claimed.
Rodriguez, on her end, has called on the United States to "work jointly on a cooperation agenda" and appealed for peace and dialogue in a public statements after taking office.
In a message published Sunday on her official social media channels, Rodríguez said Venezuela's priority was to pursue "balanced and respectful international relations" with the United States and other countries in the region, based on "sovereign equality and non-interference." She said the government was prepared to collaborate with Washington on an agenda "oriented toward shared development, within the framework of international law."
"President Donald Trump: our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war," Rodríguez wrote, adding that Venezuela "has the right to peace, development, sovereignty and a future." She described peace as essential not only for Venezuela but for regional and global stability," she added.
Rodríguez's statement came a day after Venezuela's Supreme Court ordered her to assume the presidency on an interim basis following the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia flores.
Her call for cooperation also followed sharp warnings from Washington earlier on Sunday. Trump said in an interview with The Atlantic that Rodríguez would "pay a very high price, probably higher than Maduro," if she failed to act in line with U.S. expectations. He later said she was "willing to do what we consider necessary," but stressed that U.S. pressure would continue if American interests were not respected.
The administration has so far not propped up opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, with The Washington Post claiming that it is because she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump has long wanted for himself.
One person close to the White House told The Washington Post that Machado's acceptance of the award was the "ultimate sin" for Trump. "If she had turned it down and said, 'I can't accept it because it's Donald Trump's,' she'd be the president of Venezuela today," the person added.
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