WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — United States (US) Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that he expected Venezuela’s political transition to occur in a matter of months, not years.

“It’s going to require some persistence and a little bit of patience – not years, but certainly of months and weeks,” Rubio told reporters.

Seven months after the capture of former leader Nicolas Maduro in a US military raid, delegates of interim President Delcy Rodríguez and opposition members are scheduled to hold their first round of talks this week in Caracas.

Following Maduro’s fall, Rubio became the main architect of US President Donald Trump’s policy toward the Caribbean nation, a major oil producer – a role of increased significance amid a surge in oil prices because of the war with Iran.

RUBIO…it’s going to require some persistence and a little bit of patience.

After Maduro’s fall, Rubio said that Venezuela must go through three phases: economic stabilisation, political stabilisation and finally elections.

“We want to improve the daily lives, help improve the daily lives of Venezuelans economically, so that they’re better off, they’re more prosperous. I think that helps as well facilitate the political transition,” Rubio told reporters, on the sidelines of an event with Paraguayan Foreign Minister Ruben Ramirez.

“If you look at the transitions in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, if you look at Paraguay, a country that undertook a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, it took them almost three and a half years to complete that process,” he said. “These things are difficult.”