Donald Trump deserves colossal credit for the historic advances that have taken place across Ibero-America during his term. For now he deserves statues in the capitals of many Spanish-American countries, just as Ronald Reagan deserved them, and has them, in the countries of Central Europe.

Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio have managed in these two years to transform the Ibero-American political landscape so much for the better that it would be a shame for him to squander all that capital and pull down the statues before they are even erected. And to do so, moreover, for nothing, blinded by oil that will always be at his disposal and by flatterers who think only of how easy it is to make money with criminals.

It has been highly significant to see the leaders of Ibero-America’s new patriotic forces in New York demand, one after another, those elections in Venezuela and a timetable to end this interim period under a criminal president such as Delcy Rodríguez.

It is an interim period in which the same people who ruled, stole and abused under Maduro still rule, steal and abuse. And many of the decent, patriotic Venezuelans whom Maduro and Delcy put in prison remain behind bars.

It could be justified for a few months, even a year, after Maduro’s capture. But the lack of a timetable for those elections is unbearable and a permanent insult to the Venezuelans who want to join, as soon as possible, the great movement Trump unleashed when he put an end to USAID and stopped the criminals with threats and more expeditious methods. He thereby allowed the democratic and conservative forces in so many countries to fight for power, and to do so successfully. And now all of them, Trump’s allies in the Shield of the Americas, want to open a radically new chapter across the entire continent.

That is incompatible with the survival in power of Delcy Rodríguez and her regime of murderers, drug traffickers, terrorists and paid journalists. Neither Trump’s prestige nor the alliances of all the other leaders with Washington can withstand this dramatic contradiction; they are equally discredited by complicity with Delcy Rodríguez’s murderous regime.

That is why the immediate establishment of an electoral timetable for Venezuela is so important, along with the return to her homeland of María Corina Machado, the undisputed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, leader and representative of the Venezuelan democratic will. Several Ibero-American leaders allied with Trump have met with Delcy Rodríguez, which the propagandists of Caracas’s criminal cave have tried to present as a legitimization of the delinquent. It is not. All of them have told her, and said in public, that there is an absolute need for a timetable for those elections to be imposed now, for all the prisoners to be released at once, and for the democratic process to be set on course now.

Venezuelans have begun taking to the streets to defend this single option, which is also the best one for President Trump. Delcy is betting on a Republican defeat and Trump’s subsequent weakness in order to entrench herself in power and perpetuate her dictatorship. Allowing it would be suicidal for Venezuelans, but also for all Ibero-Americans, who would once again have a criminal, narco-terrorist, subversive hotbed, one that would moreover carry the prestige of having beaten the Empire in a test of strength. And it would be suicidal for the United States too, which would once again face a direct and massive threat to its national security where, by logic, free will and democracy, it could have a Venezuela firmly united with the U.S. for the benefit of both, under those who truly believe in freedom, in prosperity and in friendship with the best democracy in the world: that immense majority of Venezuelans who are represented by María Corina and who see Delcy Rodríguez for what she is, a murderer and drug trafficker who hates freedom as much as she hates the United States.