Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday that before U.S. action earlier in January, Venezuela was an immediate strategic threat to the U.S. and the goal of replacing their president by force is to create a “friendly, stable, prosperous, democratic Venezuela in which all elements of society are represented in free and fair elections.” “We are dealing with people who have spent most of their lives living in what amounts to a gangster paradise,” Rubio said in his opening statement. “This is not going to turn around overnight. But I think we are making good and decent progress. It is the best plan available. We are better off today in Venezuela than we were four weeks ago.”

MARCO RUBIO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: Let me just talk about Venezuela in particular. I know you may want to ask about what happened before and what led up to the operation, but I want to focus my comments this morning on what happens now, moving forward. You’re going to ask about going back, so let me say this clearly: what was our goal going in? We had, in our hemisphere, a regime operated by an indicted narco-trafficker that became a base of operations for virtually every competitor, adversary, and enemy in the world. For Iran, their primary spot of operation in the Western Hemisphere was Venezuela. For Russia, their primary base of operation in the Western Hemisphere-along with Cuba and Nicaragua-was Venezuela. In the case of China, China was receiving oil at a roughly $ 20-per-barrel discount, and they weren’t even paying money for it. It was being used to pay down debt that they were owed. This is the oil of the people of Venezuela, and it was being given to China as barter at a $ 20 discount per barrel, in some cases. So you had three of our primary opponents in the world operating from our hemisphere, from that spot. It was also a place where you had a narco-trafficking regime that openly cooperated with the FARC, the ELN, and other drug-trafficking organizations, using their national territory. It was an enormous strategic risk for the United States-not halfway around the world, not on another continent, but in the hemisphere in which we all live. It was having dramatic impacts on us, on Colombia, on the Caribbean Basin, and on many other places. It was an untenable situation, and it had to be addressed. It was addressed. Now the question becomes: what happens moving forward? As I’ve described in previous settings and in individual conversations, we have three objectives here. I’ll work backwards, because the end state is this: we want to reach a phase of transition where we are left with a friendly, stable, prosperous, democratic Venezuela in which all elements of society are represented in free and fair elections. By the way, you can have elections all day, but if the opposition has no access to the media, if opposition candidates are routinely dismissed or kept off the ballot by the government, those are not free and fair elections. The end state we want is a free, fair, prosperous, and friendly Venezuela. We’re not going to get there in three weeks. It’s going to take some time. Objective number one was stability in the aftermath of the removal of Maduro. The concern was: what happens inside Venezuela? Is there civil war? Do different factions start fighting each other? Do a million people cross the border into Colombia? All of that has been avoided. One of the primary ways it has been avoided is through the ability to establish direct, honest, respectful-but very direct-conversations with the people who today control elements of that nation: law enforcement, the government apparatus, and so on. One of the tools available to us is the fact that we have sanctions on oil. There is oil that is sanctioned and cannot move from Venezuela because of our quarantine. What we did was enter into an arrangement with them. The arrangement is this: on the oil that is sanctioned and under quarantine, we will allow it to move to market. We will allow it to move at market prices-not at the discount China was receiving. In return, the funds will be deposited into an account over which we will have oversight, and that money will be spent for the benefit of the Venezuelan people. Why was that important? Venezuela was running out of storage capacity. They were producing oil, they were drilling, and they had nowhere to put it. They had nowhere to move it. They were facing a fiscal crunch. They needed money immediately to fund police officers, sanitation workers, and the daily operations of government. So we created a short-term mechanism. This is not permanent, but it is a short-term mechanism in which the needs of the Venezuelan people can be met. Each month, they submit a budget outlining what needs to be funded. We provide guidance up front on what that money can and cannot be used for, and they have been very cooperative in this regard. In fact, they have pledged to use a substantial amount of those funds to purchase medicine and equipment directly from the United States. One of the things they need is diluent-depending on how you pronounce it-which is the light crude needed to mix with their heavy crude so it can be transported. They used to get 100 percent of that from Russia. They are now getting 100 percent of it from the United States. So we’re using this short-term mechanism both to stabilize the country and to ensure that oil proceeds now go to the benefit of the Venezuelan people, not to fund the system that existed in the past. The second objective is a period of recovery. That is the phase where you want to see a normalized oil industry again. Look, there is plenty of oil in the world. Canada produces heavy crude. Venezuela’s oil is not irreplaceable, despite the fact that they have the largest known reserves in the world. But we understand that natural resources are the lifeline that will allow Venezuela to be stable and prosperous moving forward. So we want to transition to a mechanism that allows oil to be sold in a normal way-an oil industry not dominated by cronies, not dominated by graft and corruption. To that end, the authorities there deserve some credit. They have passed a new hydrocarbon law that eradicates many of the Chavez-era restrictions on private investment in the oil industry. It probably doesn’t go far enough to attract sufficient investment, but it is a big step from where they were three weeks ago. Another part of the recovery phase is creating space for different voices in Venezuelan politics. Part of that is the release of political prisoners-by some estimates, up to 2,000. They are releasing them. They are releasing them slower than I would like, but they are releasing them. You’re already starting to see people who have been released speak out and participate in political life. We have a long way to go. I’m not here to claim this will be easy or simple. I am saying that in three and a half-almost four-weeks, we are much further along than we expected to be, given the complexity of this situation. We are dealing with people who have spent most of their lives living in what amounts to a gangster paradise. This is not going to turn around overnight. But I think we are making good and decent progress. It is the best plan available. We are better off today in Venezuela than we were four weeks ago, and I believe-and hope-we will be better off in three months, six months, and nine months than we would have been had Maduro still been there.

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