Rubio Faces Senate on U.S. Venezuela Policy
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you. I appreciate it. And I'll be brief in my opening statement so we can leave more time for questions. I've submitted a written statement, but I'm not going to use it. I'm just going to talk to you guys for a few minutes and -
(Interruption.)
CHAIRMAN RISCH: All right. Here we go. Suspend. You know the drill. Off to jail.
(Interruption.)
CHAIRMAN RISCH: That's a one-year ban from the committee. Anyone who is a persistent violator will be banned for three years. So I don't know whether the guy falls in that category. Looks like it. I hope but after three years, he'll find a more productive means of employment.
Secretary Rubio, we have two hearings a week. You seem to have a more robust following than most of our witnesses that come before us. But anyway -
SECRETARY RUBIO: That's all right. There'll be a couple more, so I just - thank you for stopping the clock. But I appreciate it.
So - and I know there's a lot of other topics you're going to ask me about, so we can talk about those, including the ones that Senator Shaheen just outlined. But let me just talk about Venezuela in particular.
CHAIRMAN RISCH: Please.
SECRETARY RUBIO: I think we can talk - if you want, I'm sure your questions will be about what happened before and led up to and the operation. I want to focus my comments this morning on what happens now and moving forward, because you're going to ask about going back.
And let me just say this: What is our goal going in? We had, in our hemisphere, a regime operated by an indicted narcotrafficker that became a base of operation for virtually every competitor, adversary, and enemy in the world. It was - 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 Cuba and Nicaragua, was Venezuela. In the case of China, China was receiving oil at a huge - about $20 a 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 the Chinese as barter at a 20 percent - at a $20 discount per barrel in some cases. And so you had basically three of our primary opponents in the world operating from our hemisphere from that spot.
It was also a place where you had a narcotrafficking regime that openly cooperated with the FARC and 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 in another continent, but in the hemisphere in which we all live. And it was having dramatic impacts on us but also on Colombia and on the Caribbean Basin and all sorts of other places. It was an untenable situation, and it had to be addressed. And it was addressed, and now the question becomes what happens moving forward.
As I've described to you in previous settings and in individual conversations, we had three objectives here. The final - I'll work it backwards because the end state here is we want a - we want to reach a phase of transition where we are left with a friendly, stable, prosperous Venezuela, and democratic, in which all elements of society are represented in free and fair elections. By the way, you can have elections. You can have elections all day. But if the opposition has no access to the media, if opposition candidates are routinely dismissed and unable to be on the ballot because of the government, those aren't free and fair elections. That's the end state that we went: free, fair, prosperous, and friendly Venezuela. We're not going to get there in three weeks. It's going to take some time.
And so objective number one was stability. In the aftermath of the removal of Maduro, the concern was what happens in Venezuela. Is there civil war? Do the different factions start going at each other? Are a million people crossing the border into Colombia? All of that has been avoided. And one of the primary ways that it has been avoided is the ability to establish direct, honest - respectful but very direct and honest conversations with the people who today control the elements of that nation, meaning the law enforcement, the government apparatus, et cetera.
And one of the tools that's available to us is the fact that we have sanctions on oil. There is oil that is sanctioned that cannot move from Venezuela because of our quarantine. And so what we did is we entered into an arrangement with them, and the arrangement is this. On the oil that is sanctioned and quarantined, we will allow you to move it to market. We will allow you to move it to market at market prices - not at the discount China was getting. In return, the funds from that will be deposited into an account that we will have oversight over, and you will spend that money for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.
Why was that important? Venezuela was running out of storage capacity, okay. They were producing oil. They were drilling oil. They had nowhere to put it. They had nowhere to move it. And they were facing a fiscal crunch; they needed money in the immediacy to fund the police officer, the sanitation workers, the daily operations of government.
And so we've been able to create a short-term mechanism. This is not going to be the permanent mechanism, but this is a short-term mechanism in which the needs of the Venezuelan people can be met through a process that we've created, where they will submit every month a budget of this is what we need funded. We will provide for them at the front end what that money 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. In fact, one of the things they need is diluent*, or diluent* depending how you want to pronounce it. And that basically is the light crude that you need to mix with their heavy crude in order for the oil to be able to be mixed and moved. They're getting - they used to get 100 percent of that from Russia. They are now getting 100 percent of that from the United States.
So we're using that short-term mechanism both to stabilize the country but also to make sure that the oil proceeds that are currently being generated through the licenses we'll now begin to issue on the sanctioned oil goes to the benefit of the Venezuelan people, not to fund the system that existed in the past.
The second is a period of recovery, and that is the phase in which we want to see a normalized oil industry. Again, this is - look, we've got plenty of oil. There's plenty of oil all over the world. Canada produces heavy crude, so it's not like Venezuela's oil is unique in that regard, despite the fact they have the largest known reserves in the world. It's not irreplaceable. But we understand that that is the lifeline. Their natural resources are going to allow Venezuela to be stable and prosperous moving forward. And so we created the - what we hope to do is transition to a mechanism that allows that to be sold in a normal way, a normal oil industry - not one dominated by cronies, not one dominated by graft and corruption.
To that end, the authorities there deserve some credit. They have passed a new hydrocarbon law that basically 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's a big step from where they were three weeks ago. So that's a major change.
We can address some of the other components, but I'll run out of time. But one of parts of the transition phase or the recovery phase is beginning to create space for different voices inside of Venezuelan politics to have an ability to speak out. Part of that is the release of political prisoners, by some estimates up to 2,000. They are releasing them. They are releasing them probably slower than I would like them to, but they are releasing them. And in fact, you're starting to see some of the people being released beginning to speak out and participate in political life in the country. We have a long ways to go.
Look, we can talk in more detail about all of these things. Suffice it to say I am not here to claim to you this is going to be easy or simple. I am saying that in three and a half, almost four weeks, we are much further along on this project than we thought we would be, given the complexities of it going into it.
And I recognize that it won't be easy. I mean, look, at the end of the day we are dealing with people over there that have spent most of their lives living in a gangster paradise, so it's not going to be like from one day to the next we're going to have this thing turn around overnight. But I think we're making good and decent progress. It is the best plan, and we are certainly better off today in Venezuela than we were four week ago. And I think and hope and expect that we will be better off in three months, in six months, in nine months than we would have been, had Maduro still been there.
So thank you.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/01/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-before-the-senate-committee-on-foreign-relations-on-u-s-policy-towards-venezuela/
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