“A QUARANTINE ON THEIR OIL”
Trump’s administration has described Maduro’s capture as a law-enforcement mission to force him to face US criminal charges filed in 2020, including narco-terrorism conspiracy. Maduro has denied criminal involvement.
But Trump also said US oil companies need “total access” to the country’s vast reserves and suggested that an influx of Venezuelan emigrants to the US also factored into the decision to capture Maduro.
“What really played (into the decision to capture Maduro) is the fact that he sent millions of people into our country from prisons and from mental institutions, drug dealers, every drug addict in his country was sent into our country,” Trump said.
The Venezuelan government has said for months that Trump was seeking to take the country’s natural resources, especially its oil, and officials made much of a previous Trump comment that major US oil companies would move in.
“We are outraged because in the end everything was revealed – it was revealed that they only want our oil,” Cabello said.
Once one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America, Venezuela’s economy tanked in the 2000s under President Hugo Chavez and nosedived further under Maduro, sending about one in five Venezuelans abroad in one of the world’s biggest exoduses.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Venezuela’s next leader should keep Venezuela’s oil industry out of the hands of US adversaries and stop drug trafficking, and cited an ongoing US blockade on tankers.
“That means their economy will not be able to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest of the US and the interest of the Venezuelan people are met,” he said on ABC’s “This Week”.