Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared before Congress to discuss the progress being made in Venezuela following the arrest of Nicolás Maduro.
Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio stated, “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.”
“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,” Rubio added, explaining that the process “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,” he explained.
President Trump told reporters in the days following Maduro’s arrest, “We have to do one thing in Venezuela: Bring it back.”
“It’s a dead country right now … We have to bring it back. And we’re going to have to have big investments by the oil companies to bring back the infrastructure,” he said. “Companies are ready to go. They’re going to go in. They’re going to rebuild the infrastructure.”
