Rubio: Venezuela Oil Sanctions Will Continue Unless US Sees Behavior Change
The U.S. will continue to impose and enforce its sanctions against Venezuela until the country takes steps to “further the national interest of the United States” and create a better future for the Venezuelan people, Secretary of State Marci Rubio said.
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Rubio, speaking one day after the U.S. military on the night of Jan. 3 captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and flew him to the U.S. to put him on trial for drug trafficking-related charges, said on CBS that the U.S. will continue to keep its “tremendous amount of [sanctions] leverage” in place, including through a quarantine against boats moving oil to and from the country.
“We continue with that quarantine and we expect to see that there will be changes not just in the way the oil industry is run for the benefit of the people, but also so that they stop the drug trafficking, so that we no longer have these gang problems,” Rubio said, according to a transcript of the interview. He also said the U.S. wants to make sure Venezuela, under its next leader, “no longer coz[ies] up to Hizballah and Iran in our own hemisphere.”
Rubio made similar comments while speaking on ABC and NBC, saying the administration will continue “enforcing American laws with regards to oil sanctions. We have sanctioned entities. We go to court. We get a warrant. We seize those boats with oil. And that will continue.”
The U.S. will continue to use that “incredible, crippling leverage” until “we see the changes that we need to see that are a benefit to the American people -- and by the way, we believe to the people of Venezuela as well.”
He warned that any sanctioned boats traveling to Venezuela “will be seized either on the way in or on the way out with a court order that we get from judges in the United States.” Rubio said the U.S. is hoping Maduro’s capture leads to “an oil industry that actually benefits the people, that actually goes to the benefit not of people -- of the people -- not just two or three or five people who are stealing it, and certainly not to Iran or any of the other sanctioned entities that we’re going after.”
Christopher Hernandez-Roy, deputy director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. will likely have several preconditions for the easing of sanctions on Venezuela, including that the country work to better impede illegal drug flows to the U.S., curb illegal immigration, and distance itself from U.S. adversaries such as Russia, Iran, China and Cuba.
“I think, for instance, ending oil shipments to Cuba will be a strong message and a strong thing that the United States will want to see,” Hernandez-Roy said during a CSIS event this week.
He also said Trump likely will seek to strike a deal for major American oil companies, such as Exxon and ConocoPhillips, to reenter Venezuela's oil market. The Trump administration reportedly had authorized Chevron last year to carry out certain limited oil-related activities with Venezuela.
“Clearly the president is interested in Venezuela's resources, oil, opening up the oil sector to -- in addition to Chevron --” other American oil firms, Hernandez-Roy said.