Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I wanted to take a moment to address the recent events in the nation of Venezuela, but before I do, I want to take the opportunity to congratulate the Presiding Officer, my colleague from the great State of Florida, who a few moments ago I believe gave his speech on the floor of the Senate--and gave part of it in Spanish, and did it very well--and spoke about the important issue of Puerto Rico. His leadership here on that is going to be critical. It is an issue I know he knows very well from his time as Governor of our State.

I know this is another cause he cares about. He took leadership on it as the Governor of the State of Florida. As recently as 2 nights ago, he was with me and some others, and together we met with the President of the United States to talk about what is happening in Venezuela.

The most important answer we have to have for the American people is, Why should it matter to us? Why should America even be involved in this, beyond expressing an opinion or sending a letter or even a vote on an international organism? Why should America lead, and why should America be so intricately involved in something going on in another country?

That is always a valid question. It is the most important question we have to consistently answer and not take for granted. I think we don't do that enough anymore in American foreign policy. It has allowed some to argue that perhaps the United States gets too engaged around the world.

We are a nation that should always stand for our principles, and we should defend them and stand with those around the world who share the principles of human liberty and dignity and freedom and respect for human rights. When the United States gets deeply involved in something in another country, it must also be in our national interests.

The only reason why being involved in the issues that are going on in Venezuela can be justified to the men and women of this Nation, for whom we work, is to prove to them and argue to them and convince them that what is happening there is not just about Venezuela, but it is in the national interests of the United States.

Before I can do that, I have to lay out the history of what brings us to this point. I will not go into great detail because the time does not permit it. Venezuela has a Constitution. In fact, it has a Constitution that was put in place during the rule of Hugo Chavez--someone whom I was certainly not a fan of and who was not a fan of the United States.

Under that Constitution, there was a parliamentary body of the National Assembly, and there was a Presidency and a supreme court. What happened a few years ago is that when Chavez died and Nicolas Maduro-- the current dictator of the country--took over, he had to stand for election. Before he stood for election, there was an election to the National Assembly. The party that was Hugo Chavez's party and now Maduro's party was trounced. They lost badly. They didn't just lose the National Assembly. They lost Governors' seats across the country.

Maduro realized that his party, and he himself, could not survive in a truly democratic system. What he did is he canceled the National Assembly. First, he started ignoring them. He stopped following their orders. They would pass a bill, and he wouldn't implement it. He would completely ignore it, as if they didn't exist.

Then, he replaced a supreme court with handpicked people who would do what he wanted to do. The equivalent would be if the President of the United States decided that no matter what law we passed, even if we overrode a veto, he just wouldn't implement it and would refuse to do it.

Then, at some point, he actually tried to create an alternative to the National Assembly. He created, out of thin air, this thing called the Constituent Assembly, which is an idea he got from the Cubans and from Communist countries, and gave them extraordinary powers to do all sorts of things.

One of the things that Constituent Assembly did is they created an election late last spring. People would say Maduro stood for election, and he won--theoretically. At least that is their argument. You can have an election and it not be a real election.

For example, every one of the media outlets in the country is controlled by the government. All of them have to run, by law--they are mandated to provide what they call network coverage across the board any time he speaks to the nation.

The opposition party doesn't have that same opportunity. He manipulated vote tallies. They were able to go in and make sure votes were counted in a certain way. They control votes through the food program. Forty-two percent of the people in Venezuela depend on a food program run by the government. To have that food program, you have to have an identification card. When you go vote, that same identification card doesn't just register whether you voted or not, they know whom you voted for. They know whom you voted for.

If you didn't show up to vote and you didn't vote for whom they wanted you to vote, meaning Maduro, you got cut off from your food program. If you had to choose between voting for someone you didn't like or not feeding your family, you were going to vote for someone you did not like.

Despite all that, the turnouts were abysmally low. The images that came out--there were two people in line, in some cases. Sometimes they caught the same five people making the line over and over again. It wasn't a real election.

By the way, he legally disqualified every credible opponent he could have possibly had. Because it was a fake election, the opposition boycotted it. So he didn't even have real opposition.

He won this fake election. Then came January, and he tried to be sworn in. He was, through a ceremony, but it was not legitimate. It would be the same as if the President of the United States announced that he was calling new elections, not in 2020; we are going to have them in April of this year. If he wins, he will get to serve 6 years instead of 4.

Everybody here would say that is not the Constitution. It is not a constitutional election. That is what they did. It is not a reelection. Under the Constitution of Venezuela, because that was not legitimate, you have a vacancy in the Office of the Presidency.

Under the Constitution of Venezuela, similar to ours, when there is a vacancy in the Presidency--and by virtue of that the Vice Presidency because he was elected alongside--the President of the country becomes the equivalent of our Speaker of the House, the same line of succession we have here. He becomes the President of the National Assembly.

The President of the National Assembly assumes that charge as interim President and within 45 days has to call valid constitutional elections. That is what happened yesterday. The valid President of the National Assembly called, assumed the responsibility of interim President, and now within the next 45 days he will have to schedule and call for elections.

The United States responded to that by stating the obvious. This is not constitutional. It is not legitimate. We don't recognize this fake President. We recognize your Constitution and the President whom the Constitution says is in place, this interim President.

This is not a guy who is trying to be President himself for 6 years. This is not a fight between two political parties, not some civil war like we see in other parts of the world between two competing bands. This is basically the person who has been elected, the President of the National Assembly assuming an interim position who is now a caretaker to guide the country back toward a constitutional democracy. The United States recognizes it.

It is stunning to see some of the reporting on this here and around the world; that he basically proclaimed himself the President. No, he just assumed his constitutional responsibility. The United States did something unusual in recognizing him. No. 1, it is not unusual. It is the Constitution of Venezuela; and No. 2, it was not just the United States.

We were immediately joined by 11 countries in the region. That number is now up to 16 in the Western Hemisphere--Colombia, Chili, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala--all of them, lined up, and more, and reflected the same position the United States has taken on this issue. So did France. Apparently, so did the United Kingdom today and Albania and Kosovo and a growing number of countries. Even the European Union says Maduro is illegitimate. They have not gone as far as to recognize the interim President as the interim President, but they have said he is illegitimate, and at the National Assembly he is legitimate.

It is not unusual. It happens to be the global norm. Who disagrees with us other than Maduro? Cuba, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Egypt, apparently. What do they have in common? Think about it. These are not democracies. They have their own interests here at heart.

Some might ask: How does this guy hold on to power if he is so terrible? No. 1, he controls access to food. I can tell you, if you control access to food and medicine and you threaten people with hunger, you will have a lot of control. The other thing he has done is, he uses migration as a relief valve. It is a very Cuban regime-type tactic.

It is estimated that over 2.3 million people--basically 1 out of 12 Venezuelans--have left the country since 2015. Think about that. One- twelfth of the population has abandoned the country, leaving behind, in many cases, children on their own, leaving behind catastrophe.

The ability to drive out opponents and people for whom life has become too miserable is a relief valve. The other is just sheer oppression. They put people in jail. They kill people. People die in custody. They shoot them in the streets. That is pretty effective, too, sometimes.

The second thing that keeps them in power is the assistance of the Cuban regime. Every time I mention that, people think: You are just obsessed with Cuba. You are from Miami, Cuban American.

The Cubans, when it comes to intelligence and repression, punch way above their weight. They are experts at repression. That is what they basically assist them with.

Do you know the Cubans basically run the security apparatus of Venezuela? The personal security of Maduro are Cubans, which tells you a lot about how much trust he has in his countrymen. The Cubans provide them with basically all of their intelligence collection and the capacity to collect intelligence. They have trained their National Guard on crowd control.

By the way, none of this is free. These are not free services. This is a country that is poor and low on resources. The Cubans are probably pulling in $1 billion a year for these services they provide.

The other thing people keep mentioning that keeps him in power is the loyalty of military officers. I know you will see the picture of all these guys in a country, by the way, where people are starving, and every single one of these military guys is overweight. Somehow, in a starving country, these people are gaining weight. They have these fancy uniforms on.

Let me tell you, these folks are not truly loyal to Maduro. I saw that picture today. I can tell you for a fact that more than half of the people in that picture at some point in time have expressed serious doubts about Maduro. They are really limited to what they can do right now. Why? First of all, because all of them--every one of them--is compromised. Their loyalty is not ideological, and it is not personal. It is bought. It is paid for. Every single one of them has access to lucrative corruption opportunities. Some of them have been given the opportunity to raid Venezuela's national oil company. They have made millions--hundreds of millions of dollars--by running that company into the ground. Some of them have been given the distribution of consumer goods--watches and phones and consumer articles. They give them these things and say: You guys go out and sell them in the black market in the street and take your cut.

Others have been allowed to skim off that food program I mentioned that feeds 42 percent of the people. The military officers get first dibs at some percentage of it, and they get to sell food directly for a profit. Some are participating in currency manipulation. It sounds a lot like an organized crime ring, like one of these old-style Mafia families, where one guy ran the loan-sharking racket and the other guy had the gambling and the other guy had the prostitution and the other guy did the bank heists.

That is what this is. These people are loyal because Maduro allows them corruption opportunities. They are also loyal, by the way, because the Cubans are spying on them. The Cuban intelligence agencies quickly pick up on any of these military officers who are being disloyal or expressing doubts, and those guys are arrested.

There has been a massive purge of Venezuelan military officers over the last 2 years. I am talking about dozens of high-ranking military officials, either removed from their positions or arrested and are in jail. It wasn't for corruption, believe me. It was because the Cubans caught them and reported them and were wrapped up. Everybody else was watching that and saying: It ain't going to happen to me.

That is not really loyalty. That is fear. You can see it in their eyes today. By the way, they resent the Cubans, these military officers. Imagine, for a moment, this is your country, and here comes the smaller country and their guys run everything and tell you what to do and spy on you and pit you against each other. They better be careful about expressing that resentment because the Cubans are listening, and they will report you.

Despite all of this, all is not good in the Venezuela regime. It has gotten harder and harder every day. What has happened with the sanctions that have been imposed on these individuals, they have cut off their ability to steal money and enjoy corruption, and it has cut off the ability to enjoy the money they have stolen. They can't travel. They can't buy certain things. They have to hide their money. Some have had assets seized here and abroad. That has created resentment, and that has created anger within the inner circle. All these people in the inner circle are now upset because they are not making as much money off corruption as they used to make. They start saying to themselves, maybe we have to get rid of Maduro and get a new godfather Mafia head here. Maduro finds out about it, and he eliminates them. So the circle gets smaller, which actually works to his benefit because with shrinking resources, the less mouths you have to feed with corruption, the better.

There is a real good example of it. There is a guy named Diosdado Cabello, who ostensibly is now the president of this fake constituent assembly. He happens to be a drug lord deeply involved in narcotrafficking. I guess that is his part of the corruption deal. That is his take. That is the business line he has been given. But he wants to be President. He wants to be President, not Maduro.

This guy Cabello--when Chavez was removed in a coup that lasted just a couple of days, Cabello was sworn in as President of Venezuela because there was a vacancy, using the exact same provision of the Constitution that they now claim is illegitimate. But here is Cabello, who is a drug dealer, a drug lord, a thug, but he wants to be President. He will never be elected President of Venezuela in a normal election, in a legitimate election, so what is his path to being elected and to becoming President?

First is this constituent assembly he has been put in charge of. This new thing they created outside the Constitution is so powerful that it has the power to remove Maduro today. They could remove Maduro. And this guy hears the whispers. These guys are not blind to what is happening. They can see that the country is in disarray, the economy is collapsing, and there isn't enough money for them to steal anymore, and there are people saying to him: Hey, why don't you move on this guy because this guy is never going to fix this place.

He is thinking about it, and he has thought about it, but he knows the only way he will ever be President is if he can preserve the outlines of this regime and just get rid of the godfather and declare himself the new godfather, the head of this new criminal syndicate, or he can wait until 2024 and run a rigged election--again, set up under the confines of this regime. Even if he doesn't like Maduro, it is to his benefit that he stay there until he is ready to make his move on him or until 2024, when he can run under this rigged system.

Another thing that is wrong with Venezuela is they are deeply in debt. They have serious problems. These are the things we think about. They owe China about $18 billion, which they don't have the money to pay. They owe Russia about $3 or $4 billion. Do you know how they are paying that right now? They are paying it with oil. They are sending oil to China and to Russia for pennies on the dollar. That is what they are making because they don't have cash, so they are bartering instead, paying the debts off in oil.

I know you have seen the public pronouncements. The Chinese just want to get paid. They are owed $18 billion, and they want to get paid, and they want to make sure that Maduro or whoever is in power is going to pay them the $18 billion. But the Russians want to get paid too. Neither one of them believes Maduro is a great leader or is happy with him; they just don't know what is going to come after him. They are afraid that whoever comes after him will state that the debt is not legitimate because it wasn't approved by the National Assembly. So they would rather have this guy in place unless it is going to be someone else just like him. But they are not happy.

The corruption in the national oil company is so horrifying that even the Chinese and Russians don't like it. That is how bad it is. That has to be a pretty high standard. Then there is the mismanagement. They have destroyed this company. Its production has collapsed. It is not run by oil people; it is run by generals who don't know anything about the business. They have run it into the ground, and they missed payments. Remember, they are supposed to be delivering oil for payment. They have missed deliveries to the Chinese and Russians. They are not happy about it, but what are they going to do? At least they are getting paid something.

Russia has another interest, by the way, which leads me now to why we should care about this.

First and foremost, I can make a very compelling argument, I believe, that what is happening in Venezuela is a national interest threat to the United States and even potentially a national security threat.

Let me start with this: Maduro has repeatedly and openly invited the Russians to establish both a naval and an air base in Venezuela. Basically he said: Here is the land. We will build it for you. We want to have your airplanes and naval ships stationed here.

Most of us serving here, with a few exceptions, have never served in Congress when--and many people around do not remember a time--when a foreign military, an adversary, was stationed in our own hemisphere, but that is what Maduro is inviting him to do. Why does Maduro want it? Because he thinks that acts as insurance against ever having an invasion or whatever he thinks is going to happen.

Why does Russia want it? They want it because it is leverage against us. They don't like how close we are to them in Europe with our allies in NATO, so this gives them an opportunity to have the equivalence of it in our own hemisphere.

So if you think Putin having his military stationed here is a good thing, then I suppose what is happening in Venezuela wouldn't bother you. But the enormous majority of Americans don't want Putin's military anywhere in our hemisphere, and that is precisely what will happen if Maduro remains in power. That alone is a national security threat to the United States.

There is more. In their own national territory, the Maduro regime hosts a group called the ELN, which is a terrorist narco organization. In fact, last week the ELN detonated a bomb at the police academy in Colombia and killed 20 people. Do you know where they are headquartered? Inside Venezuelan territory, and it is from there that they plot these attacks.

Do you know what else Venezuela does with the ELN from within Venezuelan territory? They help them ship cocaine to the United States of America.

I can state that both of those matters are national security interests to the United States. The first is that drugs are a threat to this country, and anyone who is helping a drug trafficking organization ship it into our country is a threat to us. So if you don't mind or don't care about cocaine being shipped to the United States in growing quantities, then I guess Maduro and Venezuela is not something that will bother you. But if you do not want to see people around who are helping drug organizations ship cocaine into the United States under the protection of a government, meaning they are giving them controlled airspace, and they are protecting the shipments into the United States and Europe--if that troubles you, then Maduro is a problem.

One of our best partners in fighting drugs in the hemisphere is Colombia, but right now, Colombia is overwhelmed. They don't have enough money to dedicate to the anti-drug cause at a time when cocaine production--the growth of coca and the production of cocaine, I should say--in Colombia is at historic levels 3 years running. Where is that cocaine headed? A lot of it is headed to our streets, and that will be on top of fentanyl, heroin, and all the other problems we have. We are going to have a cocaine crisis in this country because all that cocaine is headed here.

Colombia is out there trying to fight against it, but their resources are being drained because they have at this moment at least 1 million or 1.2 million Venezuelan migrants who have had to leave Venezuela and are now in their territory. If the United States suddenly absorbed 1 million migrants over a 12- to 18-month period, we would struggle to afford what that would entail. Imagine Colombia, whose economy is a fraction of the size of ours--that means that instead of spending money to fight drug cartels to prevent them from bringing drugs here, they have had to dedicate resources to the humanitarian cost of housing over 1 million people, and growing.

It is not just Colombia that is being compromised. Ecuador has about 170,000 Venezuelan migrants. Peru has about 250,000 Venezuelan migrants. These people are not bad. I am not criticizing the migrants. But these are not big governments. Some of these governments have budgets smaller than most of our States have. They cannot afford this, and it is threatening to collapse their public health system, which means we may not have a humanitarian catastrophe just in Venezuela; we may soon have a growing economic catastrophe in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia--multiple countries in our hemisphere. And geography matters. It would be a terrible thing if it were happening in Africa or halfway around the world, but it would directly impact Americans and our economy and well-being because of how close it is to our country, in multiple ways.

So if you think that having a humanitarian crisis in multiple countries in our hemisphere--including countries aligned with us in the war against drugs--is a problem, then you should care about what is happening in Venezuela.

What is the road forward now? I hope people have been compelled to at least understand that this is about more than just caring about democracy. That is a big part of it. We do care, and we are proud of it. But it is a lot more than just that. This is in the national interest of the United States. We should be proud, not just of the bipartisan support in favor of the interim President and of democracy in Venezuela, we should be proud of the job the National Security Council, the White House, and the State Department have done. Unlike 25 or 30 years ago, this wasn't some unilateral American action where we went in and told everybody what to do; this is international organizations, like the OAS.

Today, the Secretary of State appeared at the OAS personally to argue the American case, and he was joined by 15 other countries that voted on a resolution agreeing with our principles on this and their principles. The leadership of these countries under the auspices of the Lima Group has been extraordinary. The United States is an equal partner to them in this endeavor.

What will probably happen now is that Maduro, instead of being the one who arrests the interim President, will turn it over to the courts to let them decide. Well, he controls the courts. They are all his cronies. They are also corrupt, by the way, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. He could very well move to try to arrest the interim President, Juan Guaido, tomorrow or the next day, although the eyes of the world are upon him, and the consequences for that would be extraordinary and severe.

They are now saying: Let's have negotiations. This is a tactic they have used repeatedly, and they use it because they all know we like negotiations. Everybody--anytime there is an international crisis, why don't we all just sit down and negotiate our way through this? Ideally, that would be the outcome. But he doesn't really want negotiations. He wants a delay tactic. He has done this multiple times. There were negotiations from the Vatican, and they gave up. Then the former Prime Minister of Spain was involved in some of these negotiations. Those were a total catastrophe. He is just doing this to bide time. Now he is talking about Mexico and Uruguay being the host of the negotiations. I wouldn't be surprised if he soon says: Let Russia come in and be the interlocutory. How about that for a national security threat, a national interest threat--having Vladimir Putin brokering political agreements in the Western Hemisphere. Putin would love it. He fancies himself a great global leader. You are going to see him do something like that, all in an effort to bide time. He has no intention of negotiating anything.

It bides him time to do what? It bides him time for his fake constituent assembly to change the Constitution towards one-party rule or even potentially to call on new flash elections at some point for a new national assembly under this fraudulent election system he set up. To many people, he will say: We had an election, and the opposition lost. But it won't be a real election if the people who could win are not allowed to run, are not allowed to advertise, have no access to the media. They control the ballot box, and they extort people with access to food.

At some point, I wouldn't be surprised to see him declare a state of emergency, maybe go out there and trigger some fake incident, a false flag, where agitators go out and commit violence, and he will say: The protesters are out of control; declare a state of emergency. Why would he do that? So he can paralyze the streets. No one can be out there protesting. And if the opposition tries to leave their homes, now they have a pretext to arrest them.

There is really only one way forward, and that is to do everything we can to strengthen the legitimate interim government, and that began today. The interim President's first request was for humanitarian aid to help bring food, medicine, and medical supplies to the people inside Venezuela.

The Secretary of State of the United States immediately announced that as an initial step, we will provide, immediately, $20 million. I know they are working on how to deliver that into Venezuela and how they can position that so the Venezuelan people have access to it. This is on top of and apart from the aid we are already providing the migrants in Colombia and other places.

That is a good first step. On day one on the job, the interim President, Juan Guaido, made a request of the international community, and America immediately stepped forward. And I believe very shortly, in a matter of days, there will be significant humanitarian aid--food and medicine--awaiting the people of Venezuela, either within their own territory and distributed through the Red Cross or some other nongovernmental organization or just across the border, where they can access it.

We have to continue to make clear to the elites in that country that there is no future for Maduro, that there is no way he can hold on, and that they need to begin thinking about who their loyalties should be to--the Constitution they swore an allegiance to, the people they live among, or some guy whose future is about to come to an end.

I think it is important that the National Guard know that not only should they not repress the people but that they will be held accountable if they do. Ultimately, I believe this deeply. I know the generals and all the guys at the press conference in the fancy uniforms have sworn allegiance--you know how nervous they were--but I can state that the rank-and-file fighters did not. Do you know why? Because the rank-and-file soldier and the midlevel officer in the military don't have corruption deals; they are going just as hungry as everybody else. They have massive rates of desertion, people just abandoning posts.

When you saw the images yesterday of the hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, you know that many of those soldiers have mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and loved ones, wives, and children in that crowd. Do you know who else knows that? The military brass. I know for a fact that they have significant doubts. In fact, they probably do not even believe that if they ordered the military to act against their own people, the military would, because there is no way these rank-and-file soldiers are going to shoot on their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and other loved ones.

So we need to step forward and continue with the humanitarian aid. We need to help use the leadership of the United States to put together reconstruction aid.

We need to help the interim President with whatever he needs to carry out a legitimate free and fair and internationally supervised election, which he should call for in the next 45 days.

This is the path forward. It is in our national interest. It is the right thing to do. It reflects our values, but it also reflects our interests as a nation. That is why this matters. That is why we should care. This is not halfway around the world. This is in our own hemisphere. It is just a few hours' flight away, and it impacts more than just one country. It impacts an entire hemisphere.

I will close with this. There has been a lot of criticism historically over the U.S. role in the Western Hemisphere. During the Cold War, the criticism was that we were supporting rightwing dictators, fighting off communism, but we were involved in some coups, and we had a heavy hand and got in and imposed ourselves. Then we went the total opposite way, and for many years--in fact, up until recently, no one talked about the Western Hemisphere, and to the extent we did, it was about migration and drugs. It was almost, frankly, a complete abandonment of the portfolio.

What you are seeing now is the potential birth of a new Latin America--a new Western Hemisphere, one in which the United States is an important partner but not a unilateral actor. When you see 16 countries in this hemisphere come together in an economic and diplomatic way, from Peru to Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil, when you see the OAS come alive after years of--frankly, when is the last time any of us here discussed anything of the things happening at the OAS? You start to see the beginning of not just a way to confront the crisis in Venezuela but of a hemispheric partnership whose impetus may have been this crisis but creates a path forward that is in our national interest. Imagine if, in fact, democracies and free people of this region came together not just to tackle dictatorships but to tackle drugs, to tackle the root cause of migration. Imagine a hemispheric 16- , 18-regional-nation response to what is happening in El Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala to cause these people to undertake this dangerous journey with their children, in many cases; imagine if it wasn't just the United States but us working in partnership with all these other countries to tackle these hemispheric challenges. I will tell you, that is in our national interest.

Not only is this an opportunity to do the right thing in Venezuela, it is an opportunity to give a start to a new hemispheric reality, a new Latin American reality that serves the national interest in this country and allows us to live in a hemisphere that is free and prosperous, where people do not have to abandon their homelands, where people can stay in their countries, if they so choose, and raise their families and not have to undertake dangerous journeys to other countries for fear of their lives.

We have to start somewhere. I can think of no better place to start than on behalf of the people of Venezuela who have suffered terribly for far too long under a dictatorial, corrupt regime that tortured their children and murdered their fathers and mothers and denied a once-prosperous country the future they deserve.

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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today is the last day for the Senate pages who are here with us today. This is a little known fact--I didn't even realize this until it was presented to me--but the 115th Congress, which we just concluded, had more session days than any Congress since 1951. That goes to tell you that these pages worked incredibly hard, and we are grateful. We hope their experience here was rewarding. They should know that there are several Members here serving on this side who once sat there.

I shouldn't be here by the time the pages get here, I hope, but we look forward to their service to our country in the years to come in whatever they decide to do.

Thank you for all of your work.

We truly appreciate the time they have put in.

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