[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 80 (Tuesday, May 9, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2843-S2844]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               VENEZUELA

  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I rise to speak briefly this afternoon on 
the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. There is a growing interest in the 
matter here among my colleagues in the Senate and the White House and 
other places--certainly, in the press--and thankfully so. This has been 
going on now for a significant period of time.
  Just to put it in context, a lot of times, when we talk about these 
sorts of showdowns around the world--these sorts of internal strife--
there is this notion that there is this government in place and there 
is this group that does not like the government and that they are 
arguing with each other about the future of the country. What is 
interesting in Venezuela is that both the opposition and the ruling 
party are in government. The government, obviously, at the Presidential 
level is controlled by someone who has turned himself into a dictator. 
He is a successor of Hugo Chavez's--he is the President, Nicolas 
Maduro--and those who surround him. Then there is the National Assembly 
that is elected by the people of Venezuela, the majority party in their 
legislative branch.
  What has happened over the last year and a half is that the President 
of Venezuela, Maduro--the now dictator--has nullified the legislative 
branch. He basically refuses to recognize the laws they have passed and 
has stopped allowing transfers. So, basically, today, those in the 
National Assembly in Venezuela are not getting paid. They have no funds 
for offices, and they have no funds for material. They will pass a law, 
and those laws are ignored. That is the ongoing crisis.
  The second part of it is that, under their Constitution, Venezuela's 
Constitution, if you had collected a certain number of signatures by 
December of this year, by the end of the year, they had to hold a 
referendum on the President, a recall referendum. They refused to 
certify the signatures even though the people who collected them turned 
in four times as many signatures as were necessary.
  The third is that they are supposed to have a Governor and 
legislative elections this year in Venezuela. Maduro has canceled 
those, and there is no telling, but it does not seem as though they are 
going to have a Presidential election either.
  Here is the bottom line: The strife in Venezuela that is going on 
today can be solved by having an election of the people of Venezuela, 
by basically following their existing Constitution, but that is not 
what they have allowed to have happen. On the contrary, not only are 
they not allowing these elections to happen, but anyone who protests 
against them has been jailed; press has been kicked out of the country; 
CNN has been kicked out of Venezuela, as an example. Now we are seeing 
reports of there being escalating violence in the streets, and it is 
extraordinary. What is interesting, though, is that fissures are 
beginning to develop.
  The message we send here today--first of all, to those who are in the 
streets who are fighting for democracy and for following the law and 
having elections in Venezuela--is that we stand with you. We will never 
let your cause fall, and we will never accept these ridiculous moves 
that Maduro is now taking to rewrite the Constitution, yet again, 
through a flawed and fraudulent process.
  The second message we have is to the people in the Venezuelan 
Government who do not want to be a part of what is happening. We now 
see examples of the Attorney General, Luisa Ortega, who is part of the 
Maduro government and has been largely friendly but who, lately, has 
begun to break away from the government, going so far as to criticize 
the government's escalating repression.
  You see it increasingly among the rank and file in the National Guard 
of Venezuela, who are all armored up like G.I. Joe, facing down these 
unarmed protesters, but on the other side of the protests are their 
mothers, their fathers, their brothers, their sisters, their wives, 
their husbands, and their friends and neighbors. What is really 
troubling now is that these armed groups--irregular groups, these 
militias--that Maduro has armed and trained with the help of Cuban 
intelligence have spun completely out of control.
  These groups are going around randomly beating people up, setting up 
roadblocks, and committing all sorts of acts of violence. They are not 
uniformed. These are collectives, as they call them--basically, these 
armed militias--outside of the government who are funded, created by 
Maduro and who have now begun to spin out of control, even to the point 
at which they, themselves, I believe, are potentially threatened by 
these groups who, in addition to funding themselves through the 
government, have found other ways to fund themselves through illicit 
means, including through street crime.
  This situation is reaching a breaking point, and I think it is an 
important moment to remind the men and women in uniform in the National 
Guard of Venezuela that their job is to protect the people of 
Venezuela, not to oppress them; that their job is to protect and uphold 
the Constitution of that country, not to cancel it out; to remind them 
that the men and women on the other side of these protests are their 
families and their fellow Venezuelans.
  Now the time has come to tell the men and women in the Venezuelan 
Government--many who, perhaps, sympathize with Hugo Chavez and Maduro 
up to a point--that they do not want to go down with this ship, that 
they do not want to wind up on the list of people who have participated 
in this crackdown and in this oppression.
  I hope that my colleagues here will continue to work hard. I am 
encouraged by the amount of bipartisan support that we have begun to 
create on the issue of Venezuela. I know my colleague, Senator Cardin, 
and I have worked out bipartisan legislation that urges the Maduro 
regime to release all of its political prisoners and express support 
for a solution to the crisis. I urge all of my colleagues to join me in 
cosigning this bipartisan legislation.
  We also support the administration's efforts at the OAS to continue 
to work

[[Page S2844]]

with regional governments in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, 
Brazil, and others who have taken heed of this issue and have played an 
extraordinary leadership role in raising this in international forums.
  Beyond that, I encourage the administration to continue to look for 
names to sanction. They have the authority under the law--passed not 
once but twice by this Congress--that allows them to identify specific 
individuals within the Venezuelan Government who are stealing the money 
of the Venezuelan people and committing grotesque human rights 
violations and have real estate and other personal property and cash 
deposits and bank accounts around the world from what they have 
illicitly stolen from the people of Venezuela.
  Here is my closing point: Maduro's government is now relying on 
credit from all parts of the world in order to continue to sustain 
itself.
  To any private investment banks and any of these large global banks 
that are thinking about lending money to Venezuela, you are abetting 
this regime and its repression, and you will be singled out and named 
if you participate in continuing to lend them money to fund this.
  To the Russian Government, I say that you are not going to get your 
money back. These guys cannot pay you back.
  It is the same for the Chinese Government.
  If you continue to lend money to the Maduro regime, they will not be 
able to pay you back, and you are going to be embarrassed.
  The Chinese Government is going to be embarrassed if it continues to 
loan money to Venezuela.
  They cannot and will never pay you back.
  The Russians cannot afford to continue to lend money to a government 
that will not pay them back either.
  I urge them to look at that very carefully before they continue to 
embarrass themselves by lending out their people's money that they will 
never get back.
  This is an important issue. It is in our own hemisphere, and the 
answer lies one election away. If only the Maduro regime would follow 
its laws and its Constitution, Venezuela would be on a better path that 
its people would choose. The alternative to this situation will 
continue to spiral out of control.
  We in this Chamber and in this country will continue to be on the 
side of the men and women who seek nothing but democracy and seek 
nothing but peace and reconciliation and a way forward for this nation, 
which has a deep history of democratic order.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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