Florida Senator Marco Rubio took to the Senate floor to ask the body to extend existing sanctions levied upon corrupt Venezuelan government officials.
Rubio’s Senate office put out this video along with its transcript of his floor speech.
“[I]t’s gotten so bad that today, their so-called President, the incompetent Nicolas Maduro, announced that government employees are only gonna work two days a week – Mondays and Tuesdays,” said Rubio. “Government offices will now only be open two days a week because they don’t want them turning on the lights. This is the state of one of the richest countries in the world and one of the richest countries in the hemisphere.
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“The first thing we should do is we should be active at the Organization of American States (OAS) as it considers the situation in Venezuela and they should be asked that voting members recognize the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela,” he continued. “The United States should ask our allies in the region, countries that receive an extensive amount of aid from this country – Haiti, Colombia, the Central American nations, our neighbors up north in Canada, among others – to support this effort.
“What’s happened in Venezuela is nothing short of a coup d’etat, a de facto coup,” Rubio added. “And the Organization of American States, if it has any reason to exist anymore, it should be to defend democracy in the region. It is the reason why we have an Organization of American States. We will soon find out whether that organization is even worth continuing to exist if it cannot pronounce itself collectively on the outright violation of democracy in the nation that purports to be a democratic republic.
“Sanctions – we have imposed sanctions on human rights violators, not sanctions on the people of Venezuela, not sanctions on the government, on human rights violators. Many of whom steal money from the Venezuelan people and invest it in the United States. … And that’s why we impose sanctions on them. There will be an effort here, I hope, in the next day or so, to extend those sanctions for another three years,” Rubio concluded.
