Secretary of State Marco Rubio Before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela

… <p>Why was that important?&nbsp; Venezuela was running out of storage capacity, okay.&nbsp; They were producing oil.&nbsp; They were drilling oil.&nbsp; They had nowhere to put it.&nbsp; They had nowhere to move it.&nbsp; And they were facing a fiscal crunch; they needed money in the immediacy to fund the police officer, the sanitation workers, the daily operations of government.&nbsp;</p> <p>And so we’ve been able to create a short-term mechanism.&nbsp; This is not going to be the permanent mechanism, but this is a short-term mechanism in which the needs of the Venezuelan people can be met through a process that we’ve created, where they will submit every month a budget of this is what we need funded.&nbsp; We will provide for them at the front end what that money cannot be used for.&nbsp; And they have been very cooperative in this regard.&nbsp; In fact, they have pledged to use a substantial amount of those funds to purchase medicine and equipment directly from the United States.&nbsp; In fact, one of the things they need is diluent*, or diluent* depending how you want to pronounce it.&nbsp; And that basically is the light crude that you need to mix with their heavy crude in order for the oil to be able to be mixed and moved.&nbsp; They’re getting – they used to get 100 percent of that from Russia.&nbsp; They are now getting 100 percent of that from the United States.</p> …