Fox Business host Charles Payne said Monday it would take ten years to get Venezuela’s oil industry “where it needs to be” after the socialist regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro “wrecked” the country.
President Donald Trump said that Venezuela could be “making money” once its oil infrastructure was repaired during a Saturday press conference at Mar-a-Lago discussing the operation. Payne said Venezuela had been “stuck” under Chavez and Maduro.
“The people of Venezuela need this more than anything else. This is a country that’s been stuck. Socialism wrecked this country,” Payne told “Fox and Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “You just heard Marco Rubio talking about the potential, right? Because this – they have all the oil reserves, but they ruined their industry. In fact, it’s gonna to take maybe $100 billion, maybe 10 years to get it back where it needs to be.”
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“But, of course, they need to do it. You see a lot of protests anywhere in the world about this because these are some folks who are suffering,” Payne continued. “On our side of the ledger it’s phenomenal, refine heavy crude that’s what they pump out of Venezuela. Of course, on the narco-terrorism side already seen overdose deaths coming down. I think you will see more of that.”
Trump declared during the Saturday press conference on the operation that captured Maduro that the United States was “running” Venezuela, saying Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would be in charge.
“As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place,” Trump said during a Saturday news conference. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Under Chavez and Maduro, Venezuela faced shortages of food and supplies, while the state-run oil company, which they staffed with loyalists, saw production drop by 50%, according to Forbes.
Trump announced in a Saturday post on Truth Social that American military forces, including the United States Army’s elite Delta Force special operations unit, protected a law enforcement operation that arrested Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas.
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