President Donald Trump says U.S. oil companies will "spend billions of dollars" to fix Venezuela’s "badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country."
The president made the statement during a press conference following the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, Saturday.
Maduro and Flores were taken out of Caracas by helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima, one of the U.S. warships that has been deployed to the Caribbean.
"As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time," Trump said.
"They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. 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," he added.
The president also said running Venezuela won't "cost us anything" because "the money coming out of the ground is very substantial.
"We want safety there. We want to be surrounded by countries that aren't housing all of our enemies all over the world. That's what was happening. And you don't want to have that, but we're going to be rebuilding and we're we're not spending money.
"The oil companies are going to go in. They're going to spend money. We're going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We're going to get reimbursed for all of that. We're going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend. So it's going to be it's going to be a very important it's going to be a very important," he added.
Venezuela's state-run oil production and refining were operating normally on Saturday and suffered no damage from a U.S. strike to extract the country's president, two sources with knowledge of the operations of energy company PDVSA said.
The port of La Guaira near Caracas, one of the country's largest but one not used for oil exports, was reported to have suffered severe damage, one of the sources said.
Trump in December announced a blockade of oil tankers entering or leaving the country and the U.S. seized two cargoes of Venezuelan oil.
That lowered the OPEC country's exports last month to about half of the 950,000 barrels per day (bpd) it shipped in November, according to monitoring data and internal documents.
The U.S. measures prompted many vessel owners to divert away from Venezuelan waters, which has rapidly increased PDVSA's inventories of crude and fuel.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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