Has anyone filled gas at CITGO?
When you see one these days, they look in disrepair.
Citgo Petroleum Corp., an extension of state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), is a refiner, transporter and marketer of transportation fuels, lubricants, petrochemicals and other petroleum-based industrial products.
Citgo owns and operates three highly sophisticated crude refineries located in Lake Charles, Louisiana (463,000 bbl/d), Lemont, Illinois, (177,000 bbl/d) and Corpus Christi, Texas (167,000 bbl/d). Citgo wholly and/or jointly owns 38 active terminals--one of the largest networks in the country--six pipelines and three lubricant blending and packaging plants.
When Hugo Chavez came to power in about 1998, he started putting his minions on the Board of PDVSA. His socialist ideals believed all profits should go to the people for social programs. Free food, education the works. In 2007 his government nationalized the oil, pipelines and equipment. The Americans went home. Hugo Chavez was certain Citgo was strong. Oil was 85% of their export.
And then the oil infrastructure started to age and break down with no parts. Then Venezuela was sued by American Companies for nationalizing and grabbing their infrastructure. $20 Billion. A Delaware judge ordered them to pay creditors. They sold the parent company to Amber Energy.
The trouble with socialism is sooner or later you are going to run out of other people's money.
Maduro was Hugo Chavez vice-president. He knows where the bodies are buried. He knows Hugo met with FARC, a revolutionary cocaine distributer from Columbia and the deals he made with them to export coke to the US.
Maduro knows Hugo was in Cuba and made exchanges cheap oil for AK's and military personnel to squash dissenters in Venezuela.