Below is a transcript of an excerpt from her speech and Q&A session that followed.
Here it is: my 1st political speech laying out my plan of where we should take Venezuela from here. Nov. 7th at the @theIWP #VenezuelaLibre @Asymmetrica_ https://t.co/vfj2F5WtoY pic.twitter.com/SjOj1FFLww— Vanessa Neumann (@vanessaneumann) November 19, 2018
Vanessa Neumann: Minute 22:24— So how do we get there? So the problem is —the thing is— we now need in order to get back our country and in order to restore that dream and that love of our country that I had as a little girl, to millions of other children and to give them open prosperity, we need you, here today listening, watching to help us resolver. To help us get out of this horrific Venezuelan crisis and help 30 million of my compatriots.
We have a plan for that too. And its really easy. And non violent —well, I don’t know really easy, that stating it a little bit too strongly perhaps. On January 10th 2019 [Nicolás] Maduro becomes a squatter in the presidential palace. He is no longer a legitimate president. His legitimate term from the 2013 election runs out. This farce of an election he had in May was rejected by fifty countries. Those fifty countries will have by law to kick out his ambassadors. Kick out all Venezuelan ambassadors from their countries, suspend their visas. We are asking also that they acknowledge the opposition National Assembly and the opposition Supreme Court in exile and that they refuse all visas to the regime. These three simple diplomatic actions that are grounded in international law and non violent would automatically open the door for our liberation. We need the world to acknowledge that this is not a legitimate government. That this is in fact a drug cartel that intends to just squat in our country seizing power. Once his turn is up we need the rest of the world to follow the law and support us. Stop the talk, follow the law and help get a dictator out of power. Make the right choice.
Once that happens it will be much easier for all of those arrest warrants that are waiting for Maduro and his cabal to be released.
And I have supreme faith in our ability to rebuild, and the Venezuelan capacity for reconstruction and to restore dignity. Just last week I got a text message from a friend of mine, Eduardo Espinel who runs an NGO in Cúcuta which is sort of the ground zero of the Venezuelan exodus called “venezolanos en Cúcuta”. And I met him in February when I went to Cúcuta and I went to see the people crossing the bridge from Venezuela into Colombia in the day time and then I said “take me out amongst them at night” to see where they were sleeping and talk to them, and see them harassed by the police. And he said: “I need to rent a house so that I cannot only house them but train them to take a bowl of wool and knit a sweater so that they don’t freeze when crossing the Andes.” And he did it, Eduardo did it. He texted me last week, a throng of them celebrating in a picture of a key and he said “this is the key to hope and survival for our people.” He is restoring dignity to Venezuelans every single day without any government support. And I know that with that fighting spirit now you know that we have a plan. That we know what needs to be done and now you have a plan from how you can help us and if we work this together we can once and for all establish, restore the dignity of Venezuela and establish a Venezuela Libre. Thank you.
[Clapping]
Presenter. Minute 26:40 —We now have time for questions. I assume there will be a lot of questions.
Vanessa Neumann: —Yes
Presenter:—Go ahead.
Voice from auditorium: — I remember asking this question a year or two ago at a Heritage meeting. At what point does the majority of the military and internal service, security services, them and their families start getting hungry and upset to the point that there is a coup.
Vanessa Neumann: —OK. Well a couple of answers actually. There have been a number of fairly serious coup attempts which is why we have —how many military do we have, how many of them are in prison? Nobody knows. There’s a lot, over a hundred? Ok at least we know that over a hundred military commanders have been thrown in prison for their participation in coup plotting. OK. So there have been attempts. There are plots. They are very strangled by Cuban intelligence which is very effective. The Cubans can’t run a country but boy can they run an intelligence service. So we know that the will to rebel is there. OK. The pressure is now growing. I don’t know if you have been following the Venezuelan cases of corruption. Now that we know that the commanders are corrupt, now you have the next level of their proxies and then the next level and the next level. And as those guys get turned and they’ll turn state’s evidence because you know, they are not brave people, the pressure on the regime itself will grow. So once you have them declared illegitimate hopefully on January 10th and you have the pressure of international indictments and arrest warrants they should probably, hopefully, get him on a plane. But other wise pressure will come from within. The pressure is building. Yes, and as you say they are hungry but the ones who are feeding their families are doing so through massive corruption which is either drug trafficking, trafficking also of gasoline which is the cheapest in the world in Venezuela and you sell it in, I mean you make millions instantaneously out of one truck and the food.
Voice from auditorium: —That money is finite, I mean eventually there is a finite amount of resources that they can play with.
Vanessa Neumann: —Yes, that’s why you see the Treasury Department closing in. That is why they sanctioned the gold last week because they are using the gold to keep paying the bond that will keep the PDVSA 2020 bond that keeps them with CITGO here in the U.S. So their options are closing and that’s where the pressure is building. So they’ll crack. Yes.
Voice from auditorium: —How are countries outside of the Americas reacting to the crisis in Venezuela? How do you think that the reaction will be with Russia and China if there are serious threats to Maduro’s regime?
Vanessa Neumann: —Well I don’t think that either Russia or China will put boots on the ground to defend Venezuela. They are not, you know, they are opportunistic. They wanted the money, they took the oil, they'll do some information operations, they will do that kind of things but they are not sending men with guns to defend their interests in Venezuelan territory. I don’t know anybody who thinks that. The reaction around the world: so that’s changing and that’s another reason why I have faith in —why I took the bold step of talking about a reform agenda today— is because I really think change is coming and I think its coming soon. Because also the environment in the region has changed. We have Ivan Duque in Colombia, Bolsonaro was just elected in Brazil. Those countries have their hair on fire with the amount of Venezuelan immigration. You are having little skirmishes on the border in both those countries and they’ve had enough. Those countries are overwhelmed. I mean, how do you, they don’t have the capacity to absorb 500 thousand immigrants with no jobs and with health care issues. So now they are starting to realize that actually the Venezuela problem is their problem and that at some point they need to stop the cause of that. They only thing that will stop the immigration is to get rid of the drug cartel regime.
Minute 31:20
