The battle for Citgo: How Venezuela's opposition leaders seized control

Asdrubal Chavez, chief executive of Houston-based Citgo Petroleum Corp, boarded the Venezuelan-owned firm's corporate jet in Caracas on Jan. 30, after meeting with top officials of the embattled administration of socialist President Nicolas Maduro about the latest U.S. oil sanctions.

Upon landing in the Bahamas - where Chavez has worked for about a year after being denied a U.S. visa - he had received word from Houston that it would be his last trip on a company plane and that his Citgo email account had been shut off.

Day-to-day control of the company had passed to Citgo's top U.S. executive, Rick Esser, who with the backing of Venezuela's rising political opposition and the U.S. government would begin clearing the way for a new, anti-Maduro board of directors at Citgo. Esser oversaw the moves to isolate Chavez - a cousin of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - and would soon start ousting other Citgo executives close to the Maduro administration.

The house-cleaning at the prized U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil firm, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), marked a crucial early victory for the country's rising opposition government - led by self-declared president Juan Guaido - as it struggles to remove Maduro from office and break his grip on the OPEC nation's oil assets.

The largest consumer of Venezuelan Heavy Crude

http://citgorefining.com/lake-charles/about-us/

CITGO has been part of the Louisiana community for 70 years. Our operations in the state include a refinery, products terminal and several miles of pipeline. Built in 1944, our Lake Charles Refinery is the sixth-largest refining facility in the United States. Strategically located on 2,000 acres along the banks of the Calcasieu Ship Channel, the complex is recognized as a leading manufacturer of high-quality transportation fuels and petrochemicals. As the largest of the three CITGO refineries, the Lake Charles Refinery consists of a modern, deep-conversion facility with a crude oil refining capacity of 425,000 barrels per day (bpd). Our facility employs approximately 1,000 regular full-time employees in Southwest Louisiana. In addition, we employ on average more than 800 contractors and contribute to the employment of nearly 8,000 people through our procurement activities in the area. The state of Louisiana also has approximately 100 independently owned CITGO retail stations which provide employment to approximately 800 people.

Nonsense, we entered into the second because Saddam Hussein never did live up to the agreement he made in the cease fire of 1991.
One of the requirements was to account for and return some 900 abducted Kuwaitis, as well as return Iranian POWs from the Iran-Iraq War. He didn’t return them because over the years following that conflict he murdered so many of these prisoners in cold blood and want to keep these torture and mass murders secret.

Iraq was also obligated to return POWs from the Iraq-Iran War. It didn’t fully comply with that, either, nor with ay Geneva Conventions requirements regarding them or their remains.

The agreements made after the 1st Gulf War were violated every which way by Iraq from the outset.

One of the requirements during the cease fire period between conflicts was to permit inspectors to observe all destruction processes of equipment and precursor chemicals and materials so this destruction could be confirmed and a resumption of fighting not be necessary. Iraq only partially complied because it wanted to prevent any reasonable evaluation of what it did or did not have.

So yes, the Iraq war was necessary to force compliance- you cannot allow defeated opponents to turn around and defeat you on the world stage by openly defying the terms any more than we as a society can allow corrupt government officials in the FBI to flagrantly violate the law...all you’ll do is encourage more and worse misbehavior.

What we did wrong in Iraq was in 1992 was to fail to prepare for the possibility that there would be no second term for Bush and thus have a plan prepared in case Clinton were elected and he would not make any serious effort to enforce the treaty. Sure enough he did get elected and sure enough he wasn’t serious. Three years after the bombmaker of the 1993 world trade center bombing fled to a retirement villa in Iraq, Clinton finally conducted one half assed effort to conduct a coup but managed to get the resistance leaders killed. Then just allowed Saddam to flip him the bird for the remaining years until Monica finally stirred Bill to go ahead with Op Desert Fox and Zarqawi founded the precursor to ISIS in Baghdad [Zarqawi helped plan the half of the 1999 Millennium Plot where a Jordanian hotel used by westerners and US personnel enforcing sanctions on Iraq was to be bombed and a simultaneous bomb was to be set off at LAX airport on New Year’s Eve]. When the USS Cole was bombed in the Port of Aden on the way to enforce sanctions on Iraq in Oct 2000, Clinton just waited out the clock.

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