Former CEO of Venezuelan Oil Company Citgo Held Hostage by Nicolas Maduro for Five Years Breaks Down with Etienne What Is REALLY Going On in Venezuela

Jose Pereira was the US-based CEO of Venezuelan oil company Citgo Petroleum and after a Thanksgiving Day meeting in Caracas in 2017, he and five other Citgo executives were arrested and charged with bribery, corruption and other false charges related to a business deal that someone in the the Venezuelan government felt was disadvantageous.

They became known as the Citgo 6. Jose was held in solitary confinement for 10 months and ultimately held for 5 years before he was released in a prisoner exchange on October 1^st 2022 where the five remaining Citgo Six hostages were flown hooded to the island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Jose was ultimately swapped for two nephews of Nicolas Maduro convicted of drug dealing by the DEA in a prisoner swap on a remote island in the Caribbean

They were met by another plane with Delcy Rodriguez, Vice President of Venezuela and now acting President and another plane flown by the US Drug Enforcement Administration where they were swapped for two nephews of Nicolas Maduro, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, who had been arrested by the US DEA for drug smuggling in an operation that came to be called the Narcosobrinos affair.

In an amazingly fortuitous twist of fate, I had been scheduled for over a month to be interviewed by Jose on his podcast Building Resilience about my new book: To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many.

With the US having seized Maduro and Trump promising to reimburse American oil companies for the astronomical costs of rebuilding the Venezuelan oil sector, I flipped the script on Jose and took the opportunity to interview the ultimate Venezuelan oil industry insider with a deep understanding of the connections of Maduro to the drug trade, on what is REALLY going on with the US Invasion of Venezuela. We discuss:

• How the Invasion of Venezuela props up the US petro-dollar system that forces oil importing countries to buy and hold US dollars to purchase oil allowing money center banks and the US Fed to continue creating dollars out of thin air in an inflationary process that steals the purchasing power from those who earn and save dollars.

• How Maduro joins the ranks of other oil rich leaders that defied the US dollar regime and sold oil in currencies other than the dollar

  • Saddam Hussein – Iraq, 3rd Largest Proven Reserves – Swaps $26 Billion in USD for Euros in his US “Oil-for-Food” program account and begins selling oil in Euros in October of 2000 – Invaded by the US in early 2003 and where the USD is mandated for oil purchases.

  • Muammar Gaddafi – Libya, 8th Largest Proven Reserves – 2009 Gaddafi elected Chairman of the African Union, proposes a gold-backed pan-regional currency called the Gold Dinar backed by Libya’s gold 144 tons of gold reserves to replace the USD and French CFA Franc system. Killed by NATO-backed rebels after a NATO airstrike on his convoy on October 20th, 2011. Libya’s gold reserves disappeared shortly thereafter.

• How Chavez “Nationalized” (Stole) the assets of hundreds of foreign exploration, refining, and oil service companies operating in Venezuela and destroyed the assets through mismanagement.

• How many Venezuelans today have to drive to Columbia to get quality gasoline for their automobiles because the domestic gas is of such poor quality.

• Which US Oil Companies are set to profit from the US control and reassignment of oil resources? Who is set to lose?

• Was Maduro really connected to the drug trade?

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