The CITGO 6

Categories: News

Lured. The CITGO 6…Six men from CITGO are being held in Venezuela, being beaten, and abused. These men traveled to the country embroiled in a figurative world of shit and quite possibly a literal warzone if the foreign policy decisions of the worlds two most powerful militaries decide to finally settle the score in the relatively small South American nation.

For those of you who don’t know the significance of this, CITGO is a majority state-owned energy company from Venezuela, the parent company being PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A). The men were arrested and denied consular access during a board meeting, since then they have been repeatedly beaten and tortured. They were allowed to keep up some appearances as to not alert or cause concern to the public…however, via a smuggled cell phone, the families received a cryptic phone call that made it seem as if their end is near.

After the potentially catastrophic actions at the border and with the humanitarian aid, the fate of these six executives from CITGO are even more unsure.

In late 2017 they were called to the country for business reasons…a board meeting. However, they’ve been held captive without trial for over 400 days. And what have we done? We’ve played it safe. We’ve carried the favor of more popular stories over the last year. We haven’t demanded action.

Name any controversy in the last year and couple of months, it overshadowed this. American citizens, Alirio Zambrano, and Jose Zambrano, with ties to both Houston and Corpus Christi here in Texas, are being held with four others in Venezuela where the cruelty of Maduro and his henchmen is on full display.

These men aren’t trained warriors, they’re businessmen. They were going to do business for CITGO, and yet now they sit in a basement, being beaten, the threat of death imminent, despite the authorities trying to ensure they look unharmed. We all know what’s actually happening.

If we do anything in Venezuela…if we do anything at all it should be to ensure these American citizens are secured and taken back to their families.

You already know that we’re going to get involved, we called it almost 2 weeks ago when the first C-17 landed with humanitarian aid and they stated: “We’re having difficulty getting the aid to the people that need it.”

Right then and there, everyone should have known we were going and what have we done to secure the release of these Americans?

Nothing.