Did socialism cause Venezuela's blackout?
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted late Monday that he plans to pull all remaining U.S. diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas.
"This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in #Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy," Pompeo Tweeted.
The decision comes amid a nationwide blackout which has led to mass looting, spoiled food, and dying medical patients.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro blamed the White House for the power outages. But former State Department senior adviser Christian Whiton said it’s a direct result of Maduro’s dictatorship.
“Maduro [and] the socialists have neglected Venezuela’s infrastructure including its energy grid for a long time, long time and this is the culmination of that,” Christian Whiton told FOX Business' Kennedy on Monday.
Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido told FOX Business exclusively on Monday that the Maduro regime is to blame for burning humanitarian aid.
“The world has seen how Maduro’s government has burned medicines and foodstuffs. The world saw how they blocked trucks to enter medicine into the country,” he told Trish Regan. “In fact, there’s a plant in Cucuta right now, and a plant producing emergency supplies for hospitals, and we know that as long as Maduro’s government is in place, it will be difficult to enter [for] these supplies. But our responsibility is to attend to our people’s suffering.”