 Welcome to Code Pink's weekly webinar, What the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, every Wednesday at noon. And I am very pleased to have with us today, Galix Tortega, who is the president of Venezuelan Central Bank. And we are going to talk today about the situation of the Venezuelan gold reserves that are currently in the vaults of the Bank of England. For those of you who are not familiar with the situation, Venezuelan Central Bank made a legal claim to the Bank of England to try to force the bank to release part of the $1.2 billion in gold reserves that this entity grows and refuses to release. And it belongs to the Venezuelan people. The government of Venezuela made a deal with, has a deal with the UN development program for them to administer a response and to be used for Venezuela's coronavirus response. So welcome, Galix Tortega, and please talk to us a little bit about this legal battle in the UK. All right, thank you and hello to your audience. My regards from Caracas, Venezuela, from the downtown Caracas, from the office of the president of the Central Bank. And this is a very, very meaningful place right now because what's been happening is that a group of people are actually saying that the bore, the ones that come every day to this building to work are not the bore. That the bore of the Central Bank, it's formed by another group of people that actually they don't even live in Venezuela. And this is the whole situation that we are fighting right now. I would like to start by saying that the issue is not related to the government of President Nicolás Maduro. The issue is a legal, the Bank of England had been served with a legal claim by our lawyers, our representatives. Following the Bank of England decision to deny Venezuelan Central Bank access to our international reserve, particularly in the scenario of the COVID-19. On April, we go to the Bank of England informing them that we were deciding to use around one billion euros of our international reserve to liquidate the equivalent in gold so the proceeds could be transferred to the United Nations Development Program for them to do the procurement of medicines, food, health related equipments and so on. The basic respond that countries are exercising against the COVID-19 in the pandemic situation. The Bank of England refuse and they claim that they have some confusion because they have received information from another group of people saying that I am not actually the president of the Central Bank. And that there is someone else that is the president of the Bank. So we start the claim and we hope to receive a positive, just decision that it's aligned with reality and it will be in favor of the Venezuelan people. So the preliminary issues that have been discussed the last two days are related to who runs Venezuela, who is actually the president of Venezuela, who is the head of the state and the head of the government because the other group, even though they don't live in Venezuela, even though they don't come to this building, they are saying that they are the Central Bank or because a gentleman that last year said self-proclaimed president actually select them to be the board of the Central Bank. And the judge basically is doing what the English law system says that is basically listening to both parts, listening to the arguments and so for him to make a decision that would be very important for this case. Our position is basically the reality that there is only one function in government in Venezuela. There is only one minister of finance, defense minister, treasurer, health minister, all what you need to be a government and it's the government of President Maduro. So that's basically what's happening right now. You talk about this claiming about who is the legitimate government of Venezuela. We just read this extracts from the book of John Bolton claiming that the UK foreign minister wanted to help promote the US sanctions policy by freezing Venezuelan gold deposits, but the Bank of England claims that it's independent. So how can this claim affect the outcome of the lawsuit? Yes, it is not a common ground to think that Mr. Bolton could be a resource of accurate information or rational opinions. But it's true that he basically described an event that is very important for this case. He basically says that they were playing politics against Venezuela and part of the strategy was to block the central bank of Venezuela because according to their strategy, it was a good thing to do and in order to make a regime change happening in Venezuela. If this was true, it's basically a proof that all what happened was a political strategy and if this was true, then it's a proof also that the Bank of England polluted with the government of the US and the government of the UK against the Venezuelan people. Ultimately, all these policies, sanctions policies, blocks of funds are against the Venezuelan people. It is very far from the truth to say that sanctions only affect the public officers or the ones running the institution. Of course they make our life more difficult because at the end we have an institutional responsibility to operate. But at the end is the Venezuelan people who are suffering. So how could you possibly say that no to a request of getting funds to respond to the pandemic even so in a strategy, in an attempt to release the funds. We said to the Bank of England, you know what, you don't need to worry about how are we going to allocate the funds. Even though it's not your problem because those are Venezuelan assets. But in order for you to have less things to worry, we are going to work with the United Nations. So the UNDP is a neutral institution. It doesn't play politics. It's not one side or the other side. They just want to help the Venezuelan people. It was good for us because it will represent access to market prices because right now if you want to buy something for Venezuela, people will charge you incredible high prices because of the worries they have to pay lawyers to defend themselves when the US government will claim that they are doing something against the law. And they say that it was not possible. This is something that Elliot Abrams, the special representative for Venezuela says all the time. Companies are afraid to make business with Venezuela because of the cost of the lawyers and they're proud of that. As if it was something that it was good and it was working for somebody else that making a collective punishment for the Venezuelan people. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I think only time will describe exactly where the internal discussions and how exactly they were thinking. I think this book gives you some examples of this way of thinking. The chapter of Venezuela I personally read it and it's an interesting case for schools. I'm not sure about public policy but maybe some psychiatrics and psychology because the way these gentlemen describe how to work and how to interact with Venezuela it shows like a feeling of supremacy if they were above the law, above the international law, above all the international arrangements that have been put together by nations for years. Yeah, like Tom said about Venezuela supposedly that Venezuela was part of the U.S. So what are your expectations around this case? And if you lose this case, can you appeal? Is there an international body that could address the case like the World Trade Organization or something? Well, I am cautiously optimistic. I have to be realistic at the same time. Remember that what is being discussed if I am the president of the Central Bank and I am talking to you from my office. So it is very difficult to imagine and when I have to interact with the government of Venezuela I have to meet with the Minister of Finance which is in the next building. I have to meet with the vice president, executive vice president which is in front of this building. I have to meet with the economic vice president who has three blocks from this building. So what we are trying to describe is just reality. It is just fact checking because the other government, supposed government is a government that only exists on papers. That only controls four or five Twitter accounts. And that's it. So my expectations are cautiously optimistic because since this is politics I can only imagine the pressures that are being right now, all the strategy right now being developed in London from other countries that don't want this to be ruled in a realistic way. But yes, since our case is just fact checking reality we have reasons to be optimistic. Finally, I wanted to ask you about the situation of the sanctions because the critics of the Venezuelan government have often cited socialist policy as the reasons for a Venezuela current economic crisis. Yet they rarely factor fluctuation of oil prices or even the inflation that is induced. Can you briefly tell us what are Venezuelan biggest economic challenges today and some of the measures that are being taken to overcome them? Yeah. The most damage has been you could describe the most related to sanctions. The worst part of the situation is related to sanctions. A policy that it's illegal. You have many institutions, international institutions it's against the law to do what they are doing against Venezuela. And it's politics. You could see for example what happened last week where basically the US government said that the international criminal court was going to be targeted with sanctions. People that worked there, their family members because they took the decision. It's like the reality of the decisions are impressive and the damage that it caused in the case of Venezuela there are exercises here trying to summarize to put together a number of the costs of the sanctions. I think it's very difficult to... It's going to be a very difficult exercise because the economy of Venezuela has been distorted because of this. You pass from selling 3 million barrels per day at $100 price, so $300 million a day that is like $3 billion for 10 days, $9 billion per month, more than $100 billion per year. Last year maybe $5 billion. So it's a reduction of 95% of your income. Imagine a household that is living with $1,000 in Washington is too little. Let's say $5,000 per month and then for some reason the income of the household is going to be $250. And you have to pay for school, you have to pay for healthcare, you have to pay for everything because the income evaporates but you exist, you have to live. It's a criminal action against the Venezuelan people. What do we have to do? We have to resist, we have to fight legally wherever there is room for it and try to do our best on this resistance exercise until a more rational policy could be actually put in place and that the Venezuelan bilateral relations with other countries including the US could be exercised on the basis of self-respect, self-determination, like normal and regular bilateral relations. But what are the concrete actions taking by the government? The concrete actions taking? I cannot talk. No, I mean... We are trying to do our best with the tools we have that are very limited because of this situation in order to have the results that we had had the last year. So for example, since two years ago, things... So the level of... How do you say that in English? Level of... How many products do you see on the stores when you go to buy? When you visit a store, how many of the products are you looking to buy actually there offered to you? Those statistics are getting better before the pandemic. There are some relative numbers that are getting better and in the case of PDVSA, it is public information that they are producing gasoline now and there are things that have been solved using the Venezuelan labor and the Venezuelan people that are trying to solve all these issues. So thank you so much. It's been already 20 minutes of conversation with Calixto Ortega and thank you so much, Calixto. Thank you. So thank you so much for joining us today. I just wanted to remind you real quick that last year, Code Pink sent a letter to the UK Department for International Development signed by many of you, saying that the sanctions are deadly and that the only way forward in Venezuela is through dialogue between all Venezuelans. That is still the case today, but we were thinking of updating this petition and asking the Bank of England to release this money and give it to the UNDP so they can administrate these funds and Venezuelans can fight COVID-19 with their own resources. As you well know, the US has not been a good neighbor to Venezuela and Venezuela is one of the countries that has been hit severely with the criminal unilateral coercive measures imposed by the US. So stay tuned and once we update this petition check our webpage at www.codepink.org and through our Facebook page. Don't forget to follow us also at Look For A Good Neighbor Policy, New Good Neighbor Policy in Facebook. And yeah, and see you next week for another episode of what the F is going on in Latin America. Every Wednesday at noon.