I am in support of the Venezuelan people and their efforts to have transparent, democratic elections.

The U.S. cannot again be a foreign power meddling in the affairs of another country.

I recognize that that is tragic and that a lot of the funding that is going to help the Venezuelan people is being stopped at some of their border points.

I urge the committee to include report language that funding be of a humanitarian nature and explicitly not intended for the use of military or state police efforts.

Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member Rogers for allowing me to testify during today's hearing to lay out what I feel are my priorities as they relate to the State Department and related agencies.

I think that we have turned our heads and our backs on that region for far too long, and they are really our backyard, and we should have an ongoing positive working relationship.

We have abdicated our leadership role in that region and created a vacuum of leadership, and for that reason we have seen now recently how countries even like China have stepped in to plug that leadership gap that we have left unattended…

We must establish our leadership again, but we must do it by assisting those nations to address some of the fundamental reasons why there is a large exodus of families for the most part.

It is imperative that the U.S. support the right of the Venezuelan people to freely and fairly elect their leaders.

We need to, again, reassert ourselves as the leader of the Americas and do so by assisting governments to provide good services and programs that will reduce the migration.

I am proposing a doubling of the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative program.

And just keep in mind that as we begin to pay more attention to the border and Central and South America, drug dealers will shift their strategy to other borders.