Trump signs sanctions order targeting Venezuela’s gold exports
WASHINGTON: Washington ratcheted up pressure on Venezuela’s leftist President Nicolas Maduro with new measures aimed at disrupting the South American country’s gold exports, US national security adviser John Bolton said.
Bolton promised a tough stance by the Trump administration toward ‘ dictators and despots near our shores’ and singled out Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in a speech in Miami, which is home to large numbers of migrants from Cuba and Venezuela.
He spoke days before US elections next week that include close races for a Senate seat and the governorship in Florida. His remarks were likely to be well received by those Cuban- Americans and other Hispanics in Florida who favor stronger US pressure on Cuba’s Communist government and other leftist governments in Latin America.
Bolton said President Donald Trump had signed an executive order to ban US persons from dealing with entities and individuals involved with ‘corrupt or deceptive’ gold sales from Venezuela.
“Many of you in the audience today have personally suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, only to survive, fight back, conquer, and overcome,” Bolton said.
“The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua - has finally met its match,” he said.
Bolton spoke at Freedom Tower – a building where Cuban refugees were welcomed in the 1960s following Fidel Castro’s revolution – a day after Trump campaigned in Florida for Republican candidates in tight Senate and gubernatorial races. Florida has traditionally been a swing state and former President Barack Obama was scheduled to rally Democrats in Miami on Friday ahead of the Nov 6 elections.
Trump has taken a harder line on Cuba after Obama sought to set aside decades of hostility between Washington and Havana. He has rolled back parts of Obama’s 2014 detente by tightening rules on Americans traveling to the Caribbean island and restricting US companies from doing business there.
Bolton said the US State Department would ‘within days’ add more than two dozen entities to a list of Cuban organisations associated with country’s military and intelligence services.
US persons and companies are banned from doing business with the restricted companies. Bolton said Cuba is aiding Maduro’s government in Venezuela, referring to the close ties between the two countries since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power in 1999.
Almost 2 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015, driven out by food and medicine shortages, hyperinflation, and violent crime. — Reuters