Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Turmoil in Venezuela
BOGOTA, Colombia — Vice President Mike Pence announced additional sanctions on Venezuelan officials Monday as he visited Colombia to discuss Venezuela’s crisis and meet with that nation’s opposition leader.
At a meeting with the Lima Group, a multinational body addressing the Venezuelan crisis, Pence warned Mexico and Uruguay that they must join the push to remove Venezuela’s socialist leader, President Nicolas Maduro.
“We believe there can be no bystanders,” Pence said. “No one on the sidelines of this, particularly in our hemisphere.”
Pence also held his first face-to-face meeting with Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who defied an order from Maduro’s government not to leave the country.
Maduro controls the assets of Venezuela’s state oil company. Pence said countries should freeze the company’s assets, transfer the proceeds to Guaido and restrict visas for Maduro’s inner circle. He said the U.S. was imposing more sanctions on four pro-government governors, including a close Maduro ally who negotiated the release of an American jailed for more than two years.
“It’s time to do more. The day is coming soon when Venezuela’s long nightmare will end, when Venezuela will once more be free, when her people will see a new birth of freedom in a nation reborn to libertad,” Pence said, ending with the Spanish word for liberty.
Pence made the trip to Latin America two days after a U.S.-backed effort to send convoys of humanitarian aid into Venezuela. Only a smattering of aid got through, and the effort degenerated into clashes between anti-Maduro protesters and Venezuelan security forces along the borders with Colombia and Brazil. Four people were killed and at least 300 wounded, although only a few were hospitalized.
Guaido crossed the border with Colombia to help direct the aid effort there. When or even whether Guaido will be able to return to Venezuela is unclear.
Guaido declared himself interim president last month and has been recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by the United States and about 50 other countries. His supporters have called on Venezuela’s soldiers to defect, but hopes that the military’s support for Maduro would quickly crumble have faded.
Maduro has called Guaido a coup-plotter and a lackey of President Donald Trump’s administration, and he has described the humanitarian aid effort as a pretext for a U.S. invasion directed from Colombia. Maduro broke relations with Colombia on Saturday in retaliation.
Venezuela’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, who has spent much of the past month lobbying on behalf of Maduro’s government at the United Nations in New York, said Monday that the outcome of the weekend’s confrontations in Venezuela showed that opposition leaders had failed and “the momentum of the coup is over.”
“It didn’t happen, and it’s not going to happen,” Arreaza said in an interview. “Of course, they didn’t fulfill their objectives.”
As Guaido met with Pence in person for the first time, Pence said that the weekend confrontations had only “steeled the resolve of the United States” to become more involved with increased sanctions as well as larger amounts of aid.
U.S. SANCTIONS
The new sanctions, targeting assets of four Venezuelan governors allied with Maduro, come atop crippling U.S. sanctions issued late last month against the state oil company, known as Petroleos de Venezuela, a crucial source of revenue for the Maduro government.
The U.S. Treasury Department, which enforces American sanctions, said the governors had been “involved in endemic corruption and in blocking the delivery of critical humanitarian aid.”
On Monday, Pence also announced an additional $56 million in aid to the Venezuelan opposition, and he warned that more punishing measures loom from the Treasury Department.
In remarks to Pence and an assembled group of regional officials, Guaido said he remained resolute in the face of a setback and called on allies to create a “more powerful and effective” stranglehold on Maduro’s government.
“Democracy must prevail,” Guaido said. “Peace must prevail. Millions of Venezuelans are asking for humanitarian aid.”
In their discussions, Pence said, Guaido had reiterated a request for military support, a possibility that Trump has called “an option.” But on Monday, the vice president did not make any commitments. Instead, Pence told reporters that he had assured the opposition leader that “all options” remain but that “we hope for a peaceful transition.”
In recent days, Pence and several other senior administration officials — including John Bolton, the national security adviser — issued multiple calls for Maduro to allow in food and medicine and threatened action if he did not relent.
U.S. officials have cheered reports of Venezuelan troop defections and castigated Maduro’s forces as hoodlums and thugs.
“To other officials that are living in fear of Maduro, make the right choice and side with your fellow citizens,” Bolton said, reaching out to potential defectors on Twitter.
How many troops have defected remains unclear.
Colombian authorities said over the weekend that more than 160 soldiers deserted their posts and sought refuge across the border, though the highest-ranking among them was a National Guard major. No battalion or division commanders have come forward to challenge Maduro despite calls by Guaido and the U.S. to do so.
Colombian President Ivan Duque said Monday that 440 soldiers had crossed over into Colombia. Venezuela’s foreign minister, Arreaza, said such figures are vastly inflated.
“As far as I know, it’s 20, 22, something like that,” Arreaza said. Maduro’s adversaries, he said, are “going to maximize everything about Venezuela and, you know, it’s dangerous.”
The Trump administration has taken a particularly hawkish stance on Venezuela, which Trump in recent weeks has framed as an ideological adversary of the United States and a promoter of a brand of socialism that must be defeated. Meanwhile, the Lima Group, which has been staunchly behind Guaido, rejected the use of force.
“Let’s hope that the pressure of the international community, dialogue and prudence will prevail,” said Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela, who likened the crisis in Venezuela to the one his country faced in the run-up to the 1989 U.S. invasion to remove dictator Manuel Noriega. “Although the circumstances are similar, we must have the capacity to find a solution different than the one used back then.”