White House rejects calls for maximum pressure on Maduro after elections setback
WASHINGTON
The Biden administration rejected calls from members of Congress for the United States to return to a campaign of maximum pressure against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro after his chief political opponent was blocked from running against him.
Speaking with a small group of reporters, a senior administration official said the White House strategy of calibrating sanctions had produced results, including the release of wrongfully detained Americans and a diplomatic breakthrough.
“The approach that we started with ... is one that sought to impose enormous sectoral sanctions on Venezuela under the theory that it would lead to rapid change in the regime. That did not happen,” the official said. “Nobody expected this to be easy. This is going to be a long road after several decades in Venezuela of having little to no democratic space.”
“For the first time, Venezuelans have had really a glimmer of hope for a better future. Is this path going to work? We don’t know. But what we do know is that the previous policy approach was not the right mix to really advance U.S. nationalsecurity interests,” the official added.
The administration has said that, unless Maduro changes course, a general license that has provided relief to Venezuela’s oil and gas sector will be allowed to expire in April. The White House hopes Maduro will use that time to reconsider the ban on his main opponent, María Corina Machado, the official said.
The Trump administration initiated a maximum-pressure campaign in an attempt to promote regime change in Venezuela amid accusations of human-rights abuses and the gradual dismantling of the country’s democratic system. The policy included the gradual introduction of sanctions on the country’s economy and the application of individual sanctions targeting leaders of the regime, especially those identified as participants in human-rights abuses or drug trafficking.
The Biden administration did not immediately dismantle those sanctions, but began to draw them down following negotiations between Washington officials and representatives of the Maduro regime. The talks led last year to the signing of an election roadmap in Barbados, where Caracas agreed with opposition leaders to hold free elections in the second half of this year in exchange for special licenses from Washington for Venezuela to start selling its oil in U.S. markets through international oil companies.
As part of the agreements, Venezuela also released a number of U.S. citizens deemed to have been detained unjustly. The Biden administration also freed an alleged business partner of Maduro, Alex Saab, who was being tried for corruption and money laundering in a South Florida federal court.
However, warming relations between the two countries hit a snag last week after the government-controlled Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled that Machado, a popular candidate who polls show would defeat Maduro, could not compete in this year’s presidential election. Most Venezuelan analysts said the ruling was a severe blow to the Barbados accord.
This week, the Biden administration said Maduro was not fulfilling his commitments and has until April to make good on his word if he wants to avoid the reimposition of the sanctions.
But the official warned that Maduro and his representatives are running out of time to uphold their commitments, noting that free and fair elections take time to organize, including the preparations required for international election monitors.
“We viewed the dialogue with, I think, a healthy degree of skepticism, given that inside Venezuela, those in power are a combination of those who are actors that want democracy, those who are criminal actors, and those that view authoritarian central control as really the only way for the future of Venezuela,” the official said.
“We’re calibrating a lot of this on the basis of progress or regress, and we understood going in that this was going to be a long-term process,” the official added. “The reality is that maximum pressure is really not going to secure that outcome.”