Campaign focuses on those held overseas
A new campaign is underway to secure the release of Americans who remain in overseas prisons, including Texans such as WNBA star Brittney Griner and high-ranking Citgo employees who have been held in Venezuela since 2017.
The “Bring Our Families Home Campaign” is the most coordinated effort yet by families of American hostages to pressure lawmakers to secure the release of their loved ones.
“There are over 55 Americans currently being held hostage or wrongfully detained overseas,” the campaign said in a statement. “They are being held because they have a U.S. passport — not for any other reason. We need the White House to use all the tools on the table to bring our family members home. We are requesting to meet with the White House to share our perspective and gain their support.”
Families of American detainees have for decades said the U.S. government’s hostage policies have left them in the dark about the status of their loved ones, many of whom are unknown to the public. At Wednesday’s launch of the campaign, they reiterated their frustrations and calls for more communication, transparency and bipartisan efforts to bring Americans home.
“We see a pattern of indecision from our administrations to bring our families home,” said Alexandra Forseth Zambrano, who helped organize the campaign. “We are running into the same roadblocks, and we come back from our meetings in (Washington) crying on planes.”
Her father, Alirio Zambrano, and her uncle, Jose Luis Zambrano, are members of the so-called “Citgo 6,” the group of highranking oil executives who have been detained in Venezuela for a half-decade. Their families and diplomacy experts have characterized their cases as “hostage diplomacy,” or the taking of political prisoners to be used as bargaining chips in diplomatic talks.
The families called for the U.S. government to pursue more negotiations for the release of hostages, which U.S. diplomats have historically avoided out of concerns that doing so would provide incentives for kidnappers to target American citizens abroad. But decades of research shows that hostage takers typically act because the opportunity presents itself — and not as a premeditated plan to extract money or concessions from the U.S. government. The launch of the campaign follows last week’s surprise announcement that the Biden administration had negotiated the release of U.S. Marine veteran Trevor Reed as part of a prisoner swap with Russia that resulted in a convicted Russian drug trafficker being freed from prison in the U.S.
This week also brought new developments in the cases of two Texas natives who are being held overseas.
Earlier this week, the parents of Austin Tice, who was abducted while working in Syria as a freelance journalist in 2012, said President Joe Biden promised in a recent Oval Office meeting that he would engage directly with the Syrian government to bring their son home. The Biden administration also said Griner, a star player for the WNBA’S Phoenix Mercury, was being “unlawfully detained” in Russia, where she was arrested earlier this year for allegedly having marijuana in one of her travel bags.
The new designation of Griner’s case allows the Biden administration to offer more in negotiations for her release, powers that were expanded through a recently created office, the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage
Affairs, that serves as a liaison between the U.S. government, the families of hostages and their families.
Families said Wednesday that the Biden administration should do the same for the other 55 Americans held in across the globe.
That includes the Citgo 6 members who were lured in 2017 to Venezuela for what they said was a routine budget meeting for PDVSA, the state-owned oil company that is the parent of the Houston refiner. Once in the country, they were arrested and
charged for an alleged conspiracy to sell off $4 billion in Citgo bonds for their personal gain.
In March, one of the so-called Citgo 6, Gustavo Cardenas, 56, was allowed to return home to Katy as the U.S. renewed talks with the oil-rich country after years of sanctions and tension.
The negotiations resumed as American officials sought new fuel sources after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tightened global supplies and caused global oil prices to skyrocket.