The United States and Venezuela have been locked in negotiations for years that, so far, have led nowhere. Washington has made lifting sanctions on the Chavista government conditional on the holding of free and fair elections in which the opposition would have a real chance of electing a president, among other demands. A year ago, representatives of both administrations met secretly in Qatar and designed a roadmap that was supposed to clarify the political panorama at this point, with a winner and a loser after the vote, with both sides recognizing the results and gradually returning to a democratic normality that would take the country out of the conflict in which it has been immersed at least since 2017, when Maduro experienced a crisis of legitimacy and protests spread to the streets.
The reality is that the situation has worsened. Maduro is experiencing his greatest crisis of legitimacy, the opposite of what was sought at this point. Chavismo accepted the challenge of the United States because it was convinced that no one could beat them in the electoral field, especially if they managed to get María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition, off the board. Since the time of Hugo Chávez, the so-called Bolivarian revolution has deployed clientelist networks throughout the nation that ensure the mobilization of followers and their families. Once the electoral process is over, Joe Biden’s government would be forced to lift sanctions, especially those on oil, which most affect the Venezuelan economy.
However, Maduro has not been able to prove his victory at the polls on July 28. Although required by law, the National Electoral Council (CNE), the plebiscite body in the hands of the Chavistas, has not shown the minutes, which reflect the results by voting centers. The opposition has published the ones that its volunteers collected throughout the country, and in them the candidate who replaced Machado, the diplomat and writer Edmundo González Urrutia, wins by a large margin over Maduro. The effort to hide the documentation has led almost the entire international community to assume the opposition’s victory. Countries with ideologically similar presidents, such as Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, also openly distrust the Chavista victory.
In a diversionary move, the Venezuelan president asked the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) to validate the minutes and declare a winner. The TSJ, presided over by a Chavista bureaucrat, awarded the victory to Maduro, to no one’s surprise. The court released images in which experts, wearing gloves, masks and plastic gowns, were seen inspecting the minutes with flashlights. It was reminiscent of a scene from CSIa series about a forensic investigation team. After the images were analyzed by the Venezuelan media, it was discovered that the experts were actually Chavista officials from the CNE itself. In other words, the investigators were the ones under investigation.
Far from being lifted, US sanctions have been increased on Thursday and now affect officials of the CNE and the TSJ, who Washington considers complicit in electoral fraud. They also extend to military, intelligence and government officials responsible for intensifying repression through intimidation, indiscriminate arrests and censorship following Maduro’s defeat at the polls, as announced by the Treasury Department. The United States feels that Maduro has broken his word by not allowing a transition and returning institutions to democratic channels comparable to those of neighbouring countries. Chavismo has responded harshly to the impositions of the US and accuses that country of not complying with what was agreed in Qatar, which in turn led to a signature in Barbados. The position of the Venezuelan government is that the elections have been transparent, as demanded, despite all the evidence and even common sense that without the minutes it is not credible to inaugurate Maduro.
Do the sanctions put Chavismo in a very delicate situation? Without a doubt, they completely reduce their income as a government and make them live in absolute precariousness. To give you an idea, the income of the Venezuelan State has fallen by 90% in recent years. However, Maduro and his political operators have survived this situation, for better or worse, and the one they are going to find from now on seems even tougher. The people who surround Maduro have proven to be tough as rocks, marathon runners of the conflict, and daily engage in verbal wars with those they see as their enemies. Characters like Diosdado Cabello, considered number two of the regime and now a minister, has been launching invectives, disqualifications and defamation at everyone who crosses his path since the time of Chávez, of whom he was a friend of arms. Day after day, with an anthological persistence.
What’s more, Maduro has recruited Cabello as Minister of the Interior and has put him in charge of the repressive apparatus. He has also named Delcy Rodríguez, also a close confidant of his, as Minister of Petroleum, that is, in charge of PDVSA, the state oil company, one of the most important positions in the government structure. These movements have been interpreted as a radicalization of the Chavistas, who are closing in on themselves and entrenching themselves, far from an opening, as was expected. The sanctions, defended by presidents such as Gustavo Petro, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, among many others, do not help anything nor achieve their purposes and only harm the Venezuelan people, who already live in scarcity.
The United States sanctioned Maduro back in 2017. Since then, its sanctions have been extended to more than 150 individuals and more than 100 entities of the regime, including all its heavyweights, such as the attorney general, Tarek William Saab; Delcy Rodríguez herself; her brother, the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, and Cabello, of course. Military, intelligence, judicial and electoral authorities have been singled out by Washington, but the Treasury sanctions basically affect assets in the United States, so their scope is limited.
Sanctions on the oil and gas sector are what really hurt the Venezuelan regime. The United States tried this route, but it has obvious drawbacks. The impoverishment of the population resulted in an exodus with few precedents, which Maduro barely blinked at. Many of these emigrants arrived in the United States, immersed in a migration crisis. In addition, the restriction of supply made oil more expensive at a time when the world’s largest economy was being punished by the highest inflation in four decades. At the same time, the Maduro regime sought escape valves by exporting to other countries, mainly China.
Washington temporarily lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil and gas to allow for democratic presidential elections under the Barbados accords, signed between Chavismo and the opposition, for the holding of free elections. However, the Maduro regime disqualified the opposition leader, María Corina Machado, to the chagrin of US diplomacy, which felt deceived. The Joe Biden administration decided to reactivate these sanctions when the agreed six-month period expired and did so. However, Washington avoided returning to the policy of maximum pressure applied during the mandate of Republican Donald Trump, which unleashed a wave of asylum requests from Venezuelans on the US southern border.
Machado’s disqualification did not prevent the president from facing an electoral setback against the new opposition candidate, Edmundo Rodríguez Urrutia. However, the Maduro regime has embarked on a headlong flight through what the United States calls “electoral fraud” and the implementation of brutal repression to illegitimately extend Maduro’s mandate.
The Treasury Department has imposed new sanctions on judicial, electoral, military and intelligence authorities, but when asked whether the United States is considering tightening restrictions on oil licenses that the American company Chevron and other international companies still enjoy to operate in Venezuela, a senior official in the Biden administration preferred to digress on Thursday: “We are closely monitoring political and economic developments in Venezuela, and we are committed to appropriately calibrating our sanctions policy in response to both events on the ground and broader U.S. national interests,” he said.
“In coordination with our partners, we are also considering a range of options to demonstrate to Maduro and his proxies that their illegitimate and repressive actions in Venezuela will have consequences. We are also keenly focused on the implementation of existing sanctions, as well as assessing how best to calibrate our sanctions policy toward Venezuela in light of broader U.S. interests. Importantly, we remain committed to promoting accountability for actors in Venezuela who are undermining the democratic process and the will of the Venezuelan people,” he added.
Like the European Union, the US government has avoided recognising González Urrutia as president-elect, probably scalded by the fiasco of recognising Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela, which ultimately proved useless, dividing the opposition and giving wings to the regime.
When it was pointed out to him that international diplomacy had failed in its pressure on Venezuela, he rejected it. “I do not agree with your assertion that regional diplomacy has failed. In fact, I think that the careful diplomatic work that we have been doing with a number of partners in this region has been extraordinarily important in terms of ensuring that the results, the fraudulent results that the Maduro authorities have published, have been widely rejected. And while there are some differences and variations in terms of the diplomatic positions that our partners have taken, I think that a level of diplomatic pressure on Venezuela has been maintained that would not have been possible without the constant work and almost constant communication that we have with our partners throughout the region, as well as in the European Union and beyond,” he added. “We stand by our conclusions and the statement made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken several days after the July 28 elections, where we believe there is clear evidence that Mr. González Urrutia obtained the majority of votes in these elections, and therefore, that fact must be respected and validated by the Venezuelan authorities.”
Despite the precedents, Washington has not lost hope that sanctions and international pressure will eventually have an effect: “We believe that there is still plenty of time until January for actors in Venezuela, including Nicolás Maduro, to begin to make better decisions than they have made to date,” said the senior official. “That is why we see these sanctions as an important step in shaping the overall context of the political trajectory in Venezuela. But it must be remembered that these measures are also being taken in the context of a broader effort in which the United States has joined its partners and allies, both within this hemisphere and around the world, which includes diplomacy, diplomatic pressure, pressure – in this case, specific, individually targeted sanctions and other measures to ensure that the will of Venezuelan voters is respected,” he concluded.
