President Trump is imposing financial sanctions on six of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro’s top military and internal security officials, the Treasury Department announced Friday.
“We are sanctioning members of Maduro’s security forces in response to the reprehensible violence, tragic deaths, and unconscionable torching of food and medicine destined for sick and starving Venezuelans,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.
The move came the same day Trump’s State Department announced it was expelling dozens of Maduro loyalists from the United States.
The new Treasury blacklist includes a major general with the Venezuelan National Guard, three senior officials responsible for Venezuela’s internal defense, and a colonel in the state national police force. The United States also sanctioned a commander of the FAES, a special police squad “known for their violent role in suppressing dissent from Maduro’s political opponents,” according to the Treasury Department bulletin.
“The United States strongly supports the efforts of interim President Juan Guaido, and Treasury will continue to target Maduro loyalists prolonging the suffering of the victims of this man-made humanitarian crisis,” Mnuchin said.
Trump’s team has been focusing on trying to drive a wedge between Maduro and the upper echelons of his regime. Guaido and U.S. officials have offered amnesty to senior leaders who agree to leave the country peacefully or help Guaido establish a new government. They’re using the threat of sanctions and the loss of that amnesty offer to deter violence against Guaido. Members of the FAES entered his family home after the United States and dozens of other countries around the world recognized the opposition leader as interim president.
“There will be consequences for those that engage in such acts,” a senior administration official told reporters in January. “They will be held accountable. And they will be missing this unique opportunity to move on in that regard.”
Those efforts are complicated by the presence of Cuban officials throughout the Venezuelan security forces, as well as reports of newly arrived Russian contractors paid to protect Maduro. But the administration has had some success. Hugo Carvajal, a former top spy chief for Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez who sits in the legislature as a member of the ruling Socialist Party, accused Maduro of corruption and called on other military officials to allow humanitarian aid into the country last week.
“He was the head of their intelligence and counter-intelligence apparatus for both Chavez and Maduro, so this is kind of as high as it gets in [terms of] having seen and done it all,” a senior administration official told reporters. “And so I think it’s a message for the rest of the Venezuelan military that they have an opportunity.”
