The sanctions that Biden reinstated are the same ones that he lifted last fall as part of a deal with the Maduro regime.
The 2024 Democratic Party platform, released today, held up President Biden’s handling of Venezuela as a foreign-policy success.
It celebrated his decision to reinstate sanctions on the regime of Nicolás Maduro — sanctions that the administration chose to lift just five months earlier.
In a section on the Western hemisphere, the platform said that Biden is “supporting human rights and fundamental freedoms as people across the region pursue a more just and prosperous future.”
“Under President Biden, the United States negotiated the release of ten American hostages from Venezuela, reinstated sanctions on Venezuela’s oil and gas sector in response to President Nicolás Maduro failing to commit to free and fair elections, and cracked down on Nicaragua for repression of their population and abuse of migrants,” the platform added.
The sanctions that Biden reinstated are the same ones that he lifted last fall as part of a deal with the Maduro regime. In exchange for a promise from Caracas that it would hold free and fair elections in 2024, the Biden administration issued a license authorizing transactions with Venezuela’s oil and gas industries that had previously been forbidden under U.S. sanctions.
The case for that move was that Maduro might have chosen to abide by the terms of the deal and, in the event of his noncompliance with it, the U.S. would just snap back the sanctions.
Congressional Republicans, though, argued that there was no conceivable situation in which Maduro meant to honor the deal. As Senators Ted Cruz and Jim Risch put it in November, “This change in posture was based on promises made by an indicted international criminal who has a strong record of using delay tactics to remain in power illegitimately.”
The Treasury Department largely, though not fully, reinstated the sanctions in April, after the Venezuelan government barred the opposition’s Maria Corina Machado from running in the election. The new Treasury rules allowed for the issuance of certain sanctions exemptions to companies that already had some operations in Venezuela.
This meant that the administration had watered down America’s sanctions on Venezuela, even considering the reinstatement of the oil sanctions.
Following Maduro’s fraudulent election victory last month, the administration took several days to publicly conclude that the incumbent’s government announced fake results. And the day immediately after the election, as part of a response to the election, a senior State Department official said that the U.S. would not cancel sanctions licenses it had previously awarded.
This official also defended the administration’s deal with Maduro, arguing that the election took place only “as a result of the calibrations that we have done with our sanctions policy over the last year.”
The platform’s reference to the release of ten U.S. hostages referred to a deal in which the administration freed Alex Saab, a top Maduro ally facing prosecution in the U.S. on money-laundering charges, and two of Maduro’s nephews who had been convicted on drug-trafficking charges.