CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuela’s vice president shrugged off U.S. sanctions identifying him as a major international drug trafficker, saying Tuesday that the actions by the Trump administration only deepen his commitment to the anti-imperialist revolution started by the late Hugo Chávez.
In a series of defiant messages posted on social media, Tareck El Aissami said the “miserable and defamatory aggression” by the U.S. won’t distract him from his job of rescuing Venezuela’s crashing economy from what he called sabotage by its conservative opponents.
En lo personal recibo esta miserable e infame agresión como un reconocimiento a mi condición de revolucionario antiimperialista!!VENCEREMOS
— Tareck El Aissami (@TareckPSUV) February 14, 2017
“They’ll never be able to defeat our unbreakable resolution to be free forever,” El Aissami said.
The Trump administration on Monday froze the U.S. assets of El Aissami and banned him from entering the U.S. for his alleged role facilitating multiple ton-loads of cocaine shipments from Venezuela. El Aissami is the highest-ranking Venezuelan official to ever be sanctioned by the U.S. and his designation as a drug kingpin is bound to ratchet up tensions between the two countries, who have not exchanged ambassadors since 2010.
But whether the action signals a hardening U.S. stance toward President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government, or is just a carry-over of policies set in motion by the Obama administration, remains to be seen, analysts said. Under Obama, the U.S. was careful not to call for the unpopular Maduro’s removal, as the opposition has been seeking, choosing instead to support a Vatican-sponsored dialogue aimed at avoiding bloodshed.
“Patience has worn out,” said Chris Sabatini, editor of Latin America Goes Global, a website that tracks U.S. policy toward the region. “There’s a mounting sense of frustration, even in the State Department and on the Hill, that the dialogue is going nowhere.”
For now, no additional actions against Venezuela are in the works, said a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss policy. It’s also not clear whether Trump personally signed off on the sanctions, although in conversations over the weekend with the presidents of Peru and Colombia he raised concerns about Venezuela’s deteriorating humanitarian situation.
Sabatini pointed out that unlike previous sanctions, issued under legislation allowing Obama to go after Venezuelan officials behind human rights abuses, the latest asset seizure was carried out by the Treasury Department under two-decade-old drug kingpin legislation that in theory is driven by law enforcement investigations. The U.S. Embassy in Caracas, in announcing the sanctions, made no mention of El Aissami’s position inside Venezuela’s government.
El Aissami, 42, has been the target of U.S. law enforcement investigations for years, stemming from his days as interior minister when dozens of fraudulent Venezuelan passports ended up in the hands of people from the Middle East, including alleged members of Hezbollah.
Before he was extradited from Colombia in 2011, Venezuela’s top convicted drug trafficker, Walid Makled, told authorities he paid bribes through El Aissami’s brother to Venezuelan authorities so they would turn a blind eye to cocaine shipments that have proliferated in the country’s ports and airports during the past two decades of socialist rule.
The action Monday made no mention of any ties to Hezbollah but said El Aissami had worked with prominent drug traffickers in Mexico and Colombia to oversee multiple U.S.-bound cocaine shipments from Venezuela. Also sanctioned was Samark López, a Venezuelan businessman the U.S. described as El Aissami’s primary front man, who is accused of laundering proceeds from the drug trade through a network of companies and luxury real estate properties in the U.S., Panama, British Virgin Islands and Venezuela.
Trump mentioned Venezuela only briefly during the presidential campaign and his entreaties to Russia — a close ally of Maduro — had led some to speculate he wasn’t interested in shaking things up with the oil-rich nation.
But as hopes fade for a dialogue between the Venezuelan government and opposition, and an economy plagued by triple-digit inflation and widespread food shortages edges closer to the abyss, the time for restraint may have passed. Authorities last October canceled an opposition-led recall referendum seeking Maduro’s removal and this month all political parties are being required to re-register under strict rules that many see as an attempt to disqualify the opposition from competing in long-overdue regional elections they are favored to win by a landslide.
Tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela have been on the rise for years and the countries haven’t exchanged ambassadors since 2010. The rush by the Bush administration to embrace Chavez’s brief ouster during a 2002 coup is also an object lesson on how an aggressive U.S. stance can backfire unless it has multilateral support. Tellingly no Latin American leader has yet to express support for the U.S. sanctions, mindful perhaps of past U.S. meddling, sometimes militarily, in political conflicts during the Cold War — a scenario that nobody wants to see return.
“Open calls for regime change would play directly into Maduro’s hands and undermine efforts to marshal a multilateral coalition to pressure Caracas,” said Michael McCarthy, a research fellow focused on Venezuela at American University.
FABIOLA SANCHEZ
JOSHUA GOODMAN