Artículo Foreign Policy, 25.01.2024 Christopher Sabatini, investigador sobre América Latina del Chatham House
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In lifting tough sanctions on Maduro, Biden will test whether sanctions can work as a diplomatic tool
Last October, a foreign-policy holdover from the Trump administration came to an end. Whether it is a happy end for U.S. policy and interests, though, remains to be seen, not just for the country it concerns—Venezuela—but also for the future of sanctions as a diplomatic rather than just a punitive tool.
On Oct. 18, 2023, a day after representatives of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition assembled in Barbados to announce they were resuming negotiations on inclusive and competitive presidential elections in 2024, the White House announced that it was loosening select economic sanctions on Venezuela. These sanctions had been imposed in 2019 on the Maduro government and on state gold and oil mining companies. At that time, the Trump White House thought that by denying the Maduro government access to investments and markets for Venezuela’s oil economy—which accounts for more than 90 percent of the country’s export revenue—it could quickly force a collapse in favor of an interim government headed by opposition leader Juan Guaidó. More than four years later, the Guaidó opposition government has been dissolved, and Maduro is still in power.
The Biden administration changes permit the Venezuelan government and its state-controlled oil company PDVSA to produce and sell oil and gas internationally. They also permit international companies to engage in joint ventures with PDVSA and another state-controlled mining company, Minerven, which processes gold. The hope is that by attracting publicly traded mining firms, the criminal networks producing and laundering illegal gold in the Orinoco region can be cleaned up.
Trump-era “maximum pressure” sanctions failed to deliver even modest improvements in human rights; the Biden administration was also feeling pressure from European and Latin American governments to lift them. Many of those governments had gone along with the plan to support the Guaidó experiment but later found their diplomatic relations strained with the de facto Maduro government—and their national companies locked out of doing business in Venezuela’s oil and gas sector or trading its debt.
The Biden administration’s carrot came with a stick. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that if, by Nov. 30, the Maduro government had not released political prisoners and U.S. citizens held by the Maduro government and failed to establish a process to consider the requalification of the three opposition leaders it had banned, the United States would reconsider its sanctions-lifting.
Moreover, if after six months there had not been sufficient progress in election organization and the guarantees necessary for a competitive 2024 presidential contest, then the United States would “snap back” the sanctions it had lifted. (Whether it would return the previous sanctions in full or in modified form was not clear at the time.)
The Nov. 30 deadline came and went, but eventually in late December the Maduro government agreed to allowing the opposition candidate who was elected in a democratic primary, Maria Corina Machado, to appeal her disqualification before the electoral supreme court. The government later released 20 Venezuelan political prisoners and six U.S. citizens detained by the Maduro government.
Controversially, as part of the deal the United States also released Colombian businessman Alex Saab to Venezuela. In 2021, Cape Verde had extradited Saab, who had been working for the Venezuelan government, to the United States to face money laundering charges and accusations that he had skimmed more than $350 million from a Venezuelan program intended to provide humanitarian support to Venezuelans.
While the Venezuelan government did eventually meet Washington’s demands, albeit past the Nov. 30 deadline, there has not been much progress since. For one, the rehabilitation (a term of art used to describe an objectionable legal decision to prohibit opposition candidates from participating in elections, of which there are currently three) over Machado’s right to compete in the elections has been frozen by the judicial system. (To be clear, the agreement didn’t require them to be rehabilitated, only that the government establish a process to review the eligibility of candidates.)
Admittedly, this is a domestic issue. By way of example, how other governments feel about Donald Trump’s right to compete in the 2024 U.S. presidential election after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is not an international issue. For Machado in Venezuela, though, the issue is the integrity and independence of a judicial system criticized by human rights groups and that has now been implicitly trusted by the United States to make that determination.
In late January, the government arrested more than 30 civil society, democratic opposition, retired military officers, and journalists, charging them with treason. In announcing their arrests, Attorney General Tarek William Saab said that “there will be no legal or juridical contemplations for any of these subjects” and threatened more arrests. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López claimed—though presented no evidence—that those arrested had been cooperating with U.S. intelligence and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Until then, unfulfilled commitments by the Venezuelan government over improving conditions for competitive and inclusive presidential elections had gone unremarked on by the Biden administration. Shortly after the January arrests, the State Department condemned the arrests as counter to the spirit of Barbados Agreement and warned that similar future actions that ran against the “spirit and the letter” of the agreement would “have consequences”—clearly drawing a line over the specifics of the agreement. Left open was the question of how many times the Maduro government could continue with actions that undermined the spirit of the agreement until Washington determined that the basic concepts of the letter had been hollowed out.
Now another deadline looms: the promise of progress on improvements on election conditions in Venezuela and the threat of snapback sanctions if the Maduro government doesn’t demonstrate progress by April 18.
Movement on preparing for the elections, guaranteeing a relatively level playing field, and inviting independent international election observation organizations—such as the European Union, the Carter Center, and the United Nations—appears to be stalled. Failing to deliver on any of these issues, the Maduro government’s attention seems more focused on courting potential investors. Caracas is now welcoming a steady parade of energy companies and investors, large and small.
Still, once maximum pressure sanctions failed to produce change, it was never clear what more could be done. With the October 2023 sanctions change, the United States has at least gained leverage it never possessed before: the ability to apply limited sanctions to incentivize change beyond a single-minded, binary pressure of yield or suffer more.
Unfortunately, that level of understanding of international relations and foreign policy has not carried over to Washington, where many hard-line Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio are already clamoring for a return to a full sanctions regime, despite the reality that the policy failed in its own stated goals. Rubio’s position—along with that of Sen. Ted Cruz—is consistent with Rubio and others’ full-throated support of the Cuba embargo, in place since 1962 despite its failure to produce any meaningful change in the Castro regime’s human rights record or regime collapse.
Sanctions to produce regime change or to deter interstate aggression or the development of weapons of mass destruction have worse than a spotty record. In fact, whether in Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, or Venezuela, sanctions have indeed inflicted economic pain on the government in power, but they have largely failed to prevent or reverse the policies that drove them. Venezuela has become a test case in sanctions leverage. In this case, the change is placed against a clear, verifiable policy goal: improved electoral conditions. Sanctions tinkering may not achieve their intended policy goals, but there is a publicly defined and honest attempt to clarify what those goals are and to measure success against them. That has never happened before.
The White House’s bet that the wily and autocratic Maduro administration would respond to sanctions liberalization—even if conditioned on forward progress—was and remains a risky one. In the face of the seeming effort by the Maduro government to skirt, if not flagrantly violate, its own commitments, the question is whether the threat of a return to sanctions is credible. Will—indeed, can—the White House and State Department roll back sanctions relief in the face of powerful U.S. and foreign energy companies that have traveled to Caracas to take advantage of the opening?
Carefully and objectively measuring the benefits and potential damage of conditional sanctions relief will require policymakers to ignore the performative noise of the Maduro government, such as its recent decision to appoint Saab as head of international investment. Instead, the focus should be on concrete, meaningful changes in policy direction by the target regime, in this case toward competitive and inclusive elections in 2024.
Placing even minimum pressure on the Maduro government to comply with its own promises will require the support of the European and Latin American governments that had resisted the extension of sanctions. Companies from those regions have benefited from Washington’s sanctions relaxation as energy interests have rushed to invest in Venezuela’s collapsed energy sector. Their governments, though, now need also to step up and press for the political changes that came along with the bargain.
Whether they will have the political and moral courage to do so is unclear. And whether the Venezuela example can show a better way to conceive of, manage, and unwind sanctions remains to be seen.
