White House rejects calls for return to maximum pressure on Maduro after elections setback

The Biden administration is rejecting calls from members of Congress for the United States to return to a campaign of maximum pressure against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro after his chief political opponent was blocked from running against him.

Speaking with a small group of reporters, a senior administration official said that the existing White House strategy of calibrating sanctions had produced results — despite the most recent setback — including the release of wrongfully detained Americans in the country and a diplomatic breakthrough in Barbados.

“The approach that we started with... is one that sought to impose enormous sectoral sanctions on Venezuela under the theory that it would lead to rapid change in the regime. That did not happen,” the official said. “Nobody expected this to be easy. This is going to be a long road after several decades in Venezuela of having little to no democratic space.”

“For the first time, Venezuelans have had really a glimmer of hope for a better future. Is this path going to work? We don’t know. But what we do know is that the previous policy approach was not the right mix to really advance U.S. national security interests,” the official added.

The administration has said that, unless Maduro changes course, a general license that has provided relief to Venezuela’s oil and gas sector will be allowed to expire in April. The White House hopes that Maduro will use that time to reconsider the ban on his main opponent, María Corina Machado, the official said.

The Trump administration initiated a maximum pressure campaign in an attempt to promote regime change in Venezuela amid accusations of human-rights abuses and the gradual dismantling of the country’s democratic system. The policy included the gradual introduction of sanctions on the country’s economy and the application of individual sanctions targeting top leaders of the regime, especially those identified as participants of the human-rights abuses or of actively participating in drug trafficking operations.

The Biden administration did not immediately dismantle those sanctions, but began to draw them down following a series of negotiations held between Washington officials and representatives of the Maduro regime. The talks led last year to the signing of an election roadmap in Barbados, where Caracas agreed with opposition leaders to hold free elections in the second half of this year in exchange for special licenses from Washington for Venezuela to start selling its oil in U.S. markets through international oil companies.

As part of the agreements, Venezuela also released a number of U.S. citizens deemed to have been detained unjustly in the South American nation. The Biden administration also freed the alleged business partner of Maduro, Alex Saab, who was being tried for corruption and money laundering in a South Florida federal court.

However, warming relations between the two countries hit a snag last week after the government-controlled Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled that Machado, a popular candidate who polls show would defeat Maduro, could not compete in this year’s presidential election, in what most Venezuelan analysts believe provided a severe blow to the terms of the Barbados accord.

This week, the Biden administration said Maduro was in fact not fulfilling its commitments, and has until April to make good on his word if he wants to avoid the reimposition of the previously lifted sanctions.

But the official warned that Maduro and his representatives are running out of time to uphold their commitments from Barbados, noting that free and fair elections take time to organize, including the preparations required for international election monitors.

“We viewed the dialogue with, I think, a healthy degree of skepticism, given that inside Venezuela, those in power are a combination of those who are actors that want democracy, those who are criminal actors, and those that view authoritarian central control as really the only way for the future of Venezuela,” the official said.

“We’re calibrating a lot of this on the basis of progress or regress, and we understood going in that this was going to be a long-term process,” the official added. “The reality is that maximum pressure is really not going to secure that outcome.”