MIAMI, FLORIDA — The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden agreed to lift sanctions on Venezuela and return to normal relations if the opposition was allowed to participate in competitive presidential elections, according to a deal secretly signed in Qatar last year that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro made public on social media.
“El Nuevo Herald” reported yesterday that Maduro published the document the day before, shortly before Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won the presidential elections last Sunday, citing the vote counts presented by the opposition.
The regime-controlled National Electoral Council said Maduro won, providing what were widely seen as fraudulent numbers.
According to the American newspaper, the Qatari document shows that the Biden administration reached an agreement with Maduro to lift sanctions on the country’s oil, banking and gold sectors if it agreed to hold elections and allowed the opposition to compete.
And it added a significant incentive for Maduro: the lifting of most sanctions after the winner took office. At that point, the U.S. government would restore full diplomatic relations and dismantle the sanctions regime against the country, the document says.
This would include unblocking all Venezuelan government assets in the United States and lifting sanctions, including individual sanctions imposed under an executive order.
From the start, Biden’s team slammed the brakes on, but did not fully dismantle, the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, saying it was willing to lift sanctions if Maduro allowed “free and fair elections.” In 2022, after intense lobbying, he authorized Chevron to expand its oil operations in the company’s existing projects in Venezuela.
The agreement with Qatar — a memorandum of understanding dated Sept. 29, 2023, the details of which had not been previously disclosed — shows how far the administration was willing to go and how instrumental its efforts were in getting Maduro to sign an electoral agreement with the opposition in Barbados last year.
The document, published by Maduro on X on Thursday, did not bear the signature of the U.S. representative. The White House did not respond to an email seeking confirmation of the document’s authenticity.
The Trump administration had imposed sweeping sanctions against the Venezuelan state, state oil company PDVSA, the country’s central bank, the gold mining sector and the purchase of Venezuelan debt, citing Maduro’s undemocratic actions and human rights violations.
Perhaps more crippling for the regime, Washington also imposed sanctions on at least 115 high-ranking Venezuelan officials for their involvement in human rights abuses, actions to dismantle the country’s democratic system, acts of corruption or involvement in drug trafficking.
The sanctions, imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, essentially froze any assets the individuals might have held in banks under U.S. jurisdiction.
According to the document released by Maduro, the Biden administration would first act to lift some sanctions after his government presented a draft of an electoral agreement with the opposition’s Unitary Platform.
In particular, the administration would issue licenses to authorize Haiti, Belize and the Dominican Republic to pay debts for oil sent by Venezuela through the Petrocaribe initiative and for Trinidad and Tobago to make cash payments to the state-owned Banco de Venezuela.
Trinidad and Tobago received a license from the US Treasury Department to import gas from Venezuela in January 2023, but was prohibited from making cash payments.
The United States also agreed to allow three foreign oil companies (Repsol, ENI and Maurel & Prom) to continue operating in Venezuela, according to the document. The Biden administration appears to have kept its end of the deal.— El Nuevo Herald
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2024-08-07 15:19:29
