WASHINGTON _ The next phase of President Donald Trump's pressure campaign on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro may rely on his diplomatic skills.
Trump's advisers want Europe and Latin America to aggressively expand multilateral sanctions that will compound "political and psychological pressure" on Maduro and his aides, according to a senior State Department official.
Their goal is to block key Maduro officials from banking and traveling within Europe and the Americas, building on existing U.S. sanctions that have revoked hundreds of U.S. visas from Maduro-linked individuals and banned U.S. financial transactions with Venezuelan entities.
Elliott Abrams, the U.S. special representative for Venezuela, told McClatchy and the Miami Herald in a recent interview that the administration is pushing the European Union and Rio Treaty nations to match Washington's unilateral sanctions.
"It would be great for some of the people involved in the regime's crimes not to be able to travel in Latin America," Abrams said. "You have bank accounts in Latin America. So there's a variety of forms of pressure, and we think that expanding the pressures to include European and Latin democracies is a useful form of political and psychological pressure on the regime."
The European Union recently imposed economic sanctions on seven individuals associated with the capture and murder of Rafael Acosta Arevalo, a Venezuelan military officer accused of conspiring against Maduro who died in government custody. But the Trump administration is pushing for more.
"We want to see EU sanctions," Abrams said. "We would like to see broader sanctions than that."
The United States and more than 50 countries recognize Juan Guaido, president of the National Assembly, as the legitimate interim president of Venezuela. But efforts to force Maduro out of power through sanctions have yet to deliver.
One former Trump administration official told McClatchy that the administration's current plan suggests the White House is running out of options to act on its own.
"To be frank, we have run out of unilateral options, but it's also very important that we go back to treating this as a multilateral issue," the former official stated. "The U.S. government worked very hard at the beginning of this administration to make this a coalition effort and there were results _ over 55 countries now recognize Guaido as president."
"It's important to take a step back now and let the international community catch up in many ways," the official added.
Trump and his aides at a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York underscored their commitment to the Venezuelan opposition, Abrams said, and sought to "put to rest any of that nonsense about a change in policy, a diminution of interest or in pressure."
Administration policy has not changed since the departure of John Bolton, the president's third national security adviser, last month, he said.
But while 16 nations in the Western Hemisphere invoked the Rio Treaty, also known as TIAR, during the U.N. summit as a legal framework for regional sanctions, the parties now must begin the hard work of producing a list of sanctions they all can agree on.
Abrams said the process might take some time.
"I think what we need to do, really, is to identify the names that we will start with that everyone will agree on. And the mechanism is an important one, because in a number of cases, there's no domestic legislation that deals with economic sanctions in particular," Abrams said.
"We need to get to work on specific cases," he continued, "and translate this invocation of the treaty into actual naming of names."
