The Biden administration saw the Ukraine crisis as an opportunity to re-engage with Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime in Venezuela, hoping to secure alternative oil supplies and prise away a key Moscow ally.
But after news leaked of a secret mission to Caracas by three top White House officials, sparking a furious political backlash, the administration backtracked.
The White House this month sent three top officials to talk to Maduro, even though the US does not recognise him as president and has indicted him as a drug trafficker with a $15mn price on his head. The US government acknowledged last week that one aim was “certainly” to discuss energy security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The visit — the first by a White House official to Caracas since the 1990s — prompted a fierce backlash at home, not only from Republican hawks like Florida senator Marco Rubio but also Bob Menendez, the Democratic head of the Senate foreign relations committee.
Rubio accused President Joe Biden of trying to replace “the oil we buy from one murderous dictator [Russian leader Vladimir Putin] with oil from another murderous dictator [Maduro].”
Menendez said “the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people . . . are worth much more than a few thousand barrels of oil”.
“Nicolás Maduro is a cancer to our hemisphere and we should not breathe new life into his reign of torture and murder,” he added.
The official US explanation for the trip changed during the week and by Friday, state department spokesman Ned Price said the delegation had travelled to Caracas with “two priorities in mind”. The first was the release of US prisoners and the second was “championing the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people”. He made no mention of oil.
Price denied there was a “quid pro quo” for Maduro releasing two US prisoners shortly after the US delegation left Caracas. “For us, there can be no trade-off,” he said.
On Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said any sanctions relief for Venezuela “has to be tied to concrete steps that Maduro and the people around him take”.
The US decision to go to Venezuela initially looked like a startling policy volte-face. Washington broke ties with Maduro in 2019 after accusations he rigged an election, closed its embassy and sanctioned the Venezuelan oil industry in a bid to push him from power.
It also looked like a slap in the face for Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader who Washington has recognised as the legitimate president of Venezuela for the past three years. He was not involved in the talks.
It seemed the move might bolster Maduro by giving him additional leverage as a potential oil supplier to the US. He has survived US sanctions with support from Russia, which has provided arms, Iran, which has supplied refined fuel, and China, which has bought Venezuelan crude via intermediaries.
“The perception is that Maduro wins something with this visit from the US,” said Luis Vicente León, a pollster and political analyst in Caracas. “It makes him appear validated, if only indirectly. The US came to him. They’re not recognising his legitimacy but they are recognising his territorial control.”
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