Biden raises bounty for Nicolás Maduro to $25 million
BOGOTA, Colombia — The Biden administration said Friday that it was offering $25 million for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, after he assumed a third term in office despite evidence suggesting that he lost Venezuela’s recent election.
The announcement was a retaliatory measure by Washington, which does not recognize Maduro as the rightful president of Venezuela. Maduro has presented no evidence that he won a July election, while his opponent Edmundo González has presented thousands of publicly available vote tallies that he says indicate he easily won the most votes.
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The United States has said that González is the president-elect of Venezuela and has urged Maduro to step aside.
The Biden administration also announced that it was extending protections for roughly 600,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the United States with temporary protected status. The measure allows those who apply to stay for an extra 18 months.
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said the decision to raise the bounty on Maduro was part of “a concerted message of solidarity with the Venezuelan people,” meant “to further elevate international efforts to maintain pressure on Mr. Maduro and his representatives.”
Such rewards are widely considered more symbolic than a serious effort to effect an arrest. The $25 million bounty is an increase from a $15 million reward set by the Trump administration in 2020.
But that measure did nothing to sway Maduro from taking a third six-year term. And some critics have even argued that this reward strategy has further entrenched Maduro by making it harder for him to leave power.
If he leaves the presidency, he would be extremely vulnerable to arrest.
In 2020, Maduro was indicted in the United States, accused in a decades-long narco-terrorism and international cocaine trafficking conspiracy.
Officials from the Biden administration said Friday that the United States would also offer $25 million for information leading to the capture of the country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, up from $10 million.
And the State Department added another reward: $15 million for help with detention of Venezuela’s defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López.
Just minutes after Maduro was sworn in Friday for another term, the U.S. Treasury Department also said it was placing new sanctions on eight Venezuelan officials, adding to about 180 Maduro allies and other Venezuelans already under sanction.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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