The Biden administration recently shifted its Venezuela policy—and it’s already in trouble. Whereas the previous administration heaped a pile of sanctions on the Maduro regime in an effort to stymie its human rights abuses and corruption, the Biden administration has presided over a significant softening of the Venezuelan sanctions architecture.
This softening amounts to a major test of the administration’s ability to reach what has been a bipartisan goal of freer and fairer presidential elections in Venezuela, on a longer road to full re-democratization. But now Maduro is returning to his old antics of arresting opposition figures and is even threatening to annex Esequibo, a region administered by neighboring Guyana but long disputed by Venezuela. It’s clear that the Biden administration must reboot its Venezuela policy or face strategic insolvency against an adversarial regime.
Following the October signing of two partial accords in Barbados between the Maduro regime and the opposition Unitary Platform, the Biden administration announced a six-month period of sanctions relief for Maduro. This was in effect a huge gamble, permitting the Maduro regime a near full return to international oil, gas, minerals, and secondary bonds markets. A windfall beckons for Maduro, with the temporary relief potentially equating to $10 billion in additional revenue—more than one-tenth of Venezuela’s GDP—at a critical time.
The Barbados agreements are a set of narrow accords that do not commit the Maduro regime to major concessions on freer and fairer presidential elections in Venezuela. The regime did pledge space for independent media, election observation missions, and respect for internal candidate selection process. However, the electoral apparatus remains under the influence of the regime, the media is dominated by Maduro’s allies, and censorship ensures a steady drumbeat of regime views in major outlets.
The Biden administration imposed two additional demands in exchange for sanctions relief. First, the Maduro regime must release political prisoners, including unjustly detained American citizens. Second, the Maduro regime had to outline a procedure for lifting candidate bans, which have blocked the country’s political opposition for years.
The most significant of these bans is on María Corina Machado, the resounding winner of the Unitary Platform’s primary, who is prevented from competing in 2024. The Biden administration announced that it would review progress on these demands by Nov. 30, with the threat of a “snapback” on sanctions if the Maduro regime balked.
The Maduro regime’s recent course of action should be interpreted as having violated the Barbados agreements. This tracks a pattern of behavior from the previous seven agreements between the opposition and regime. For instance, the regime has run afoul of its commitment to media outlets covering the primary—it did this through censorship, harassment, and intimidation, as well as cutting internet access during the transmission of poll results.
Machado’s triumphant victory, in which she won 92 percent of the vote, had barely receded when the Maduro regime launched an investigation into the primary process, and through its control of the Supreme Court, “suspended” the results. The regime has also forced primary organizers to appear before prosecutors and demanded information on those who participated, potentially compromising the identities of millions and exposing them to coercion and punishment, as happened after a recall referendum against then-President Hugo Chávez in 2004.
Consider, also, the Maduro regime’s manufactured crisis with its neighbor Guyana. The regime has engaged in a massive campaign of distraction by reactivating an old claim to Esequibo, a territory administered by Guyana. While it is easier to stake a claim than to pitch a tent, Maduro has whipped the country into a nationalist frenzy, threatened to fully annex the territory, and announced plans to administer and develop it. This has put much of South America on high alert, and it has also worked to blunt the opposition’s momentum.
Meanwhile, Maduro has launched investigations into opposition figures for “treason” and issued arrest warrants for several members of Machado’s team on the spurious basis that they took money from ExxonMobil, which is one of the primary companies operating in Esequibo.
With the Biden administration’s end of November deadline nearly reached, the Maduro regime presented a “process” for lifting candidate bans. The process requires banned candidates to request the admission of their appeal with the country’s comptroller general. If admissibility is granted, the case will then be decided by Venezuela’s Supreme Court—the same regime-controlled institution that recently suspended the results of the opposition’s primary.
Problematically, once decisions have been rendered on political bans, opposition candidates are expressly prohibited from speaking about and criticizing those decisions—in essence inserting a censorship clause into the process.
Yet the Biden administration did not move to reimpose sanctions on the Maduro regime at this point. In fact, senior administration officials said that they “welcome the announcement of a process to reinstate all candidates for the 2024 Venezuelan election.” The Biden administration’s blessing of Maduro’s process has afforded the regime an alternative—and more face-saving—avenue to continue its electoral machinations.
Since its inception, one of the most enduring features of Chavismo as a political movement is not only that it maneuvers to win most elections, but that it also leverages tools such as candidate bans and cooptation of political parties to confront an ersatz opposition. Now, rather than having to force a do-over of the opposition’s primary, which would have induced an outcry from the international community, Maduro has the Biden administration’s blessing to review candidate bans and use the sham process as another tool to ensure its preferred opponent in 2024.
Venezuela, after all, placed dead last in the World Justice Project’s annual Rule of Law Index, with the entry noting the near absolute control exercised by the executive over nominally independent institutions.
In other words, the “process” in question is tantamount to Maduro indicating when he will decide on candidate bans, all while masquerading as rule of law. The inclusion of institutions with no independence will permit Maduro to claim that candidates had their day in (regime-controlled) court, followed by an enforceable ban on their ability to speak out.
Given that her ban was just “reaffirmed” by the same comptroller general in June, it is unimaginable that Machado will win her appeal and thus the right to run for president in 2024. The Biden administration will be complicit in the sidelining of an opposition candidate who received an unprecedented 92 percent of the primary vote.
This failure of American policy stems from a lack of understanding of Maduro’s calculations. It is likely that the value of sanctions relief to Maduro’s reelection efforts decreased upon witnessing the opposition’s primary, wherein throngs of people previously attracted to Chavismo lined up to vote for the change Machado represents. An expected boost in the regime’s social spending would be insufficient to compensate for Maduro’s abysmal approval ratings. While sanctions relief is a necessary condition for Maduro to reactivate Venezuela’s moribund economy, it is not existential. The regime has already rebuffed a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign by utilizing repression and following the mantra that “poverty is better than defeat.”
Moreover, by failing to message clearly to Maduro the exact costs of not abiding by the Barbados agreements, senior Biden administration officials encouraged him to take his chances. Maduro is betting that even if the Biden administration does reimpose sanctions eventually, the new architecture will still be a net positive for his regime.
Lastly, Maduro has several tools at his disposal to push back. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have been forced to migrate because of widespread and systematic human rights abuses and an economic implosion, with 50,000 of them showing up at the southern U.S. border in the month before the Barbados agreements. Maduro may threaten to rip up a recent agreement to accept returnee flights; this would generate trouble for Biden’s own reelection efforts. Maduro also understands the importance of the price of gas in U.S. elections and seems to have convinced Biden that in the tight international market engendered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East, the United States could use more Venezuelan crude.
All signs point to the Biden administration’s desire to normalize relations with Venezuela, and Maduro knows that.
The Biden administration is understandably reticent to signal strategic failure by reimposing sanctions mere months after lifting them, but it must realize that providing permanent relief to a regime that has offered only a sham pathway to freer and fairer elections, threatened kinetic action against its neighbor, and continues to arrest opposition figures would also represent strategic insolvency. Moreover, the Maduro regime has not released any unjustly detained Americans from its cells—in fact, it abducted a new American political prisoner since signing the Barbados agreements.
The “facts on the ground” should send the Biden administration back to the drawing board regarding its operative theory of change in Venezuela. Given her democratic mandate and large margin of victory, the Biden administration should not recognize an election in which Machado is prohibited from running.
And yet, that is exactly the scenario facing both U.S. policy and the Venezuelan opposition. Once again, Maduro has maneuvered to stage manage the election and position himself to face a weak opposition candidate lacking Machado’s appeal.
In addition to preventing the Maduro regime from any misadventures by establishing deterrence with Guyana, a U.S. partner, the Biden administration must be guided by two overarching goals. First, a freer and fairer election, and second, an election in which Machado is eligible to run.
Finding convergence on these two goals has proven elusive. However, if it fails to reverse course, the Biden administration’s operative theory of change in Venezuela will amount to hoping for a black swan event—an opposition victory with a candidate approved by Maduro.