May 20: Bill S-2142

Today, the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed on a bill that would see sanctions imposed on any Venezuelan official found to be responsible for the human rights violations that have taken place in the country since the start of this latest round of protests on February 12. The bill will now move to the Senate, where it will face a vote.

The bill is called S-2142 Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014, and can be viewed in its entirety here.

Bill S-2142 looks to place “targeted sanctions on persons responsible for violations of human rights of anti government protesters in Venezuela“, and sights the country’s high inflation rate, along with reports of human rights violations documented by Human Rights Watch, as pretexts for the sanctions. It also cites the “chronic mismanagement by the Government of Venezuela of its economy” as the root cause for the country’s economic condition, including the scarcity crisis. Moreover, the bill criticises the government for failing to “guarantee the minimal standards of public security for its citizens“.

Overall, the bill is extremely critical of the Maduro government, and it lays the blame for the condition the country finds itself in squarely at its feet. Section 5 of the bill gives President Obama the authority to place sanctions on any government official who has “perpetrated, or is responsible for ordering, controlling, or otherwise directing, significant acts of violence or serious human rights abuses in Venezuela”, and more general on any official that is generally related to the violation of human rights.

Specifically on the sanctions themselves, the bill allows for “asset blocking” and “exclusion from the United States and revocation of visa or other documentation“.

Maduro spoke on the bill today, saying:

I hate the interference by these ultra-right sectors from the United States, and I hate the words of that [Roberta] Jacobson (…) What do you, Mrs. Jacobson, have to do with the process of dialogue in Venezuela?

Roberta Jacobson is the Unites States Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and is the top U.S. government official on Latin American affairs.

In Other News

Heeding a call from a group of professors, 18 universities across the country will close their doors this Thursday in solidarity with the students who have been arrested since February 12. The president of the Federation of Associations of Venezuelan University Professors, Lourdes Ramirez de Viloria, said:

Our students are not delinquents. They treat them as if they were just for exercising their constitutional right to protest.

A picture of burning garbage in Altamira from earlier this evening:

Finally, an undated picture. The sign reads, “Ideas are bullet proof. Freedom forever!”