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Updated 2 hours ago
WASHINGTON — In a major escalation of its confrontation with Venezuela, the United States on Monday accused that country's vice president of drug trafficking and money laundering.
The Trump administration said it acted after a years-long investigation into Vice President Tareck El Aissami's ties to the international drug trade.
El Aissami, Venezuela's former minister of interior who was once the governor of Aragua state, is the highest-ranking Venezuelan to be hit by U.S. sanctions, which included a freeze on all his known U.S. assets, including several Miami properties and a private airplane.
U.S. officials said they moved as part of a long-standing commitment to hold people accountable regardless of their position or rank, and that the U.S. government's political differences with Venezuela had not influenced the decision.
“The message is not a political one,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity under the ground rules of a briefing for reporters. “It's not an economic one. It's not a diplomatic one. It's about going after international narcotics trafficking. And we do that aggressively.”' Nonetheless, the new sanctions will inflame already tense U.S.-Venezuela relations. The two countries haven't had full diplomatic relations since 2010, when Venezuela refused to accept the newly appointed American ambassador.
The Trump administration appears to be continuing, if not expanding, the Obama administration's efforts to increase pressure on high-ranking members of Venezuela's socialist government for their suspected role in allowing the country to become an important transit hub for narcotics. President Trump has raised concerns about developments Venezuela over the past couple of weeks with leaders in the Western Hemisphere, including a phone conversation over the weekend with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.
Florida members of Congress praised the decision. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., urged the government to take an even tougher stand.
“The Venezuelan government is run by corrupt, incompetent and criminal thugs who have inflicted misery on their own people and routinely used violence to crush dissent,” Rubio said.
Two Miami Republicans, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, praised the move. Ros-Lehtinen said the move signaled “a fundamental step in charting a positive role the United States can continue to play given the deteriorating crisis in Venezuela.”
El Aissami was named vice president last month amid a Cabinet shuffle by embattled President Nicolas Maduro. El Aissami is seen as a hard-liner in Maduro's United Socialist Party of Venezuela and a young star of the Maduro government.
Last week, a bipartisan group of 34 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to Trump urging him to step up pressure on Venezuela's government and El Aissami's alleged ties to drug trafficking and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
In November, a federal jury in New York two of Maduro's nephews of conspiring to smuggle more than 1,700 pounds of cocaine to the United States. Testimony at the nephews' trial said shipments would depart from the presidential hangar at the Caracas airport for Honduras, from where they would then travel on to the United States.
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