U.S. Puts Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami on Sanctions List
U.S. Puts Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami on Sanctions List
Official, placed on Treasury’s kingpins list, allegedly aided drug traffickers
By
Kejal Vyas and
Anatoly Kurmanaev
Updated Feb. 13, 2017 6:18 p.m. ET
Tareck El Aissami, vice president of Venezuela. Photo: Carlos Becerra/Bloomberg News
CARACAS, Venezuela—Vice President Tareck El Aissami has been put on a sanctions list by the U.S. Treasury Department for allegedly aiding drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists.
The move, announced by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, freezes any of Mr. El Aissami’s assets in the U.S.
The action is likely to heighten tensions between Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian government and the administration of President Donald Trump, who promised to defend Venezuelans against “oppression” during his presidential campaign.
Mr. El Aissami, 42, has been under investigation by U.S. prosecutors for allegedly aiding drug shipments from Venezuela, The Wall Street
Journal reported in 2015. In less than two decades, he rose from a provincial student organizer to the second-most-powerful man in the country under President Nicolás Maduro, with sweeping powers to allocate foreign currency, expropriate companies and jail his foes.
U.S. law-enforcement officials believe that as Venezuela’s interior minister and then as governor of the central Aragua state, Mr. El Aissami provided material aid to drug traffickers shipping Colombian cocaine to Europe and the U.S. through Venezuelan ports, according to four people familiar with the investigation. “What he did was charge for the routes,” said one of the people.
Mr. El Aissami also allegedly used his control of Venezuela’s immigration agency to sell passports and visas to citizens of Middle Eastern countries with terrorist ties, the people say.
People placed on the specially designated sanctions list, tied to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, have their assets blocked, and Americans and U.S. entities are prohibited from dealing with them. In the past few years, a number of high-ranking Venezuelan officials have been put on the list.
A spokeswoman for Mr. El Aissami and Venezuela’s Ministry of Communications didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. He and other Venezuelan officials previously have dismissed U.S. sanctions and accusations as attempts to destabilize the country’s leftist government.
Samark López, a Venezuelan financier who has several properties in Miami and is closely associated with Mr. El Aissami, was also placed on the special sanctions list Monday. A call to Mr. López’s lawyer seeking comment wasn’t immediately returned.
The two men join a number of current and former high-level Venezuelan officials who have been placed on the list for alleged offenses ranging from drug trafficking and aiding terrorism to human rights abuses.
In 2008, the Treasury placed two top military officers—Gen. Hugo Carvajal, the chief of military intelligence at the time, and Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, the head of Venezuela’s civilian intelligence agency—on the so-called kingpin list. The two, along with a third official, were alleged to have assisted the drug trafficking activities of Colombia’s communist guerrillas. Four other officials were put on the list the following year for the same reason.
Gen. Carvajal was later indicted on a charge of drug trafficking in Miami and New York in 2014. That year, he was briefly detained on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, but was freed after the Dutch government determined that he had diplomatic immunity.
Another seven Venezuelan officials were also sanctioned by Treasury for human rights violations following the Venezuelan government’s violent crackdown on a wave of protests in 2015 in which 43 people died.
Write to Kejal Vyas at
kejal.vyas@wsj.com and Anatoly Kurmanaev at
Anatoly.kurmanaev@wsj.com
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