WASHINGTON, March 30 (NNN-EFE) — The United States is trying to persuade China that its economic interests in Venezuela will be at risk as long as President Nicolas Maduro remains in power, the US special envoy for the oil-rich South American nation told EFE here Friday.
“We have had discussions with China about their economic and financial relations with Venezuela. And the main message is a simple one: you have investments, you have commerce, you have loans, you will never get it back while this regime is destroying the economy of Venezuela,” Elliott Abrams said.
Abrams said he raised the issue with the Chinese ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, and that Washington’s envoy to China, Terry Branstad, made the same point in conversations with senior officials in Beijing.
China is Venezuela’s largest creditor, having lent Caracas nearly $62 billion over the last 10 years, roughly two-thirds of which has been repaid, according to data from Boston University and Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think-tank.
Maduro’s government is repaying part of its debt to China in the form of oil. Last year, the Asian giant trailed only the US and India in imports of Venezuelan crude.
While the US continues to import crude from Venezuela, the sanctions Washington imposed in January on Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA have stopped the revenues from flowing to the Maduro government.
Besides lobbying China, the US has sought to persuade India to reduce imports of Venezuelan oil.
“In the case of India, we had discussions, we urged Indian companies, the Indian government to reduce, and reduce and reduce the level of their purchases from Venezuela,” Abrams told EFE.
“They have been very cooperative and I think it’s worth saying that from the beginning they were anxious to cooperate with the United States and if you look at the numbers, the level of Indian purchases is continuing to decline,” he said.
During a visit to Washington earlier this month by India Foreign Minister Vijay Gokhale, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly exhorted India to “not be the economic lifeline for the Maduro regime.”
A day before Gokhale traveled to the US capital, India’s leading customer for Venezuelan oil, Reliance Industries Ltd., announced a cap on purchases from the South American nation.
The US has been reaching out to a wide range of stakeholders in the petroleum sector, Abrams said.
“We have said to people involved in the oil industry – in some cases shippers or insurers, in some cases governments, in some cases oil-trading companies – that there are a lot of US sanctions now on Venezuela and there will probably be more, watch out,” the special envoy said.
“In some cases people are violating the sanctions, in other cases they’re not, but they’re very close to it and so we are urging them don’t get involved in this net, watch out what you’re doing, and we have urged them of course to stop trading in oil that belongs to the Venezuelan people and that the regime is misusing,” Abrams said.
The US has had sanctions in effect against Venezuela since 2015, but the punitive measures were ratcheted up after Donald Trump became president in 2017.
The effort against the leftist Maduro government shifted into an even higher gear on Jan. 23, when the speaker of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled National Assembly, Juan Guaido, denounced the incumbent’s May 2018 re-election was fraudulent and proclaimed himself interim president.
The US recognized Guaido within hours and some 50 other countries followed suit. China, Russia and India are among the dozens of countries that continue to support Maduro. — NNN-EFE
