Venezuela’s Coming Nightmare Debt Holdout Saga?
Venezuela’s Coming Nightmare Debt Holdout Saga?
AS/COA’s Christopher Sabatini comments about the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s human rights violations and the country’s potential default.
Last week, Cleary Gottlieb – the US law firm representing Argentina in its debt negotiations – held a packed closed-door session on Venezuela. The question of the day was: what if Venezuela defaults? This week, the US Senate passed a bill that seeks to sanction Venezuelan officials for alleged human rights violations. Although these two events are not obviously related — and the sanctions bill still has to be approved by Congress, and signed into law by Barack Obama — they could become so. They both also illuminate the horrible mess that Venezuela could be heading into....
But since then, the mediation talks have failed “miserably, without even a whimper,” as Chris Sabatini, senior policy director at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, puts it. Furthermore, Latin American states have subsequently done nothing that might prompt investigation of Venezuelan human rights abuses, even as Caracas has ramped up persecution of opposition leaders while also ignoring calls from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights....
