Florida Democrat congresswoman Donna Shalala and six other representatives –three Republicans amongst them–, introduced a bipartisan bill in the U.S. Congress to restrict the export of riot gears and crime control material from the United States to Venezuela. Specifically, to the security forces that remain under of the government of Nicolas Maduro, “a government that is not recognized as the legitimate government of Venezuela by the government of the United States.”
If approved, the draft introduced by Shalala proposes that the law be called the Venezuela Arms Restriction Act.
The Florida representative, a former minister of the Bill Clinton administration, announced it herself on January 31 in her official Twitter account. The first bill she introduces for this term as a member of the House of Representatives:
https://twitter.com/repshalala/status/1090749725672910850?s=12
The purpose of this bill is “to restrict the transfer of defense articles, defense services and crime control articles to any element of the security forces of Venezuela that is under the authority of a government of Venezuela that is not recognized as the legitimate government of Venezuela by the Government of the United States, and for other purposes,” as the document eads.
“These tools, like tear gas and riot gear, are often used by the illegitimate Maduro regime to attack its own people, often with lethal consequences. We cannot allow Maduro to continue to steamroll democracy and act with impunity,” Shalala wrote in the same tweet.
There is not a visible figure on the amount of items and money exchanged for the export of these arms and materials from the United States. The data is not shown in the statistics.
A Congresswoman Shalala’s press release says that “some of these elements” have been already restricted since 2006.
It refers, as an article by Al Navío elaborates on, to the fact that, since that year, Venezuela is on a blacklist of countries that, according to the U.S. State Department, “do not cooperate fully with the United States in counterterrorism efforts.”
“And that includes the ban of exports of defense material and the provision of military and defense services, as well as the issuance of licenses for the export of weapons and technology,” journalist María Rodríguez writes in the same piece.
The bill demands the Department of State, and the Department of Commerce, if necessary, to submit to Congress, within 180 days after the law’s enactment, a report on the foreign citizens involved in the transfer of these items and services from the US to Maduro’s forces.
This report should include a list of all significant transfers of this type; a list of all foreign citizens who maintain an existing defense relationship with Maduro’s security forces; any known use of such items or services by Venezuelan security forces or “associated forces, including paramilitary groups, that have coordinated with such security forces to assault, intimidate, or murder political activists, protesters, dissidents, and other civil society leaders”.
The other six congressmen accompanying this initiative, as the Shalala website confirms, are Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Stephanie Murphy, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Darren Soto Democrats from Florida; Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican from the same state; and Jennifer Gonzalez, a Republican from Puerto Rico.
Photo credit: UN news