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'It Will Not Work': Experts Question Venezuela Sanctions as Bolton Touts Them

By Tom Phillips and Dan Collyns

AS/COA's Eric Farnsworth said to The Guardian the US moves were partly an attempt to signal that efforts to unseat Maduro had not “plateaued”.

US national security adviser, John Bolton, has insisted Venezuela’s “tired dictator” was at “the end of his rope”, as he opened another front in the White House’s economic blitz on Nicolás Maduro by freezing all Venezuelan government assets in the United States.

Addressing a summit on Venezuela’s crisis in Peru’s capital, Lima, Bolton pronounced Maduro’s “dying regime” doomed – even though a seven-month US-backed campaign has so far failed to topple Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian successor...

But experts questioned the impact and wisdom of the measures, which Maduro’s administration and its Russian backers both branded “economic terrorism”...

Eric Farnsworth, a former US diplomat and vice-president of the Council of the Americas, said the US moves were partly an attempt to signal that efforts to unseat Venezuela’s strongman leader had not “plateaued”, as well as to further undermine Maduro.

“Obviously the goal here is to get Maduro out of power … [But] I don’t know what the trigger is to force him out – I don’t think anybody does. That’s part of the issue,” he admitted...

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