by Marielbis Rojas
U.S. Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio on Thursday introduced a bill calling for increasing the reward for information leading to the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The Ensuring Timely Payment Opportunities and Maximizing Rewards for Stopping Illegal Regime Officials (STOP MADURO) Act seeks to increase the reward amount from $15 million to a maximum of $100 million.
“The reward would be paid by the federal government using seized assets already being held from Maduro, Maduro regime officials, and their co-conspirators, not taxpayer funds,” Sen. Rick Scott, one of the bill’s authors, said in a statement.
“According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida and its federal law enforcement partners who have filed dozens of criminal charges against high-level regime officials, asset seizures total approximately $450 million,” the text clarifies.
https://t.co/E43TWYJ1ue pic.twitter.com/Gg18GWR0Av
— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) September 19, 2024
For his part, Marco Rubio said that “the United States must do more to stop the narco-dictator Nicolás Maduro. I have asked Interpol to issue a red alert to facilitate this and this legislation is based on that request by increasing the reward for Maduro’s arrest to 100 million dollars.”
“Maduro is one of the most corrupt conspirators of the Venezuelan regime and it is time for him to be held accountable for his crimes,” he said.
Increase the reward for narco-dictator Maduro to $100 million pic.twitter.com/anaxyNGGSs
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 19, 2024
Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are leading the bipartisan legislation in the House of Representatives, and it is co-sponsored by Representatives Carlos A. Giménez, Jenniffer González-Colón, María Elvira Salazar, Mike Waltz, Chris Smith, and Darren Soto.
Díaz-Balart said that “for nearly two months since the July 28 ‘elections’, in which the Venezuelan people overwhelmingly voted for President-elect Edmundo González, the Maduro regime has only intensified its brutal repression”:
He also said that Maduro’s leadership is a “criminal organization” that supports narcoterrorism, represses independent media and violates human rights.
“Lifting sanctions has put our national security at risk by helping a regime closely allied with dangerous adversaries like Russia, Iran, Cuba, and the People’s Republic of China,” he said.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of the elections with 52% of the votes without showing proof of the result, while the opposition denounced fraud and published the electoral records on a website giving victory to its candidate Edmundo González Urrutia with 67% of the votes.
After the regime-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) announced the results in favor of Maduro, several protests broke out across the country, leaving a balance of 27 dead, 192 injured and 2,400 arrested.
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Marielbis Rojas is a Venezuelan journalist and communications professional, with a degree in Social Communication from UCAB. She is a news reporter for ADN América.
Photo “Nicolás Maduro” by Nicolás Maduro.
