Pascale Solages, an anti-corruption activist from Haiti, burst into tears of joy last month when she heard that the U.S. Treasury Department had finally slapped sanctions on Michel Martelly, a former president of Haiti who is accused of drug trafficking, money laundering and fueling violent gangs in Port-au-Prince. It was a sign that the U.S. government, which once supported Martelly, was actually listening to the Haitian people. And it raised her hopes that Martelly, who lives in Miami, might finally lose his political influence and be brought to justice.
“It’s a really important step,” she told me.
Her words struck me because I’ve been critical of the proliferation of U.S. sanctions in recent years, after binge-reading research papers on the collateral damage they cause. The more I read, the more convinced I became that crippling sanctions on entire countries — as in the case of Cuba, Iran and Venezuela — are counterproductive. They create widespread misery but strengthen autocrats’ grip on power by bankrupting independent businesses that might have served as counterweights. Those left standing become beholden to the regime or to criminal networks that can help them sidestep U.S. laws.
Sanctions also backfire by driving adversaries like Cuba, Iran and Venezuela further into the arms of Russia and China, solidifying what has been called an “axis of the sanctioned.” Don’t take my word for it. Read the analysis The Washington Post published this summer about how even senior U.S. officials fear that sanctions, which have become a tool of first resort, are being overused. Or read the letter that hundreds of legal scholars from around the world wrote to President Joe Biden last month, in which they described sanctions on Iran, Cuba, Syria and North Korea as “collective punishment.”
But asset freezes and visa bans on individuals — like the former Haitian president — can be a different story.
Targeting keptocrats and human-rights abusers
Targeted sanctions like those are often the only way kleptocrats and human rights abusers ever get held accountable. While the sanctions might not change behavior, they send a strong signal and impose a stigma that can serve warnings to others. They cause less collateral damage, and they provide more opportunities to craft deals that can change the status quo. After being imposed, they give the United States a valuable bargaining chip, such as the promise to unfreeze assets if the offender releases political prisoners or steps down from power.
Thomas J. Biersteker, who advises the United Nations and several governments on designing effective targeted sanctions, told me that targeted sanctions on individual people “offer more choices and opportunities” than sweeping sanctions on entire countries. He thinks governments should be more strategic about how they are used, and the governments should experiment more often with rolling them back to see if that produces a change in behavior. “That’s why I say that sanctions are overused but underutilized,” he said.
They aren’t perfect. Questions about due process — how much proof of bad behavior should be required to impose sanctions on someone, and whether their spouses or children are fair game — remain unresolved.
Yet, in countries that are keen to stay on Washington’s good side, subjecting one bad guy to sanctions can produce swift results.
Examples …
In 2019, sanctions against a corrupt Latvian oligarch prompted the government of Latvia to strip him of control over a port that he ran. In 2022, U.S. sanctions against a notoriously corrupt Ukrainian judge helped spur some long-awaited judicial reforms.
And last year in Guatemala, targeted sanctions helped rescue the country’s democratically elected president, Bernardo Arévalo — an anti-corruption crusader — from a coup by the kleptocratic elite. When powerful forces looked poised to block Arévalo from taking office, two things saved the country’s democracy. The first was an unexpectedly strong protest movement initiated by Indigenous leaders and young people in Guatemala. The second was the Biden-Harris administration, which canceled nearly 300 U.S. visas of members of Guatemala’s elite and slapped sanctions on Miguel Martínez, a close associate of the incumbent president, Alejandro Giammattei, for corruption and “interfering with the country’s democratic transfer of power.”
A month later, Arévalo was sworn in. “The Biden administration and Kamala Harris has been very important for democracy in Guatemala,” Andrea Reyes, a Guatemalan lawmaker from the Seed Movement party, told me.
Of course, such victories are fragile and most elusive in countries that don’t mind antagonizing Washington. In Venezuela, the bleeding wound of the Western Hemisphere, the Biden administration eased oil sanctions in exchange for a free and fair election. But President Nicolás Maduro has refused to give up power since the presidential election in July, in which he was almost certainly defeated. Instead, he is digging in, cracking down on protesters and political rivals. Edmundo González, a former diplomat who is widely believed to have won the election, fled the country for Spain. María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition, has gone into hiding.
The United States can’t just sit back and do nothing. It has little choice but to continually add people to the list of sanctioned Venezuelans. Even if the sanctions won’t pry Maduro from power, they are one way to extract some modicum of justice for the people of Venezuela.
Infamous members of the Maduro regime
Maduro and his wife have already been hit with sanctions, but there’s a slew of businessmen connected to the regime who remain untouched, including 232 current and former military officers who live in Florida or own businesses there, according to Ewald Scharfenberg, a Venezuelan investigative journalist.
“It is almost a joke,” he told me.
His reporting suggests that one of the most infamous members of the Maduro regime, Alexander Enrique Granko Arteaga, who was accused of torture by the European Union, manages to keep a financial foot in Florida through a network of companies owned by his relatives and allies, despite being hit personally with U.S. sanctions in 2019.
He argues that targeting businessmen connected to Maduro in Florida might weaken support for the regime. “They want to enjoy their wealth not in Havana or Belarus, but in London or Paris or Miami — mainly Miami, which is the dream of every Venezuelan,” Scharfenberg said.
It may well be that the biggest benefit such sanctions can bring is boosting the morale of activists on the ground who are risking their lives and searching for signs that the dictatorship might one day be defeated. Adam Keith, director for accountability at Human Rights First, who works with human rights defenders around the world, told me, “Hearing from an outside voice as powerful as the U.S. government means something to them.”
Fighting corruption and impunity
For Solages, it means vindication. She has spent the last six years fighting corruption and impunity in Haiti through her organization, Nou Pap Dòmi — and trying to get U.S. officials to acknowledge that the former president was involved in drug trafficking and gangs, and do something about it. She’s been forced to flee her country, and friends of hers have been killed in the struggle for justice and better governance of Haiti.
Sanctions alone are not enough, she said. “We want to see them go to jail,” she told me. “We want to seize what they stole from the country.” But sanctions at least serve as some sort of promise that Haitians’ struggle will not be in vain.
Farah Stockman writes for the New York Times.
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