U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio presented a bill this Thursday to increase reward money for information leading to the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The Law to Ensure Timely Payment Opportunities and Maximize Rewards for Detaining Illegal Regime Officials (STOP MADURO) 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 withheld from Maduro, officials of the Maduro regime and his co-conspirators, not taxpayer funds,” said Sen. Rick Scott, one of the authors of the initiative, 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 officials of the regime, the asset seizures total approximately $450 million,” the statement said.
In a tweet published on the X social media platform, Sen. Marco Rubio that “the U.S. must do more to arrest narco-dictator Nicolás Maduro. I’ve called for Interpol to issue a red alert to facilitate this, and this legislation builds on that call by increasing the reward for Maduro's arrest to $100 million. Maduro is one of the most corrupt conspirators of the Venezuelan regime and its past time for him to be held accountable for his crimes,” he said.
https://t.co/E43TWYJ1ue pic.twitter.com/Gg18GWR0Av
— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) September 19, 2024
Congressmen Mario Díaz-Balart and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are leading the bipartisan legislation in the House of Representatives, and it is co-sponsored by Reps. Carlos A. Giménez, Jenniffer González-Colón, María Elvira Salazar, Mike Waltz, Chris Smith and Darren Soto.
Díaz-Balart stated that, “for almost two months since the July 28 'elections', in which the Venezuelan people voted overwhelmingly for president-elect Edmundo González, the Maduro regime has only intensified its brutal repression”:
Increase the reward for narco-dictator Maduro to $100 million pic.twitter.com/anaxyNGGSs
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 19, 2024
The Florida congressman described the Maduro regime as a “criminal organization” that supports narcoterrorism, represses independent media and violates human rights.
“The lifting of sanctions has endangered our national security, helping a regime closely allied with dangerous adversaries such as Russia, Iran, Cuba and the People's Republic of China,” he pointed out.
Maduro was declared the winner of the elections with 51.2% of the votes without showing evidence of the result, while the opposition denounced fraud and published the electoral records on a website that gave victory to his candidate Edmundo González Urrutia with the 67% of the votes.
After the Maduro regime controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) gave the results in favor of Maduro, several protests broke out throughout the country, leaving 27 dead, 192 injured and 2,400 detained.
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