NEW YORK -- More than a dozen Latin American countries agreed Monday to sanction individuals associated with corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking and human-rights violations in Venezuela in a move designed to further isolate and eventually oust President Nicolas Maduro.
The agreement came as President Donald Trump's administration criticized what it called a limp European response to the crisis, renewing demands for more aid for refugees.
The broadsides, delivered as leaders arrived for the annual U.N. General Assembly, sought to re-energize global support for Venezuelan opposition leaders who have been trying since January to oust Maduro from power.
The sanctions by the Latin American nations were spurred by a NATO-like treaty called the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, also known as the Rio Treaty. It is rooted in the principle that a threat to one member threatens all members.
Sixteen of the 19 signatories to the rarely used 1947 treaty, including the United States, voted to endorse the sanctions. Only Uruguay voted against it, while the single nation of Trinidad and Tobago abstained. Cuba was absent, but it is an outcast from the Organization of American States, which sponsored the meeting.
Under the treaty, all the signatories are required to share information and work together to compile a master list of former and current regime members and their families to whom sanctions would apply.
Though the diplomats stopped short of calling for military action, as the Rio Treaty would permit, they said it represents a big step in pressuring Maduro and his cronies in a way that almost a year of U.S. sanctions against more than 100 individuals have so far failed to do. For months, U.S. officials have said they believe Maduro's government was on the brink of collapse, but he has managed to maintain the support of most of the armed forces.
"This starts defining the path forward," said Carlos Trujillo, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, who participated in the meeting.
"Imagine the families of the accused trying to get out of the country by getting on a flight from Panama or Costa Rica," he added. "This puts pressure on the regime it has not had for the last 10 months."
Meanwhile, several European officials agreed that far more needed to be done to help the nearly 7 million Venezuelans in desperate need of food, safe water and medical supplies.
The numbers of refugees fleeing Venezuela -- expected to grow to 5 million by the end of 2019 -- "are terrifying," Edita Hrda, an EU diplomat, told an Atlantic Council forum in New York. She said plans to broaden assistance would be a focus of a conference in Brussels in late October.
The promise of a conference drew a retort from John Barsa, who oversees assistance to Venezuela for the U.S. Agency for International Development. He described meeting a pregnant Venezuelan woman last month in a Colombian border town.
"The first thing coming out of her mouth was not 'How's the conference planning going?'" Barsa said.
Information for this article was contributed by Lara Jakes of The New York Times; and by Carol Morello of The Washington Post.
A Section on 09/24/2019