Bringing Home Hostages
Terry H. Schwadron
Dec. 27, 2023
Quietly last week amid a lot of news developments, Joe Biden brought home 10 American hostages from Venezuela who had been “wrongly detained” according to our State Department.
It was the beginning of the release of 30 Americans in all in return for the release of alleged money launderAlex Nain Saab MoránVenezual, a personal ally of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. Saab, a Colombian businessman, was indicted in the U.S. and Colombia for money laundering and other crimes on behalf of the Venezuelan government.
In what seems important here in another “extremely complex” and “fragile” agreement, is without a lot of hoopla, Biden has scored yet another release of Americans from hostile governments through seemingly careful steps in arranging trades. This one also involved the release of 20 Venezuelans held as political prisoners.
Among other things, the deal also returns to the United States Leonard Francis, a Malaysian national and defense contractor nicknamed “Fat Leonard,” for prosecution. He fled to Venezuela in 2022 to evade prosecutors who wanted him on charges of running a widespread scheme to bribe Navy officials. According to the charges, he gave Navy officials gifts, cash, prostitutes, and luxury travel in exchange for secret information that benefited his port logistics company.
Over the Biden years, the administration has negotiated a few prisoner swaps with major adversaries, including a controversial hostage deal with Iran earlier this year and the exchange of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA player Brittney Griner.
For his part, Biden, who says getting Americans released has been a priority, has been relatively more open about paying a price in these exchanges than his predecessors.
As a result, Biden gets more criticism than huzzahs for making these deals, in part because prisoner exchanges are involved and the second-guessers always believe that they would have set a different price, and in part because Biden gets more blame than cheers for almost anything his government achieves.
Donald Trump set up several prisoner exchanges as well, though not as many as he claims or without “giving up anything.”
Still, hostage exchanges are likely not to be a big campaign issue.
A Rising Problem of Hostage-Taking
Indeed, the whole business of state-sponsored arrests are on the rise in hopes that a prisoner swap can be reached. What makes it all controversial, naturally, is the name of the traded prisoner or, in the case of Iran, the release of Iranian assets in the West.
NBC News reminds us that U.S. law prohibits paying ransom to terrorist groups seizing American hostages, part of a “no concessions” policy that dates to the 1970s. But Americans unjustly imprisoned by other governments are defined as “wrongfully detained,” and U.S. law does not prohibit the executive branch from offering concessions to another state to get them out.
The United States and Venezuela have long been at odds over human rights abuses and drug trafficking. Nothing in this deal removes any of several economic sanctions that the U.S. has imposed over the years.
Venezula has suffered economic struggles for years under Maduro and the U.S. sanctions. It has been in the news because so many migrants reaching the U.S. southern border were fleeing poverty in Venezuela. The country also is involved in an international land-grab of mineral -rich rainforest from neighboring Guyana. Interestingly, officials from Qatar, a Middle Eastern country that has been key to Israeli-Hamas on-again, off-again negotiations, helped to facilitate quiet talks over months between members of Maduro’s government and U.S. officials.
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