...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeds places like Honduras and El Salvador, and a significant proportion of the populace as refugeed to Colombia and points south...n government officials accused of taking bribes to issue passports, the US Treasury said.
The sanctions targeted Gustavo Adolfo Vizcaino Gil, head of the government department in charge of identification documents and migration, as well as his predecessor Juan Carlos Dugarte Padron, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said.
Any assets the two men possess under US jurisdiction will be frozen, the office said.
It said the scheme to sell passports for thousands of dollars dated back at least to April 2016 when Dugarte was named as head of the government department and continued under Vizcaino, who took over in June 2018.
More than 4.5 million Venezuelans have fled the country, mostly for neighboring Latin American countries, after years of economic crisis.