CARACAS (TRT) - Venezuela has condemned a U.S. decision to double the bounty for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro, calling the move “pathetic” and “ridiculous.”
“The pathetic ‘bounty’... is the most ridiculous smokescreen we have ever seen,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil wrote on Telegram on Thursday, hours after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the increase, TRT reported.
Gil said the increased bounty is designed to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein controversy in the U.S.
“It does not surprise us, coming from who it comes from. The same one who promised a non-existent ‘secret list’ of Epstein and who wallows in scandals of political favours,” he said.
“Her show is a joke, a desperate distraction from her own miseries. The dignity of our homeland is not for sale. We reject this crude political propaganda operation,” the Venezuelan minister said.
The U.S. has offered a $50m reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, doubling an earlier reward of $25m set by the Trump administration in January.
The U.S. has accused the Venezuelan leader of being one of the world’s leading narco-traffickers and working with cartels to flood the U.S. with fentanyl-laced cocaine.
In a video posted to social media on Thursday announcing the “historic” increase in reward money, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi accused Maduro of collaborating with Venezuelan crime syndicates Tren de Aragua, Cartel of the Suns and the notorious Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.
Bondi said that the U.S. Department of Justice had so far seized more than $700m in assets linked to Maduro, including two private jets, nine vehicles, and claimed that tonnes of seized cocaine had been traced directly to the president.
Maduro was indicted in a U.S. federal court in 2020, during the first Trump presidency, along with several close allies, on federal drug charges, Al Jazeera reported.
At the time, the U.S. offered a $15m reward for his arrest. That was later raised by the Biden administration to $25m – the same amount the US offered for the capture of Osama bin Laden following the September 11, 2001, attacks.