The United States on Friday promised further sanctions to pressure Venezuela's leftist leader Nicolas Maduro, accusing him of bribing lawmakers to block the re-election of his opponent Juan Guaido.
The National Assembly will vote on January 5 on whether to give a new term to Guaido, the 36-year-old engineer considered interim president by most Western and Latin American countries.
"The regime is using a combination of threats, arrests and bribes - up to $500,000 per vote, we have been told - to stop the re-election of Juan Guaido," Elliott Abrams, the US envoy leading efforts to oust Maduro, told reporters in Washington.
"That is Step One. Step Two will be to try to grab control of the National Assembly by preventing free elections in 2020," he said. "That is why we will continue our sanctions and strengthen them," Abrams said.
He declined to preview the sanctions. The US has already sought to end Venezuela's shipments of oil, its vital money-maker.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019
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