Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has so brazenly disrespected his promise for free and fair elections that allies in Colombia and Brazil took to publicly condemning his crackdown on the opposition.

Barring the opposition’s primary winner, Maria Corina Machado, and her little-known substitute, Corina Yoris, from running in this year’s presidential race are among the latest violations of the deal that Maduro struck five months ago with the Biden administration to allow democratic elections in exchange for the removal of some of the crippling sanctions imposed years ago on the crisis-torn country.

By the Venezuelan opposition’s tally, the regime has now broken terms of the deal at least eight times.

Each snub raises the volume on an increasingly uncomfortable question for officials in Washington: whether or not to reimpose crucial oil and gas sanctions during an election year. Migration has emerged as a key issue for U.S. voters, and Biden would be hard-pressed to take any steps that could worsen the economic or political situation in a country that has already sent so many people to the U.S. southern border.

“Washington is in a difficult position,” said Geoff Ramsey, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. “The challenge is how to reimpose sanctions while still retaining a degree of leverage over Maduro, keeping the government at the table.”

So far, the U.S. has released a statement saying it was deeply concerned, and that “actions that run counter to the spirit and letter of the Barbados Agreement will have consequences.”

The U.S. has also imposed an April deadline with a vague request for Venezuela to follow through on democratic commitments or face reinstated oil and gas sanctions.

The most likely scenario is that the administration lets the “general license 44,” which authorizes transactions involving the oil and gas sector in Venezuela, to expire unceremoniously, three people with knowledge of the plans have said. The Biden administration would still retain “license 41,“ which authorizes Chevron Corp to produce crude oil and petroleum products in its projects in Venezuela, one of the people said. They all requested anonymity to talk about the plan as it’s not yet public.

In January, after a Venezuelan court ruling ratified Machado’s ban on running for public office, the U.S. revoked a license that allowed dealings with state-owned gold producer Minerven.

Failing Deal

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