White House plays down summit spat with Venezuela

The White House said today Venezuela is not a security threat, in a disavowal aimed at defusing a controversy just days before Presidents Barack Obama and Nicolas Maduro come face-to-face at a regional summit.
Senior US officials said recent sanctions on seven people linked to the Venezuelan government were not designed to inflame tensions, but to address human rights abuses.
Maduro and his supporters attacked US legal wording that declared Venezuela a threat to national security, and even US allies criticized the timing of the sanctions, weeks before the upcoming Summit of the Americas.
"The wording, which got a lot of attention is completely pro-forma," said Ben Rhodes, a senior advisor to Obama.

"The United States does not believe that Venezuela poses some threat to our national security, we frankly just have a framework for how we formulate these executive orders."
Rhodes said the sanctions were prompted by Congress and were "not of a scale that was in any way aimed at targeting the Venezuelan government broadly or bringing about some type of dramatic change in terms of the government of Venezuela."

While all eyes at the summit will be on a possible first substantive meeting between US and Cuban leaders in more than half a century, thawing ties between the Cold War enemies risk being overshadowed by the spat with Venezuela.

Ricardo Zuniga, Obama's top Latin America advisor, said: "We don't have any hostile designs on Venezuela."
"We have an interest in the success of Venezuela... Its prosperity, its security, its stability, its democracy. We are Venezuela's largest trading partner.