Politics The United States Treasury Department reported on Friday that it has frozen the assets that two top Venezuelan officials and one former minister have under US jurisdiction and prohibited them from conducting financial transactions "for materially assisting the narcotics trafficking activities of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)," Colombia's largest rebel group, according to a press release posted on the Treasury web's site.

The sanctions imposed by the US Treasury Department affect explicitly two senior Venezuelan government officials: Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios and Henry de Jesús Rangel Silva, the head of the Directorate of Intelligence, Security and Prevention Services (Disip), as well as former minister of Interior and Justice, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, who resigned to the post this week.