Benavides Torres (commander in the Bolivarian National Armed Forces), González López (head of Bolivarian National Intelligence Service), and Noguera Pietri (president of the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana), are just three of the seven individuals targeted by sanctions freezing assets and barring travel to the United States. All have been implicated in various human rights abuses linked to the opposition protest movement that swept through Venezuela last year.

The sanctions come at a difficult time for the Venezuelan economy. The much-shared and eyebrow-raising recent headline that the government wants to install fingerprint scanners in supermarkets to stop panic buying encapsulates the country’s bleak economic prospects. Venezuela topped Bloomberg’s ‘economic misery index’ last month thanks in large part to an inflation rate of around 60%. The IMF estimated a GDP contraction of 3% in 2014, and is projecting another 1% contraction for 2015.