How US decides to work with some alleged abusers but not others?

Boz writes about a new tool that might be available to the US to punish foreign officials who engage in serious human rights violations.

Welcome to S. 284: The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. It takes the US sanctions regime against Russia (which is very similar to the structure of the Venezuela sanctions passed last year), and applies them globally. Any government official or member of a security force who engages in extrajudicial executions or other serious violations of human rights can have their US visas revoked and assets seized inside the US.

As he alludes to in the title of his post, the sanctions could be applied to any number of countries in the Americas - US sanctions against Venezuela are about to be applied to Colombia, Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Cuba, etc.

Guatemala's Mauricio Lopez Bonilla. El Salvador's David Munguia Payes. Honduras's Juan Carlos "El Tigre" Bonilla.

All three have been linked to corruption and / or human rights abuses yet the US seems to highly value its relationship with these three individuals. Does the US not believe the allegations? Does the US believe that the positives that each man brings (or brought) to the job exceed the negatives? These men were appointed by the Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Honduran governments. The Obama administration has tried to take a non-ideological approach to Central America and we work to the best of our ability with those people that those governments appoint to sensitive positions? Are we providing evidence and sharing our concerns with these individuals behind closed doors rather than publicly?

I don't know. Our relationships with these individuals sure seem to undermine our efforts to fight corruption and promote respect for human rights in the Northern Triangle.

While these are clearly not the only people connected to human rights abuses and corruption, probably not even the worst, I have a hard time understanding how the US decides to work with some alleged abusers but not others.