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Nathaniel Meade
May 10, 2019

Sanctions are Murder in Venezuela

The current tensions in Venezuela have caused debates in the United States about the best way to address the issues currently facing the South American country. Branko Marcetic's article entitled "Sanctions are Murder" discusses the impact of United States economic sanctions on the Venezuelan population. Marcetic uses a study published by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs to substantiate his claims that the sanctions are essentially causing a humanitarian crisis among the Venezuelan people. The basic findings of the study support the claim that the issues caused by an over-reliance on oil, corruption, and other factors contributed to a negative economic situation that was exacerbated into a full-fledged humanitarian crisis by the economic sanctions. According to Marcetic, the country experienced forty thousand more deaths from 2017 to 2018. Additionally, eighty thousand HIV-positive patients, sixteen thousand patients on dialysis, and four million people with diabetes and hypertension do not have access to the medicine or health care they require. Most necessities of Venezuelans' daily life are funded through oil export revenue and the sanctions imposed beginning in 2017 have closed that off sending the country in a downward spiral. Nicolas Maduro is often blamed for the dire conditions Venezuela is now facing. However, the full story is that the conditions set by Maduro have been worsened by Trump and the UN is now condemning the sanctions. An important consideration for the current U.S. administration should be an analysis of the policy objective of the sanctions. The sanctions are not helping "the people" of Venezuela. Is the hope that conditions will become so bad that the country will be forced to place the United States' favored leader simply out of despair and a need to survive? Trump's sanctions and his encouragement of the international community to join in has crippled the economy and worsened even further the standard of living for the Venezuelan people.

 

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/venezuela-sanctions-trump-intervention

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