How the US Economic War on Venezuela Fueled the Migrant Crisis
JANUARY 20, 2023
BY EDWARD HUNT
The U.S. economic war on Venezuela is one of the main reasons for the record number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, where there has been a surge in migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Years of U.S. efforts to destroy the Venezuelan oil industry and overthrow the Venezuelan government has fueled the humanitarian catastrophe. As U.S. sanctions have pushed Venezuela into one of the worst crises in the hemisphere’s history, more than 7 million people have fled the country. Hundreds of thousands more have fled Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, poor countries that have lost access to low-cost Venezuelan energy.
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Trump’s Escalation
It was not until the Trump administration entered office, however, that U.S. officials began ignoring the warnings in order to wage an all-out economic war against Venezuela. During its four years in office, the Trump administration directed a major economic attack against Venezuela, first with economic sanctions against the country’s finances in 2017 and then with crippling economic sanctions against its state oil company in 2019.
Administration officials openly acknowledged that they were trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government. In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proudly proclaimed that “we’re leading a 59-nation coalition to oust Maduro,” the Venezuelan president. Years later, John Bolton, who had spent little over a year as Trump’s national security advisor, acknowledged that the administration had backed a coup attempt in Venezuela.
As the Venezuelan economy collapsed in the face of the Trump administration’s economic war, many critics warned about the humanitarian consequences. For years, Mark Weisbrot reported that U.S. economic sanctions were accelerating the country’s economic collapse. In 2019, Weisbrot collaborated with Jeffrey Sachs on a study that estimated that U.S. sanctions had resulted in the deaths of more than 40,000 Venezuelans from 2017 to 2018.
U.S. sanctions “are a death sentence for tens of thousands of Venezuelans,” Weisbrot and Sachs wrote. Officials in the Trump administration responded to these criticisms by blaming the Venezuelan government for the country’s collapse, but they faced strong pushback, sometimes from U.S. analysts.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/20/272039/
