Trump’s sanctions are still hurting everyday Venezuelans — and fueling migration

Five years ago Sunday, Donald Trump announced a major escalation of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. On top of sweeping financial restrictions imposed in 2017, the new measures targeted the very heart of the Venezuelan economy, oil.

The explicit aim of this “maximum pressure” strategy was to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in favor of opposition legislator and self-declared president Juan Guaidó. Asked some weeks later if he was satisfied with the progress made toward this goal, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded: “We always wish things could go faster, but I’m very confident that the tide is moving in the direction of the Venezuelan people … The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour. … You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from.”

Pompeo’s suggestion that the economic crisis would lead to Maduro’s ouster was wrong. Five years later, Maduro remains in power, while Juan Guaidó lives in exile in Miami. But his prediction that the Venezuelan people would suffer was all too right. And U.S. economic sanctions are to blame.

Between 2012 and 2020, Venezuela experienced the largest peacetime economic collapse in modern history, more than twice the magnitude of the Great Depression. Horrific stories of hunger, illness, and desperation became the norm. Even before Trump’s oil sanctions took effect, Venezuela experienced an estimated 40,000 excess deaths in a single year. 

This, in turn, spurred an unprecedented exodus of over 7 million Venezuelans, according to the IMF estimates. Today, more Venezuelans are arriving to the U.S. border than nearly any other group.

As sanctions defenders are quick to point out, Venezuela’s economic challenges began well before the imposition of sanctions, ignited by a collapse in oil prices that similarly impacted many oil-exporting nations. But whereas other economies bounced back as oil prices grew, Venezuela’s, hindered by crushing sanctions, did not.

To be sure, such a catastrophic breakdown has multiple causes. Yet study after study (after study after study) have found that Venezuela’s oil production fell precipitously as a direct result of U.S. sanctions. Each wave of sanctions saw a marked downturn in the oil production on which the economy depended for its foreign reserves and extensive social programs. There is simply no accounting for the extremity of Venezuela’s economic collapse, and the resulting mass suffering, without recognizing the toll of U.S. sanctions.

This should not be surprising. It is well documented that broad economic sanctions severely harm civilian populations, increasing rates of poverty, hunger, disease and even death.

Indeed, Secretary Pompeo’s comments reveal that this is often their intent. Trump himself even recently went so far as to boast, “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil.”

As then chair of the House Rules Committee, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), wrote in a letter urging President Biden to reverse the Trump-era sanctions policies: 

The impact of sectoral and secondary sanctions is indiscriminate, and purposely so. Although U.S. officials regularly say that the sanctions target the government and not the people, the whole point of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign is to increase the economic cost to Venezuela … Economic pain is the means by which the sanctions are supposed to work.

Unilateral collective punishment of civilians is a violation of international law, to say nothing of its goal of regime change.

While Trump may have been more open about the logic of “maximum pressure” against Venezuela, he and Biden have much in common in the substance of their policy. When Biden took office, his Democratic colleagues made repeated open appeals to reverse the Trump-era sanctions, both to help the Venezuelan people and to attenuate migration pressures.

But it was not until the war in Ukraine sent global oil prices skyrocketing that Biden began even piecemeal reforms, likely intended to get more Venezuelan oil onto the market. While this easing of sanctions has offered Venezuela’s long-suffocating economy some welcome breathing room, the relief is temporary, liable to reversal at any time, and ultimately minor compared to the restrictions that remain in place.

This is par for the course. In an election year where Biden seeks to present himself as the sensible and humane alternative to Donald Trump, it’s striking that — from Venezuela to Cuba to Iran — Biden’s approach has largely been a continuation of his predecessor’s. Indiscriminate economic sanctions remain a go-to tool of U.S. foreign policy, with little consideration of whom they might hurt in the process.

Five years since Trump’s oil sanctions announcement, Venezuela has finally managed to escape the worst of the crisis. But the sanctions continue to take their toll. Whatever one’s positions on the policies of the Maduro government, punishing the Venezuelan people is cruel and senseless. It’s time for a change.

Michael Galant is Senior Research and Outreach Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.