Carlos Becerra
At least five people have died and over 200 detained during protests across the country since April 30, according to Venezuela's Attorney General. Amnesty International reports more than 200 people injured "during state repression of protests."
As the Trump Administration accelerates its efforts to oust leftist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, tightening sanctions on Venezuela while bolstering opposition leader Juan Guaidó, the people of Venezuela continue to suffer one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
More than 90 percent of Venezuelans are now living in poverty, and about 25 percent desperately require humanitarian assistance. Over the past several years, more than 3 million people have fled the country.
“The context is a severe and continuing economic contraction, with associated dramatic increases in inflation, on a scale seen in few if any other countries around the world in recent years,” Mark Lowcock, the U.N. humanitarian chief, told the U.N. Security Council last month.
Officials in the Trump Administration, who believe the growing turmoil could make it easier to oust Maduro, expect the crisis to worsen. In March, Mark Green, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Congress that if the economic contraction continues, “we will see a profound collapse,” leading to “profound despair and hopelessness.”
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Congress that he expects the number of refugees to nearly double by the end of this year. “Our best analysis says that there will be another 2 to 2.5 million people flee during calendar year 2019,” Pompeo said.
According to Admiral Craig S. Faller of the U.S. Southern Command, the crisis is “on track to be worse than the Syria migration crisis by the end of this year.”
With so many officials expecting the crisis to worsen, there remains much debate over what is causing it. In the United States, politicians and their supporters in the mass media typically blame Maduro, charging him with running a corrupt and authoritarian regime that has mismanaged the Venezuelan economy. Only with political and economic change, they argue, will things improve.
On the economic front, U.S. officials believe the biggest change needs to occur in the country’s oil industry, the engine of the Venezuelan economy. Although oil production has declined by nearly 50 percent over the past several years, some say that the trends can be reversed if Maduro is removed from power.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Congress that he expects the number of refugees to nearly double by the end of this year.
Officials under President Barack Obama were confident that they could turn things around. “At the end of the day, Venezuela’s oil is easy to produce,” Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy, told Congress in 2016. “It is not complicated. And the minute there is a political and economic change, you will see an increase in production.”
Similar views have carried into the Trump Administration. “It would certainly be better from the point of view of the economy and the oil sector if the regime were to come to an end,” Elliott Abrams, the administration’s special representative for Venezuela, commented earlier this year.
The Venezuelan government is not solely to blame for the problems plaguing the country, however. Factors outside of its control have contributed to the crisis.
One major factor was the steep decline in oil prices worldwide from 2014 to 2015. During that time, it was widely reported that falling oil prices were significantly weakening the Venezuelan economy.
“Venezuela has been hardest hit by the drop in oil prices,” U.S. Congressman Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican, said in June 2016. He speculated that actions taken by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to keep oil prices low had significantly weakened the Venezuelan government and could culminate in regime change.
“I think we will look back at OPEC’s decision as possibly being a game changer in a positive way for Venezuela—my hopes anyway—in regime change there,” he said.
A more recent factor in the country’s turmoil has been sanctions levied by the Trump Administration. In August 2017, the Trump Administration restricted the country’s access to U.S. financial markets, making it much harder for the Venezuelan government to raise money. Earlier this year, the Administration increased the economic pressure by prohibiting most U.S. companies from doing business with the country’s main oil company.
Administration officials say that the sanctions are necessary to squeeze and isolate Maduro, but they periodically concede that the sanctions harm the Venezuelan people as well. Sanctions “sometimes have an adverse impact on the people of Venezuela,” Secretary of State Pompeo acknowledged last year.
In a paper published last month by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs described the sanctions as a form of collective punishment. The sanctions, they argued, were the main reason for an estimated 40,000 additional deaths in Venezuela from 2017 to 2018. They called Trump’s most recent additional sanctions “a death sentence for tens of thousands of Venezuelans.”
Some U.S. lawmakers have spoken out. Earlier this month, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, told Democracy Now! that the Trump Administration’s “bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela.”
But Congress has largely been enabling U.S. political and economic intervention in Venezuela, placing no serious limits on the Trump Administration’s actions.
After Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, “it is so important that the Venezuelan people are successful in overthrowing Maduro,” none of the committee members objected.
In the meantime, the people of Venezuela continue to suffer.