[…] Meanwhile, the U.S. is strangling the Venezuelan economy with its sanctions. The authors warn that U.S. sanctions will end up starving the population if they remain in place for very long:
Even without military intervention, US sanctions policies, if sustained, are bound to create a famine . By cutting off Venezuela’s oil trade with the US and threatening to sanction non-US firms that do business with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, the Trump administration has created one of the most punitive economic sanctions regimes in recent history.
But rather than provoking a coup, economically isolating a country that essentially feeds itself with its oil export revenues could lead to mass hunger instead.
Sanctions are always punitive, but as Rodriguez and Sachs point out the sanctions on Venezuela are unusually so. In both the Iranian and Venezuelan cases, the ones to suffer from the punishment inflicted on their countries are the poorest and weakest among the civilian population. […]
An administration that was genuinely concerned with the welfare of the people wouldn’t strangle their economy with sanctions, but that is exactly what this administration has done to Venezuela. At the very least, the U.S. should not be making the hemisphere’s worst humanitarian and economic crisis even worse, but that is what our policy is doing. Läs artikel