But maintaining economic warfare by the US—including sanctions—only hurts the Venezuelan people.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro celebrates after claiming victory in the presidential election on at Miraflores Palace July 28, 2024, in Caracas. But the opposition leaders—and many observers—dispute his claim.(Alfredo Lasry R / Getty Images)
Even though the Nicolás Maduro government in Venezuela is almost certainly stealing Sunday’s election, the Biden-Harris administration should still end the harsh US economic warfare against the country.
Here are three reasons:
The Trump policy was not only cruel but also arguably cynical. TheWashington Post just reported that Trump officials knew that imposing total sanctions would force a big jump in the number of Venezuelan refugees. But “chaos at the border” helps the MAGA movement politically, as we’ve just seen with Trump’s sabotage of a bipartisan compromise in Congress that would have made asylum requests at the border more difficult.
Meanwhile, there is clear evidence that Maduro is not playing fair. From the start, the regime tried to stymie the opposition—by disqualifying its original candidate and arresting and harassing campaign workers. Maduro had already sharply restricted the number of outside election monitors, and on the election’s eve the government blocked a planeload of former Latin American leaders from landing to observe the vote. Some leftist presidents in the region have already issued warnings, including Lula da Silva of Brazil and Gustavo Petro from neighboring Colombia.
In the hours just after the government-controlled election authority released questionable results showing that Maduro won, 51 percent to 44 percent, Chile’s leftist leader, Gabriel Boric, tweeted: “The Maduro regime must understand that the results it published are hard to believe. The international community and the Venezuelan people—including millions in exile—demand full transparency.”
The Maduro government also made no effort to allow the Venezuelans in exile—a quarter of the country’s population—to vote.
The Venezuelan election took place amid an ongoing economic catastrophe, a disaster whose scale is not fully grasped outside the country. The Trump sanctions blocked most of the country’s oil exports, and cut it off from international finance. The United States supposedly made exceptions for the import of food and medicines, but global companies steered clear, afraid to run afoul of the American boycott. Mark Weisbrot has the details; he told me that after Trump’s 2017 decree, Venezuela’s economy collapsed by nearly 38 percent, a worse drop than the 29 percent contraction that the US experienced in 1929–33, the first years of the Great Depression. Venezuelan imports dropped by 91 percent, and food imports by 78 percent. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reported that undernourishment rose to 27 percent; it had been under 3 percent a decade earlier. Infant mortality jumped to 21 per 1,000 live births, the second highest in Latin America. Some 82 percent of the population ended up in poverty.
Meanwhile, the global price of oil, Venezuela’s main export, rose, but the country was not able to take advantage.
Calculating additional deaths is necessarily inexact, but Weisbrot used various statistics to estimate that “the number of Venezuelans who have died as a result of the sanctions over just the past six years is at the very least in the tens of thousands, and likely higher.”
In short, Venezuelans are not fleeing their country because they want to change careers and earn more money in other countries. They join the exodus because they are hungry and afraid of getting ill.
The Biden-Harris administration did ease the sanctions somewhat. But Weisbrot says the pressure remains “substantial and damaging.”
I know that many important organizations are asking you to donate today, but this year especially, The Nation needs your support.
Over the course of 2025, the Trump administration has presided over a government designed to chill activism and dissent.
The Nation experienced its efforts to destroy press freedom firsthand in September, when Vice President JD Vance attacked our magazine. Vance was following Donald Trump’s lead—waging war on the media through a series of lawsuits against publications and broadcasters, all intended to intimidate those speaking truth to power.
The Nation will never yield to these menacing currents. We have survived for 160 years and we will continue challenging new forms of intimidation, just as we refused to bow to McCarthyism seven decades ago. But in this frightening media environment, we’re relying on you to help us fund journalism that effectively challenges Trump’s crude authoritarianism.
For today only, a generous donor is matching all gifts to The Nation up to $25,000. If we hit our goal this Giving Tuesday, that’s $50,000 for journalism with a sense of urgency.
With your support, we’ll continue to publish investigations that expose the administration’s corruption, analysis that sounds the alarm on AI’s unregulated capture of the military, and profiles of the inspiring stories of people who successfully take on the ICE terror machine.
We’ll also introduce you to the new faces and ideas in this progressive moment, just like we did with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. We will always believe that a more just tomorrow is in our power today.
Please, don’t miss this chance to double your impact. Donate to The Nation today.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher, The Nation
There is also the argument that the US sanctions violate the human rights of the Venezuelan people. In May 2021, Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote an eloquent letter to President Biden to demand that the economic warfare end:
Economic pain is the means by which the sanctions are supposed to work. But is it not Venezuelan officials who suffer the costs. It is the Venezuelan people.… For people in Venezuela the ongoing crisis is a life and death matter.… I have never believed that sanctions should be used to punish whole populations for the actions of their leaders.
Besides ending the economic sanctions, the United States should just sit back, and say little or nothing. Decades of brutal US interventions in Latin America have destroyed our government’s credibility. Instead, America should concentrate on humanely treating the Venezuelan migrants whom our harsh policy helped create when they reach our southern border. Let Latin Americans, both leaders and ordinary people, continue responding to the crisis. And, for once, let Venezuelans themselves make their own history.
James NorthTwitterJames North has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for 50 years. He lives in New York City.