US Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela & Killed Over 40,000 Since 2017

Economist Jeffrey Sachs: The U.S. government has been trying to strangle the Venezuelan economy.

It started with sanctions in 2017 that prevented the country from accessing international capital markets and the oil company from restructuring its loans. That put Venezuela into a hyperinflation. That was the utter collapse.

Oil earnings plummeted. The earnings that are used to buy food and medicine collapsed. That’s when the social, humanitarian crisis went spiraling out of control. And then, in this year, with this idea – very naive, very stupid, in my view – that there would be this self-proclaimed president, which was all choreographed with the United States, very closely, another round of even tighter sanctions, essentially confiscating the earnings and the assets of the Venezuelan government, took place.

Now Venezuela is in complete, utter catastrophe, a lot of it brought on by the United States deliberately, creating massive suffering. We know there’s hunger. We know there’s a incredible shortage of medical supplies. We can only imagine, because we won’t know really until the dust settles and careful studies are done, how much excess mortality there is, but, surely, in a context like this, this is a catastrophe largely created by the US, because this is an all-or-nothing strategy. What the US, what Trump, just doesn’t understand is the idea of negotiations.

This is an attempt at an overthrow. It’s very crude. It’s not working. And it’s very cruel, because it’s punishing 30 million people. More here.

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