[News] They Are Making Venezuela’s Economy Scream

Thu May 1 11:58:22 EDT 2025

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*They Are Making Venezuela’s Economy Scream: The Eighteenth Newsletter 
(2025)*

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<////Users/vijayprashad/Desktop/thetricontinental.org%257D>.

No country should go through what Venezuela has been going through since 
2017.

The FACTS graphic above shows that US-led sanctions (more aptly referred 
to as Unilateral Coercive Measures 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=8eaf6050c5&e=d206d0a40d>, 
or UCMs) caused Venezuela to lose oil revenue equivalent to 213% of its 
GDP between January 2017 and December 2024. In total, the country 
suffered an estimated $226 billion in losses – around $77 million per 
day – during this period. This data, produced by Global South Insights 
and Tricontinental based on research by Venezuelan economist Yosmer 
Arellán, was calculated by comparing actual figures with an estimate of 
Venezuelan oil production without the maximum pressure campaign 
initiated by US President Donald Trump.

Before 2017, Venezuela relied 
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on its oil revenue for 95% of its export earnings. Moreover, oil revenue 
has been critical for financing the government’s progressive social 
agenda. This loss has caused inflation in Venezuela to soar: according 
to official Central Bank of Venezuela numbers 
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from 2019, the highest inter-annual inflation rate was 344,510%, meaning 
prices increased by a factor of 3,400 in a single year. This is an 
unimaginable disaster for any country and an enormous strain on the 
population.

While Venezuela has been under attack by the US government and its 
allies since Hugo Chávez’s first election in 1998, Trump’s 2017 
Executive Order 13808 
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set off a new wave of financial sanctions that denied Venezuela access 
to international credit markets, severely undermining its ability to 
sell oil abroad. What the executive order did was prevent any US 
national from buying new debt from the Venezuelan government or 
purchasing existing bonds that would have enabled refinancing. Dividend 
payments from Citgo (the US subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil 
company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA) were halted later, in 
January 2019, when the company was seized and placed under the control 
of Juan Guaidó, the person imposed on the country as its ‘president’ by 
the United States. This prevented PDVSA from securing letters of credit 
to guarantee oil shipments, finding insurance for oil tankers, 
maintaining oil fields, and conducting transactions with non-US 
nationals who feared secondary sanctions. Two additional executive 
orders imposed by Trump (13850 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=360d58ae4d&e=d206d0a40d>, 
on 1 November 2018, and 13857 
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on 25 January 2019) further restricted Venezuela’s access to financing 
and targeted buyers of its oil, particularly in Europe and India.

Trump took the Venezuelan economy by the throat and squeezed as hard as 
he could.

Oswaldo Vigas (Venezuela), /Objeto negro americano en tres bloques/ 
(American Black Object in Three Blocks), 1956.

The horrendous impact of the executive orders was immediately clear to 
the Trump administration. On 11 March 2019, Matt Lee of the Associated 
Press asked then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the UCM-driven 
humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. Pompeo’s answer 
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was direct:

    The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by
    the hour. I talked with our senior person on the ground there in
    Venezuela last night at 7:00 or 8:00 last night. You can see the
    increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are
    suffering from.

This ‘pain and suffering’ was felt by the real target of the UCMs: the 
Venezuelan people. Two years later, Alena Douhan, the UN special 
rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the 
enjoyment of human rights, visited Venezuela and filed a report for the 
UN Human Rights Council. What Douhan found was catastrophic: the 2014 
oil crash triggered widespread food and medicine shortages, which were 
compounded by Trump’s maximum pressure campaign beginning in 2017. This 
crisis was a sharp contrast from the significantly raised living 
standards that the population had enjoyed since the Bolivarian 
Revolution in 1998. As Douhan wrote 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=78b895391c&e=d206d0a40d>, 
‘the tightening of sanctions from 2017 undermined the positive impact of 
the multiple reforms and the State’s capacity to maintain infrastructure 
and continue to implement social programmes’. Importantly, she explained 
that ‘existing humanitarian exemptions are ineffective and insufficient, 
subject to lengthy and costly procedures, and do not cover the delivery 
of spare parts or equipment and machinery indispensable for the 
maintenance and restoration of the economy and vital public services’. 
That means that the entire UCM regime – despite exemptions – forced the 
Venezuelan people to pay a heavy cost, as we show in our recent dossier 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=5032cc079d&e=d206d0a40d> 
/Imperialist War and Feminist Resistance in the Global South/.

Pablo Kalaka (Venezuela), /Olivos y resistencia/ (Olive Trees and 
Resistance), 2024.

Contrary to the narrative pushed by people like Trump and Pompeo, there 
is no way that mismanagement and corruption could have caused this level 
of economic devastation in just seven years (2017–2024). Everyone who 
has looked seriously at the Venezuelan economy has noted that the fiasco 
is entirely driven by the Trump administration’s intensification of UCMs 
from 2017 onwards.

At that time, Trump’s Latin America team was comprised of people such as 
Mauricio Claver-Carone, a Cuban American lawyer and the senior director 
for Western Hemisphere Affairs in the National Security Council. 
Claver-Carone was regarded as the author of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ 
campaign against Venezuela, and, according to senior officials in the US 
State Department, he even wrote Trump’s executive orders. After a 
scandal at the Inter-American Development Bank, he is now Trump’s 
special envoy for Latin America. His aim is to overthrow both the Cuban 
and Bolivarian revolutions by any and every means.

CIA Director Richard Helms’ notes during a meeting with US President 
Richard Nixon about Chile at 15:25 on 15 September 1970, with John 
Mitchell and Henry Kissinger present.

In April 1976, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study 
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired 
by Senator Frank Church, published its final report. The select 
committee’s staff report 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1b3d811679&e=d206d0a40d>, 
/Covert Action in Chile, 1963/–/1973/, compiled documents on the 
destabilisation of President Salvador Allende’s government. It includes 
a handwritten note by CIA Director Richard Helms about a 15 September 
1970 meeting in the White House with President Richard Nixon, Attorney 
General John Mitchell, and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. 
The meeting took place eleven days after Allende, of the Socialist Party 
of Chile, won the presidency. Nixon advised his team to ‘save Chile’ by 
putting the ‘best men we have’ on the job. The game plan: ‘make the 
economy scream’.

A few weeks after the meeting, on 9 November, Kissinger filed 
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National Security Decision Directive Memorandum 93, which laid out this 
‘game plan’. With a ‘correct but cool’ public posture, Kissinger wrote, 
the US must apply maximum pressure to prevent Chile from accessing any 
further finances, including access to international banks and 
multilateral financial institutions as well as private US businesses. In 
the aftermath of Chile’s nationalisation of its copper industry, US 
multinational mining companies – such as Kennecott – sought to intercept 
Chilean ships and seize their copper or prevent the country from selling 
copper to third parties, including European countries. The US used its 
power over the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to deny loans and 
pressured international bodies to stop Chile from initiating arbitration 
proceedings over legal challenges to its mines. Shipping companies began 
to avoid Chile, and the country’s copper exports became less attractive 
to buyers. A decline in the price and volume of copper exports – which 
had accounted 
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for 80% of Chile’s foreign exchange – severely impacted the economy. 
This decline led to a general economic crisis, with shortages of 
imported goods and industrial supplies as well as an inflation rate that 
soared to 200% in 1973.

A week before the coup, Victor Jara (pictured on the far right) marches 
for peace and development, 1973.

In our September 2023 dossier 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4de7df5e0e&e=d206d0a40d> 
/The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973/, we show how the coup 
against Allende’s government was in fact a coup against any attempt by 
Third World countries to exercise sovereignty over their raw materials 
and build a socialist economy with those gains. Exactly the same motives 
are evident in the case of Venezuela. In February 2019, Trump gave a 
speech in Miami about Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and socialism in which 
he declared 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=f3283bfdfb&e=d206d0a40d> 
that ‘the twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere’. 
Trump was referring not only to Latin America but also to the United 
States, which, he insisted, ‘will never be a socialist country’.

What the United States did to Chile between 1970 and 1973 is precisely 
what they have been doing to Venezuela since at least 2017. In 1972, 
Victor Jara captured the sensibility of the economic war on Chile and 
the essence of Chilean resistance to that war with his song /El hombre 
es un creador/ (Man Is a Creator). It is a simple song about the working 
class in the factories and fields and underneath the earth in the mines. 
The last stanza is powerful:

Aprendí el vocabulario
del amo, dueño y patrón,
me mataron tantas veces
por levantarles la voz,
pero del suelo me paro,
porque me prestan las manos,
porque ahora no estoy solo,
porque ahora somos tantos. 	I learned the language
of my masters, owners, and bosses
They killed me so many times
for raising my voice at them,
but from the ground I get up,
because I am lent a hand,
because now I’m not alone,
because now we are many.

Victor Jara was tortured and killed in the coup that overthrew Allende. 
His grave in Santiago is a place of pilgrimage for dreamers and dreams. 
Dreams are worthy: they give us hope. Dreams are better than the 
bitterness of men like Nixon and Trump, Kissinger and Claver-Carone.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research · Shadipur · New Delhi, 
NCT 110008 · India

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