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<h1 class="reader-title">The Plot to Kill Venezuela</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Vijay Prashad - May 14,
2019<br>
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<p>Hugo Chávez knew that Venezuela was very
vulnerable. Its oil revenues account for 98
percent of its export earnings. Chávez was
familiar with the thinking of Juan Pablo
Pérez Alfonzo, Venezuela’s minister of mines
and hydrocarbons in the early 1960s and one
of the architects of OPEC (Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries). In 1976,
Pérez Alfonzo wrote, “Ten years from now,
twenty years from now, you will see, oil
will bring us ruin.” He called Venezuela’s
oil the “devil’s excrement.” If oil prices
remained high, as they were when Chávez came
to power in 1999, then oil revenue could be
used to finance a project for the landless
workers. If oil prices collapsed, then the
country—laden with debt—would face severe
challenges.</p>
<p>Venezuela’s economy had not been
diversified by the oligarchy that ruled the
country before Chávez took office. By 1929,
it had become apparent to the oligarchy that
the flood of oil revenues had damaged the
agricultural sector—which shrank in the
decades to come. There was neither an
attempt to enhance agricultural production
(and make Venezuela food sovereign) nor was
there any attempt to use oil profits for a
wider industrialization program.
Occasionally, presidents—such as Carlos
Andrés Pérez in the 1970s—would pledge to
use the influx of oil revenues to diversify
the economy, but when oil prices would
fall—as they did periodically—Venezuela went
into punishing debt.</p>
<p>It would have taken Chávez a generation to
pivot the economy away from its reliance
upon oil revenues. But Chávez and the
Bolivarian Revolution simply did not have
the time. In the 2000s, when oil prices
remained high, the revenues were used to
enhance the social lives of the landless
workers, most of whom suffered high rates of
malnutrition and illiteracy. Gripped by the
need to deal with the social blight amongst
the landless workers, Chávez and the
Bolivarian Revolution simply did not have
the capacity to tackle reliance upon imports
of food and of most consumer goods.</p>
<p>In 2009, a U.S. State Department <a
href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09CARACAS564_a.html">cable</a> from
Caracas noted that the decline in oil prices
had placed the Venezuelan government in
great peril. The government’s oil
company—PDVSA—had provided the revenues to
fund the social missions, the programs to
lift the low standard of social life for the
landless workers. “Unless oil prices rise
significantly,” wrote John Caulfield from
Caracas, “we are increasingly certain that
the game will be up, from an economic
standpoint, by early to mid 2010, as no one
will be willing to continue to finance PDVSA
and a vicious cycle will be inevitable.” The
June 2008 price was $163.52; by January
2009, it had collapsed to $50.43.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution was in
peril.</p>
<h3>Sanctions</h3>
<p>The United States government and the
Venezuelan oligarchy first tried to
overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution in 2002.
Great hope in Chávez prevented a discredited
oligarchy from victory. Oil revenues then
allowed Chávez to build up pillars of
support for the revolution. But the
depletion of the oil prices from 2009
threatened the Bolivarian process. Chávez
died in 2013. The combination of low oil
prices and the death of Chávez changed the
political calculations.</p>
<p>Egged on by the United States, opposition
leaders Leopoldo López and María Corina
Machado called for demonstrations against
the newly elected president Nicolás Maduro
in 2014. It was clear that the protests were
intended as a provocation, drawing a
crackdown from the government forces, which
allowed U.S. President Barack Obama to sign
the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and
Civil Society Act of 2014. This act allowed
Obama to sanction individuals in the
Venezuelan government. It was extended in
2016 and will expire—unless extended
again—at the end of 2019. The sanctions
policy was to be the new lever to pressure a
vulnerable Venezuela.</p>
<p>In March 2015, Obama declared Venezuela a
“threat” to U.S. “national security,” an
extreme step, and sanctioned a handful of
Venezuelan government officials. The
administration of Donald Trump only
sharpened and deepened the policy. Obama
sanctioned seven individuals, while Trump
has—thus far—sanctioned 75 individuals.
Obama forged the spear; Trump has thrown it
at the heart of Venezuela.</p>
<h3>Sanctioned Economy</h3>
<p>These early sanctions went after
individuals, offering an inconvenience for
some Venezuelan politicians and for sections
of the state. The U.S. government would soon
move the sanctions from individual
inconvenience to social collapse. Trump’s
policy, from 2017, was to hit Venezuela’s
petroleum industry very hard. The U.S.
government prevented Venezuelan government
bonds from trading in U.S. financial
markets, and then it prevented the state’s
energy company—PDVSA—from receiving payments
for its export of petroleum products. The
U.S. Treasury Department froze $7 billion in
PDVSA assets, and it did not allow U.S.
firms to export naphtha into Venezuela (a
crucial input for the extraction of heavy
crude oil).</p>
<p>The country relied on oil revenues to
import food and medicines. The theft of the
$7 billion in PDVSA assets, the seizure of
the $1.2 billion in Venezuelan gold in the
Bank of England, the transfer of ownership
of the PDVSA subsidiary CITGO in the United
States to the opposition and the pressure on
oil exports squeezed Venezuela very hard.
U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton
estimated that the United States (and
Canadian) sanctions had cost Venezuela about
$11 billion.</p>
<p>When the United States began to put
pressure on transportation firms to stop
carrying Venezuelan oil, the schemes to
export oil to the Caribbean (PetroCaribe) <a
href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/19/how-us-strangling-haiti-it-attempts-regime-change-venezuela">suffered</a>,
as did the fraternal delivery of oil to
Cuba. This policy inflamed the situation in
Haiti—which is in a long-term political
crisis—and it has deepened the crisis in
Cuba—which has now had to enforce <a
href="https://www.salon.com/2019/01/04/the-cuban-revolution-60-years-on_partner/">rationing</a>.
The countries in the Caribbean, which relied
upon Venezuelan oil, are now suffering
deeply.</p>
<h3>Impact of the Sanctions</h3>
<p>Economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs
calculate that the U.S. sanctions have
resulted in the death of 40,000 Venezuelan
civilians between 2017 and 2018. In their <a
href="https://tinyurl.com/y5qge3hw">report</a>—“Economic
Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case
of Venezuela” (April 2019)—they point out
that this death toll is merely the start of
what is to come. An additional 300,000
Venezuelans are at risk “because of lack of
access to medicines or treatment,” including
80,000 “with HIV who have not had
antiretroviral treatment since 2017.” There
are 4 million people with diabetes and
hypertension, most of whom cannot access
insulin or cardiovascular medicine. “These
numbers,” they write, “by themselves
virtually guarantee that the current
sanctions, which are much more severe than
those implemented before this year, are a
death sentence for tens of thousands of
Venezuelans.” If oil revenues drop by 67
percent in 2019—as has been projected—the
death of tens of thousands of Venezuelans is
guaranteed.</p>
<p>Venezuela has imported food goods worth
only $2.46 billion in 2018 compared to $11.2
billion in 2013. If food imports remain low
and Venezuela is unable to hastily grow
enough food, then—as Weisbrot and Sachs
argue—the situation will contribute to
“malnutrition and stunting in children.”</p>
<p>In 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights—Michelle Bachelet—made the case that
the cause of the deterioration of well-being
in Venezuela predates the sanctions (a <a
href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/04/04/venezuelas-humanitarian-emergency/large-scale-un-response-needed-address-health">report</a> from
Human Rights Watch and Johns Hopkins
University underlined this point). It is
certainly true that the fall of oil prices
had a marked impact on Venezuela’s external
revenues and the reliance upon food
imports—a century-old problem—had marked the
country before Trump’s very harsh sanctions.</p>
<p>But, the next year, Bachelet <a
href="https://reliefweb.int/report/venezuela-bolivarian-republic/oral-update-situation-human-rights-bolivarian-republic">told</a> the
UN Security Council that “although this
pervasive and devastating economic and
social crisis began before the imposition of
the first economic sanctions in 2017, I am
concerned that the recent sanctions on
financial transfers related to the sale of
Venezuelan oil within the United States may
contribute to aggravating the economic
crisis, with possible repercussions on
people’s basic rights and wellbeing.” A
debate over whether it is mismanagement and
corruption by the Maduro government or the
sanctions that are the author of the crisis
is largely irrelevant. The point is that a
combination of the reliance on oil revenues
and the sanctions policy has crushed the
policy space for any stability in the
country.</p>
<h3>Illegal Sanctions</h3>
<p>Weisbrot and Sachs say that these sanctions
“would fit the definition of collective
punishment,” as laid out in the Hague
Convention (1899) and in the Fourth Geneva
Convention (1949). The United States is a
signatory of both of these frameworks.
“Collective penalties,” says the Fourth
Geneva Convention, “are prohibited.” Tens of
thousands of Venezuelans are dead. Tens of
thousands more are under threat of death.
Yet, no one has stood up against the grave
breach of the convention in terms of
collective punishment. There is not a whiff
of interest in the UN Secretary General’s
office to open a tribunal on the accusations
of collective punishment against Venezuela.
Allegations of this seriousness are brushed
under the rug.</p>
<p><em>The views expressed in this article are
the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis
editorial staff.</em></p>
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