U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela. How Does That Help Democracy?

President Nicolás Maduro appears determined to survive the latest election in Venezuela.

The opposition had high hopes when ex-diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia stepped in at the last minute for María Corina Machado, who was barred from running, but the Venezuelan government’s election authority announced a Maduro victory, with a 51.21 percent to 44.2 percent margin. Claiming fraudulent results, the opposition declared its own victory, bringing Venezuela to the brink of a political crisis.

Washington immediately seized on the disputed election. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the government to produce verification of the vote, then issued a statement Thursday declaring the opposition victorious and urging a “respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people.” Prominent members of Congress like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are already doing the media circuit praising the Biden administration’s actions in defense of democracy in Venezuela.

In light of Maduro’s declared victory and the chaotic aftermath of the contested election, however, the case that U.S. policy worked in Venezuela is on shaky ground. Instead, Washington has embraced a policy of intense sanctions — implemented under President Donald Trump and largely continued by President Joe Biden — as a way to pressure the general population to force Maduro out of office. That aim has so far not been achieved, though it has devastated the nation’s economy, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans and forcing millions more to flee — fueling the migration crisis at the U.S. border in the process. 

“How can we blame asylum-seekers fleeing desperation and poverty if we’re contributing to the very desperation and poverty that they’re trying to escape?” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas told The Intercept. “At the end of the day, what we have seen in practice is that we don’t usually get the freedom of press and free and fair elections and transparency that we ask for. What we wind up getting is hungrier everyday people.”

Casar added that the U.S. approach to sanctions means “we just doom ourselves to continuing to strangle other nations’ economies.” We hurt the people in those countries, he said, “it ends up hurting us too because we’re all interconnected.”

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As the Washington Post recently reported, U.S. sectoral sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry contributed to one of the most severe peacetime economic contractions ever recorded, significantly more severe than the Great Depression. As a result, more than 7 million Venezuelans have been driven to flee the country, triggering the largest migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere. 

The Biden administration temporarily allowed some sanctions relief, easing restrictions to allow Venezuela to export more oil and gas, in exchange for a promise of “free and fair elections.” In April, Biden reimposed the broader sanctions, while still allowing for licenses to be granted on a case-by-case basis.

“If it had not been for sanctions, Venezuela would have experienced a large economic crisis in the last decade, but it would have been more like other large economic crises in Latin America and even in prior Venezuela history,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist and professor who previously served as the head of the economic and financial advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly. “It wouldn’t have been like what we’ve seen.”

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The Venezuelan Perspective

The famously anti-migrant Trump approved the John Bolton-led sanctions on Venezuela in spite of an array of officials in both the U.S. government and other Latin American countries warning the White House that the region could not handle the ensuing migration wave. Now, Venezuelans compose one of the largest groups of migrants at the southern border and in transit through Central America (under additional sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, on top of the longtime, infamous embargo, the number of migrants from Cuba has also grown). On Wednesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the Biden administration to end the “anti-human” measure, adding that the sanctions only bring more hunger and violence. 

Sanctions have become an increasingly popular tool for U.S. foreign policy because they are perceived to be less harmful than outright war or proxy war. United Nations experts have argued that these coercive measures amount to economic warfare, and civilians harmed by sanctions “deserve the same protections provided by the Geneva Conventions to people in war.”

Venezuela offers a prime example of how sanctions are key to U.S. regime change strategies. Conventional wisdom holds that citizens living under economic decline are more likely to blame their own leaders — whose failings they can see firsthand — than economic analyses showing the impact sanctions imposed by a foreign power have on GDP. This strategy was succinctly articulated in a 1960 State Department cable regarding the purpose of the embargo on Cuba:

If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The only way of “alienating internal support” for Fidel Castro, the State Department argued, was through “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

This holds true for Maduro, who has campaigned against the U.S. sanctions directly but has seen the yearslong economic hardship erode overall levels of support for his government.

Venezuela’s opposition leaders, in contrast, are well aware that the economic sanctions benefit them electorally, as long as they don’t give any sound bites endorsing collective punishment of their own citizens by the U.S. In a June interview, González Urrutia falsely claimed that the U.S.-imposed sectoral sanctions on much of Venezuela’s economy “are not directed against the country” but merely are targeting government officials. Corina Machado, the conservative activist leading the opposition, has also falsely claimed that Maduro is exclusively to blame for the economic crisis.

As Venezuela erupted into protests in the aftermath of the vote, Rodríguez argued that the influence of U.S. sanctions may be hardening both Maduro’s stance and that of the opposition. “The government is also uncompromising, of course, but I think that it’s made finding agreement much more difficult, because the opposition sees itself as backed by the U.S,” Rodríguez said.

Policymakers may feel the urge to intensify sanctions on Venezuela in the coming weeks as Maduro digs in, hoping it will spur the change they seek. But when asked whether U.S.-led sanctions ultimately skew the democratic process in other countries, Casar acknowledged that “it ends up just getting really messy, and it’s hard to see what the mess gets us.”