CEPR

CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND POLICY RESEARCH

Economic Sanctions as
Collective Punishment:
The Case of Venezuela
By Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs*
April 2019

Center for Economic and Policy Research1611 Connecticut Ave. NW
Suite 400
Washington, DC 20009

tel: 202–293–5380
fax: 202–588–1356
www.cepr.net* Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Jeffrey Sachs is a Professor of Economics andDirector of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

Contents
Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 6
The August 2017 sanctions .............................................................................................................................. 7
Sanctions in 2019 .............................................................................................................................................10The Impact of Sanctions on Human Life and Health...............................................................................14
The Illegality and Intent of Unilateral Economic Sanctions .....................................................................17
Depression, Hyperinflation, and Sanctions: Blocking Economic Recovery ...........................................19
References .........................................................................................................................................................22

Acknowledgements
The authors thank Francisco Rodríguez for his own research and data; Rodríguez and Alex Main for
helpful comments; Jake Johnston, Kevin Cashman, Joe Sammut, Colin Brineman, and Cavan
Kharrazian for research assistance; and Rebecca Watts for editorial assistance.

Executive Summary
This paper looks at some of the most important impacts of the economic sanctions imposed on
Venezuela by the US government since August of 2017. It finds that most of the impact of thesesanctions has not been on the government but on the civilian population.
The sanctions reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults andinfants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening
economic depression and hyperinflation. They exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and made itnearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts
disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.
Even more severe and destructive than the broad economic sanctions of August 2017 were thesanctions imposed by executive order on January 28, 2019 and subsequent executive orders this year;
and the recognition of a parallel government, which as shown below, created a whole new set offinancial and trade sanctions that are even more constricting than the executive orders themselves.
We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life andhealth, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–2018; and that these sanctions
would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the
Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory. They are also illegal
under international law and treaties which the US has signed, and would appear to violate US law as
well.

The August 2017 Sanctions
The August 2017 sanctions prohibited the Venezuelan government from borrowing in US financial
markets. This prevented the government from restructuring its foreign debt, because any debt
restructuring requires the issuance of new bonds in exchange for the existing debt. Thus, thesesanctions prevented the economy from recovering from a deep recession which had already taken alarge toll on the population, which along with the economy was more vulnerable to these sanctions
and the ones that followed as a result of the economic crisis. Real GDP had already declined by about
24.7 percent from 2013 through 2016, and consumer price inflation for January to August 2017 wasprobably somewhere between 758 percent and 1,350 percent at an annual rate.

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela1

It is important to emphasize that nearly all of the foreign exchange that is needed to import medicine,
food, medical equipment, spare parts and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems,
or transportation, is received by the Venezuelan economy through the government’s revenue fromthe export of oil. Thus, any sanctions that reduce export earnings, and therefore government revenue,
thereby reduce the imports of these essential and, in many cases, life-saving goods.
The August 2017 sanctions adversely impacted oil production in Venezuela. But following the August
2017 executive order, oil production crashed, falling at more than three times the rate of the previous
twenty months. This would be expected from the loss of credit and therefore the ability to cover
maintenance and operations and carry out new investments necessary to maintain production levels.
This acceleration in the rate of decline of oil production would imply a loss of $6 billion in oil revenue
over the ensuing year.
This by itself is an enormous loss of foreign exchange, relative to the country’s need for essential
imports. Imports of food and medicine for 2018 were just $2.6 billion. Total imports of goods for2018 were about $10 billion.
The loss of so many billions of dollars of foreign exchange and government revenues was very likely
the main shock that pushed the economy from its high inflation, when the August 2017 sanctions
were implemented, into the hyperinflation that followed.
Other executive decisions made by the Trump administration resulted in the closure of Venezuelan
accounts in financial institutions, loss of access to credit, and other financial restrictions that have had
severe negative impacts on oil production as well as the economy, as detailed in this paper.

Sanctions in 2019
The most immediate impact of the January sanctions was to cut off Venezuela from its largest oil
market, the United States, which had bought 35.6 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports in 2018, or about
586,000 barrels per day on average. In the week of March 15, US imports of Venezuelan oil fell tozero for the first time, and they remained at zero for another two weeks before rebounding to a
fraction of their 2018 average.
The Trump administration also intervened to pressure other countries, including India, not to buy theoil that had been previously imported by the US. For example, on March 28, Reuters reported that“[t]he United States has instructed oil trading houses and refiners around the world to further cut

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

2

dealings with Venezuela or face sanctions themselves, even if the trades are not prohibited bypublished US sanctions…”
These threats are effective because the US government can sanction foreign financial institutions who
do not comply with its demands.
As a result of these and other efforts Venezuela’s oil production declined by 130,000 barrels per day
from January to February. In the six months prior, it was declining by an average of 20,500 barrels perday. Then in March it fell another 289,000 barrels per day, for a total of 431,000 barrels per day. Thisis an economically devastating 36.4 percent plunge in oil production just since the January sanctions.
This drop, if maintained over the next year, would cut another $6.8 billion from Venezuela’s available
foreign exchange earnings. This is about 21 percent of export earnings from 2018. However, oil export
revenues in 2019 are projected to fall by a cataclysmic and unprecedented 67.2 percent from 2018, asa result of the impact of tightening sanctions.
The January sanctions also froze many billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets that could have beensold in order to maintain essential and life-saving imports, or to stabilize the economy. These included
most of the government’s $9 billion in reserves that are in gold; trade credits worth an estimated $3.4
billion; and CITGO, with estimated net assets of $5.2 billion.
After the January sanctions and the recognition of Guaidó as “interim president” — which made him,
according to the Trump administration and other governments recognizing the parallel government— the legal owner of any funds transferred or goods bought by the Venezuelan government,
Venezuela’s access to correspondent banks for international transactions was mostly wiped out. This
included access to necessary credits for imports of medicine, food, and other essential goods.
The sanctions have also contributed substantially to the length and economic damage of power
outages, including the severe electricity crises in March.
For example, the sanctions have limited Venezuela’s access to diesel fuel, which is needed for its
backup thermal generators. Further, Venezuela’s electrical sector relies upon equipment provided byinternational suppliers such as General Electric. The sanctions prevented the Venezuelan government
from paying these companies, thereby increasing reliance on hydroelectric power generation.

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

3

The Impact of Sanctions on Human Life and Health
One result of the sanctions, as described above, is to deprive the Venezuelan economy of many billionsof dollars of foreign exchange needed to pay for essential and life-saving imports. The sanctions
implemented in 2019, including the recognition of a parallel government, accelerated this deprivation
and also cut off Venezuela from most of the international payments system, thus ending much of thecountry’s access to these essential imports including medicine and food — even those that could
normally be bought with available dollars. There is no doubt that all of these sanctions since August
2017 have had severe impacts on human life and health.
According to the National Survey on Living Conditions (ENCOVI by its acronym in Spanish), an
annual survey of living conditions administered by three Venezuelan universities, there was a 31
percent increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018. This would imply an increase of more than
40,000 deaths.
More than 300,000 people were estimated to be at risk because of lack of access to medicines ortreatment. This includes an estimated 80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviraltreatment since 2017, 16,000 people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million withdiabetes and hypertension (many of whom cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine).
These numbers 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 ofVenezuelans. This is especially true if the projected 67 percent drop in oil revenue materializes in 2019.
The accelerating economic collapse that current sanctions have locked in assure further impacts on
health, and premature deaths. For example, the increasing collapse of export revenue — and therefore
imports — has also created massive public health problems in the areas of water and sanitation. The
electricity crisis has also impacted hospitals and health care.
Food imports have dropped sharply along with overall imports; in 2018 they were estimated at just
$2.46 billion, as compared with $11.2 billion in 2013. They can be expected to plummet further in
2019, along with imports generally, contributing to malnutrition and stunting in children.
The United Nations finds that the groups most vulnerable to the accelerating crisis include children
and adolescents (including many who can no longer attend school); people who are in poverty or
extreme poverty; pregnant and nursing women; older persons; indigenous people; people in need ofprotection; women and adolescent girls at risk; people with disabilities; and people who identify aslesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex.
Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

4Illegality of the Sanctions
The unilateral sanctions imposed by the Trump administration are illegal under the Charter of theOrganization of American States (OAS), especially articles 19 and 20 of Chapter IV. They are also
illegal under international human rights law, as well as treaties signed by the United States.
The sanctions also violate US law. Each executive order since March 2015 declares that the UnitedStates is suffering from a “national emergency” because of the situation in Venezuela. This is required
by US law in order to impose such sanctions, and the national emergency is invoked under the 1976
National Emergencies Act. This is the same law that President Trump invoked in February 2019 whendeclaring a national emergency to circumvent Congressional appropriation for funds to build a wallalong the border with Mexico.
The executive order also states, as required by law, that Venezuela presents “an unusual andextraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States. There is no foundation in fact foreither of these declarations.

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

5Introduction
President Trump issued executive order 13808 on August 25, 2017, imposing broad economic
sanctions on Venezuela. The sanctions were described by many observers as an instrument of pressure
on the government.1 At the time the pressure was described as necessary in order to encourage thegovernment of Venezuela to respect human rights.2 However, threats of military action from President
Trump himself indicated that the Administration’s real goal was regime change.3
It soon became clear that the sanctions imposed by this executive order — as well as other measurestaken by the Trump administration — would have most of their impact not on the government buton the general population of Venezuela. The sanctions reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased
disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled
the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation. The sanctions
exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy,
contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest andmost vulnerable Venezuelans.
Even more severe and destructive sanctions were instituted by executive order 13857 of January 28,
2019 and subsequent executive orders the same year; and the recognition of a parallel government,
which as shown below, created a whole new set of financial and trade sanctions that are even moreconstricting than the executive orders themselves. Statements from the administration indicated thatthe purpose of the sanctions was to provoke a military rebellion to topple the government.4
This paper examines these economic sanctions and their impact on the Venezuelan economy and the
population, including the most vulnerable. We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and continue toinflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths
from 2017–2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of thecivilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which
the US is a signatory. They are also illegal under international law and treaties which the US has signed,
and would appear to violate US law as well.

1 See, e.g., Krauss (2017).
2 Associated Press (2017).
3 The New York Times (2017).
4 Cohen, Spetalnick, and Rampton (2019).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

6

The August 2017 sanctions
By August of 2017, when the Trump administration issued its executive order imposing broad
financial sanctions on Venezuela, the economy had already been in recession for more than three
years. Although there has not been official government data for these indicators since 2015, the best
available estimates were that real GDP had declined by 24.3 percent from 2014 through 2016, andconsumer price inflation for January to August 2017 was probably somewhere between 758 percent
and 1,350 percent at an annual rate.5
The August 2017 sanctions prohibited the Venezuelan government from borrowing in US financial
markets. This had a number of immediate impacts. First, it prevented the government fromrestructuring its foreign debt, because any debt restructuring requires the issuance of new bonds inexchange for the existing debt. Although the August 2017 sanctions technically affect only the US
financial system, in practice they were effective outside of the US financial system as well because 1)
the restructuring is negotiated with groups of bondholders, which would invariably include US
bondholders; 2) financial institutions outside the US financial system had good reason to fear that
there would be further sanctions affecting them, and this did indeed happen within a year and a half(see below).
Prior to the August 2017 sanctions, the debt that was up for restructuring was the debt of the state oilcompany, PDVSA. The sovereign debt (from the government) could not be restructured after the
opposition won a majority of the National Assembly in 2015. This is because the opposition leadershipof the National Assembly stated that it would not approve any new foreign borrowing by thegovernment. Without this approval, new government bonds from a restructuring would be ofquestionable legality under Venezuelan law, and the opposition pledged not to pay them if they were
to come to power. On that basis, a restructuring of government debt was impossible at that time.6
Nonetheless the PDVSA debt at that time totaled roughly $30 billion, on which $7.1 billion in principal
and interest was due over the next two years; much of this debt service could have been postponedwith the restructuring of the PDVSA debt that was being negotiated before the August 2017 sanctions.
These sanctions also prohibited CITGO, the PDVSA affiliate that has some 5,500 gas stations in theUS, from repatriating profits to Venezuela. From 2015 through 2017, CITGO provided approximately$2.5 billion in dividends to PDVSA.7

5 Upper and lower bounds are year-over-year average inflation for 2017, measured by the National Assembly (upper) and CENDA(lower). Torino Economics (2019).
6 DiChristopher and Frost (2017); Chinea and Ulmer (2016).
7 Parraga and Ngai (2017).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

7

Even more costly to the economy and the population, the August 2017 sanctions adversely impacted
oil production in Venezuela. Figure 1 shows oil production in Venezuela and Colombia, in thousandsof barrels per day, from 2013–18. Both countries’ production declined at about the same rate fromthe beginning of 2016, after a sharp fall in oil prices. But following the August 2017 executive order,
oil production crashed, falling at more than three times the rate of the previous twenty months. This
would be expected from the loss of credit and therefore the ability to cover maintenance andoperations and carry out new investments necessary to maintain production levels. This accelerationin the rate of decline of oil production would imply a loss of $6 billion in oil revenue over the ensuing
year.
FIGURE 1
Venezuela and Colombia Oil Production, 2013–18

Sources and note: OPEC (2019), OPEC Secondary Sources; US Energy Information Administration (2018). Adaptedfrom Rodríguez (2018).

This by itself is an enormous loss of foreign exchange, relative to the country’s need for essential
imports. Imports of food and medicine for 2018 were just $2.6 billion. Total imports of goods for2018 were about $10 billion.

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela8

Annual oil production fell by 30.1 percent in 2018, as compared with 11.5 percent in 2017.8 The
difference in this rate of decline implies a loss of approximately $8.4 billion in foreign exchange thatwas increasingly desperately needed for essential imports such as medicine and food.
It is important to emphasize that nearly all of the foreign exchange that is needed to import medicine,
food, medical equipment, spare parts and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems,
or transportation, is received by the Venezuelan economy through the government’s revenue fromthe export of oil. Thus, any sanctions that reduce export earnings, and therefore government revenue,
thereby reduce the imports of these essential and, in many cases, life-saving goods.
The loss of so many billions of dollars of foreign exchange and government revenues was very likely
the main shock that pushed the economy from its high inflation, when the August 2017 sanctions
were implemented, into the hyperinflation that followed. It is common in the history of hyperinflations
that they are triggered by a large external shock to government revenues and the balance of payments,
as happened to Venezuela following the implementation of these sanctions.
On September 20, 2017, less than a month after the August 25 sanctions, the US Treasury
Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an “Advisory to Financial Institutions
on Widespread Political Corruption in Venezuela.”9 It stated that “all Venezuelan government
agencies and bodies, including SOEs [State Owned Enterprises], appear vulnerable to public
corruption and money laundering,” and reminded US financial institutions of their regulatory
obligations to “take reasonable, risk-based steps to identify and limit any exposure they may have tofunds and other assets associated with Venezuelan public corruption.”10
Francisco Rodríguez, Chief Economist at Torino Capital, argues that the warning from US Treasury
may have been even more important than the August executive order because it resulted in the closureof Venezuelan accounts in financial institutions, loss of access to credit, and other financial restrictions
that have had severe negative impacts on oil production as well as the economy.11
The above example illustrates how serious economic damage — with resultant human costs — canbe inflicted without attracting public or media attention. For this reason, the damage described here
from the Trump administration’s sanctions in 2017 likely understates significantly the actual harmcaused.

8 Torino Economics (2019).
9 Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (2017).
10 Ibid.
11 Rodríguez (2018).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

9Sanctions in 2019
This has certainly been the case for the series of executive orders that began on January 28, which
followed the Trump administration’s and allies’ recognition of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” ofVenezuela. Here we must include not only the sanctions that were explicitly mandated by these
executive orders but also the sanctions that were implied, and activated, by the recognition of a parallel
government; and additional sanctions resulting from further statements, threats, or actions from theexecutive branch of the United States.
If we look at the combined impact of all of these actions, we find that they drastically reduced theability of Venezuela to produce and sell oil and to sell any foreign assets of the government, the mostimportant of which were frozen and/or confiscated; and also to use whatever foreign exchange thatthe country is still able to earn to buy essential imports. For these reasons, a baseline projection of
Venezuela’s real GDP shows an astounding and unprecedented decline of 37.4 percent in 2019, ascompared to 16.7 percent in 2018.12 Imports of goods are projected to fall by 39.4 percent, from $10
billion to $6.1 billion.13 More than 1.9 million people are expected to leave the country, 14 and theimpacts on human life and health (described below) are expected to be even more severe than what
happened last year.
The most immediate impact of the January sanctions was to cut off Venezuela from its largest oil
market, the United States, which had bought 35.6 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports in 2018, 15 orabout 586,000 barrels per day on average.16 In the week of March 15, imports of Venezuelan oil fellto zero for the first time, and they remained there for another two weeks before there was a reboundfor one week to 139,000 barrels per day, then 71,000 barrels per day.17
The Trump administration also intervened to pressure other countries, including India, not to buy theoil that had been previously imported by the US. On March 28, Reuters reported:
The United States has instructed oil trading houses and refiners around the world to further
cut dealings with Venezuela or face sanctions themselves, even if the trades are not prohibitedby published US sanctions, three sources familiar with the matter said. …

12 Torino Economics (2019).
13 Ibid.
14 United Nations (2019).
15 Ibid.
16 US Energy Information Administration (2019a).
17 US Energy Information Administration (2019b).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

10The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced a ban in earlyFebruary on the use of its financial system in oil deals with Venezuela after April.
But as recently as this week, the US State department has called up foreign firms to say thatthe scope of the sanctions is wider.
The sources said that the State Department made clear that any kind of oil trade, whether it
be direct, indirect or barter, would be considered a breach.18
It is important to note that these threats are effective because the US government can sanction foreign
financial institutions who disobey its instructions. Thus in February even Gazprom, which is majority
owned by the Russian government, froze the accounts of PDVSA and cut off transactions with thecompany, under threat of sanctions from the Trump administration. 19 Reuters also noted that
“Washington is particularly keen to end deliveries of gasoline and refined products used to dilute
Venezuela’s heavy crude oil to make it suitable for export.”20 This could impact another 300,000
barrels per day of Venezuelan oil production.21
As a result of these efforts, oil that Venezuela was producing piled up, filling storage facilities and thentankers. The resulting lack of markets and available space to store oil seems to be the main cause of a
sharp drop in oil production in February.22 As can be seen in Figure 2, Venezuela’s oil production
declined by 130,000 barrels per day from January to February. In the six months prior, it was declining
by an average of 20,500 barrels per day. Then in March it fell another 289,000 barrels per day, for a
total of 431,000 barrels per day.

18 Paine and Zhdannikov (2019).
19 Voronova (2019).
20 Paine and Zhdannikov (2019).
21 Ibid.
22 Kassai and Zerpa (2019).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

11

FIGURE 2
Venezuela’s Oil Production Fell by 289,000 Barrels per Day in March, the Second Month Impacted by
New US Sanctions

Source: OPEC (2019), OPEC Secondary Sources.

This drop, if maintained over the next year, would cut another $6.8 billion from Venezuela’s available
foreign exchange earnings.23 This is about 21 percent of export earnings from 2018. However,Rodríguez projects oil exports in 2019 to fall by a cataclysmic and unprecedented 67.2 percent from2018, as a result of the impact of tightening sanctions.24
The January sanctions included PDVSA in the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets
Control (OFAC) list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) and Blocked Persons. 25 This froze the
US assets of PDVSA and prohibited Americans from doing business with it. With the recognition ofJuan Guaidó as interim president, the US government blocked Venezuela from access to CITGO,

23 Estimated loss based upon price of Venezuela oil basket as of March 19, 2019 ($57.75). OPEC (2019).
24 This includes forecast price changes, i.e. it is forecast export revenue. Torino Economics (2019).
25 US Department of the Treasury (2019).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

12thus taking an estimated $5.2 billion in net assets away from the government of Venezuela.26 Most of
the government’s $9 billion in foreign reserves are in the form of gold; the sanctions make it very
difficult to sell this gold.
On April 10 Bloomberg reported that the IMF had suspended the Venezuelan government’s accessto nearly $400 million in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), another source of liquidity, “citing politicalchaos since National Assembly President Juan Guaidó claimed in January that he was the nation’s
rightful leader.”27
Other Venezuelan foreign assets have been confiscated by governments closely allied to the US,
including $1.2 billion in gold that was held at the Bank of England 28 and a fertilizer company in
Colombia, Monómeros, valued at $269 million.29 The government also has some $6.5 billion in tradecredits, from energy cooperation agreements, which could be marketable at an estimated $3.4 billion,
in order to get cash for essential imports.30 However, such asset sales are also mostly precluded becauseof the US sanctions. In some cases, sizeable payments from countries who participated in Venezuela’s
Petrocaribe program and attempted to pay have, apparently, been blocked — for example a recent$115 million attempted payment from Jamaica.31
On the other side of the equation — the purchase of imports — the Trump administration has dealt
the public health and safety of the population a serious blow by incapacitating Venezuela’s means of
payment for the imports that it can buy with the cash flow that remains. Of course, this directly reduces
the population’s access to essential imports such as medicines and food. The Trump administration isable to do this by various means that prohibit or reduce both the public and private sector’s access tothe international system of payments.
Financial institutions, both public and private, use a system of correspondent banks located in othercountries in order to pay for international transactions. US sanctions have taken the Federal Reserve
and all US financial institutions out of Venezuela’s options for making international payments. The
risk of running afoul of US sanctions had, since at least 2017, led more and more correspondent banks
to discontinue these correspondent banking services.
For example, in November 2017, more than a year before the most severe sanctions (those
implemented since January 2019), Venezuela was using a small bank in Puerto Rico as an intermediary
26 Torino Economics (2019).
27 Arrioja and Bartenstein (2019).
28 Laya, Bronner, and Ross (2019).
29 Torino Economics (2019).
30 Ibid.
31 Craham (2019).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela13

to process payments for food and medicine. Reuters reported that the institution, Italbank, haddiscontinued these services and closed an account with Venezuela’s central bank because of “concerns
about reputational risk.”32 But after the January sanctions and the recognition of Guaidó — which
made him, according to the Trump administration and other governments recognizing the parallel
government — the legal owner of any funds transferred or goods bought by the Venezuelan
government, Venezuela’s access to correspondent banks for international transactions was mostly
wiped out. This included access to necessary credits for imports of medicine, food, and other essential
goods.
Venezuela also suffered a severe electricity crisis in March. A baseline estimate from Rodríguez
forecasts Venezuela losing a total of 6.4 percent of GDP in 2019 from this crisis; this assumes
blackouts per month amounting to about 35 percent of what happened in March. The causes of theblackouts are not fully known, although there is evidence that a brush fire in close proximity to linestransmitting power from the Guri hydroelectric dam, which supplies 75 percent of Venezuela’s
electricity, contributed to the initial loss of power.33 However, there is no doubt that the economic
sanctions contributed substantially to the length and economic damage of power outages.
For example, the sanctions have limited Venezuela’s access to diesel fuel, which is needed for its
backup thermal generators. Further, Venezuela’s electrical sector relies upon equipment provided byinternational suppliers such as General Electric. The sanctions prevented the Venezuelan government
from paying these companies, thereby increasing reliance on hydroelectric power generation.34

The Impact of Sanctions on Human Lifeand Health
One result of the sanctions, as described above, is to deprive the Venezuelan economy of many billionsof dollars of foreign exchange needed to pay for essential and lifesaving imports. The sanctions
implemented in 2019, including the recognition of a parallel government, accelerated this deprivation
and also cut off Venezuela from most of the international payments system, thus ending much of thecountry’s access to these essential imports including medicine and food — even those that could
normally be bought with available dollars. There is no doubt that all of these sanctions since August
2017 have had severe impacts on human life and health.

32 Pons (2017).
33 Associated Press (2019).
34 Rodríguez and Rodríguez (2019).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

14

While it is impossible to specify the counterfactual — what would have happened if there were no
sanctions — we can first look at some of the deterioration of health indicators (including health careand health-related infrastructure and capacity) between 2017 and 2018.
According to the National Survey on Living Conditions (ENCOVI by its acronym in Spanish), an
annual survey of living conditions administered by three Venezuelan universities, there was a 31
percent increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018.35 This would imply an increase of more than
40,000 deaths.36 This would be a large loss of civilian life even in an armed conflict, and it is virtuallycertain that the US economic sanctions made a substantial contribution to these deaths. The
percentage of deaths due to the sanctions is difficult to estimate because the counterfactual isunknowable, but it is worth noting that the counterfactual in the absence of sanctions could even bethat mortality would have been reduced (see below), in the event that an economic recovery would
have taken place.
Since these are annual statistics, they would not take into account the impact of the sanctions during
the last four months of 2017. As noted above, the impact of the August 2017 sanctions on the collapseof oil production and therefore access to imports was quite immediate, so we would expect some of
the increased mortality to show up in 2017.
In 2018 the Venezuela Pharmaceutical Federation reported that shortages of essential medicines were
85 percent.37 According to a September 2018 study by CodeVida and Provea, more than 300,000
people were at risk because of lack of access to medicines or treatment. This includes an estimated
80,000 people with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 people whoneed dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension (many of whom
cannot obtain insulin or cardiovascular medicine).38
These numbers 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 people
who cannot leave the country to find medicines elsewhere. This is especially true if the projected 67
percent drop in oil revenue materializes in 2019.

35 The ENCOVI 2018 survey has not been made public; the mortality statistic cited here is from the UN Report. United Nations(2019).
36 This is based on a mortality rate of 5.609 per 1,000 people and a population of 30.491 million in 2017 and 29.187 million in 2018.
World Bank (2016) and IMF (2019).
37 United Nations (2019).
38 Coalición de Organizaciones por el Derecho a la Saludo y a la Vida (CodeVida) and Programa Venezolano de Educación Acción en
Derechos Humanos (Provea) (2018).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

15

But the accelerating economic collapse that current sanctions have locked in have many more impacts
on health and premature deaths. According to the Venezuelan Medical Federation, some 22,000
doctors — about one third of the total — have left the country.39 As migration accelerates in 2019
due to the tightening sanctions, more of these health professionals, as well as others with necessary
technical skills, will leave Venezuela.
According to the March 2019 UN Report “Venezuela: Overview of Priority Humanitarian Needs,”
ENCOVI surveys find that due to malnutrition, some 22 percent of children under five are stunted.40
Food imports have dropped sharply along with overall imports; in 2018 they were estimated at just
$2.46 billion, as compared with $11.2 billion in 2013.41 They can be expected to plummet further in
2019, along with imports generally.
The increasing collapse of export revenue and therefore imports has also created massive public healthproblems in the areas of water and sanitation. The most recent UN Report notes that “lack of accessto water, soap, chlorine and other hygiene inhibits hand washing and household water treatment” andthat “households not connected to the water network are using improperly treated and unsafe surface
water and wells.”42 CodeVida found that for 2018, “79 percent of health facilities experience shortages
in water supply,”43 while ENCOVI reports that 61 percent of schools “are in communities without
daily access to potable water.”44
The electricity crisis has also impacted hospitals and health care. It is not known how many people
have died as a result of power failures in hospitals, but during the March blackouts there were press
reports of fatalities due to loss of electricity.45 As noted above, the sanctions contributed substantiallyto the duration and impact of the blackouts.
The UN Report finds that the groups most vulnerable to the accelerating crisis include children andadolescents (including many who can no longer attend school); people who are in poverty or extreme
poverty; pregnant and nursing women; older persons; indigenous people; people in need of protection;
women and adolescent girls at risk; people with disabilities; and people who identify as lesbian, gay,bisexual, transgender, or intersex.

39 United Nations (2019).
40 The underlying data from ENCOVI is not publicly available. United Nations (2019).
41 Data from Torino Economics (2019).
42 United Nations (2019).
43 CodeVida and Provea (2018).
44 United Nations (2019).
45 Gutierrez and Ramos (2019).

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The Illegality and Intent of Unilateral Economic
Sanctions
The unilateral sanctions imposed by the Trump administration are illegal under the Charter of theOrganization of American States (OAS). There are many provisions in the Charter that prohibit thesesanctions, but among the most clear and unambiguous are articles 19 and 20 of Chapter IV:
Article 19
No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason
whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle
prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat
against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.
Article 20
No State may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or politicalcharacter in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantagesof any kind.46
The Trump administration’s sanctions clearly violate both of these articles of the OAS Charter. With
regard to article 19, the US administration is directly interfering in the internal affairs of Venezuela.
This is especially true in light of administration officials’ statements and actions indicating that theirgoal is the overthrow of the Venezuelan government. In discussing US policy in Venezuela, including
military threats, Vice President Mike Pence has repeatedly said “Maduro must go.”47 On February 8,
Reuters reported that the United States was “holding direct communications with members ofVenezuela’s military urging them to abandon President Nicolás Maduro and is also preparing new
sanctions aimed at increasing pressure on him,” citing a senior White House official.48
Perhaps even more striking was this exchange between Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee and
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on March 11, 2019:
MATTHEW LEE: Are you satisfied with the pace of the momentum behind Guaidó and hisleadership? …

46 Organization of American States (OAS) (1993).
47 See, e.g., Pence (2019).
48 Cohen, Spetalnick, and Rampton (2019).

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MIKE POMPEO: Well, we wish things could go faster, but I’m very confident that the tideis moving in the direction of the Venezuelan people and will continue to do so. It doesn’t takemuch for you to see what’s really going on there. The circle is tightening, the humanitariancrisis 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 sufferingthat the Venezuelan people are suffering from.49
While the Trump administration has consistently maintained that the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela
is solely the result of the government’s economic policies, this exchange tells a different story. “Thecircle is tightening, the humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour. … You can see the increasing
pain and suffering” — this appears to refer to the impact of the sanctions, not something that has
taken place over years of economic failure. Furthermore, it implies that the pain and suffering being
inflicted upon the civilian population may not be collateral damage but actually part of the strategy totopple the government.
With regard to article 20, which outlaws “coercive measures of an economic or political character” toobtain “advantages of any kind,” there are reports indicating such intent from both President Trump
and National Security Adviser John Bolton. In a recent book by Andrew McCabe, former acting FBI
director, Trump is quoted as saying “That’s the country we should be going to war with. They have
all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”50
In January, Bolton stated that “We’re in conversation with major American companies now. … It will
make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies
really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”51
A number of legal scholars have argued that economic sanctions of this type are in violation ofinternational law, including the UN Charter and international human rights law.52 It seems obviousthat sanctions which cause widespread hunger and disease, and increased mortality, would violate
human rights law.53
It is worth noting that both the Hague and Geneva Conventions, to which the US is a signatory,
prohibit collective punishment of civilians. Although these treaties apply only during wartime, UN

49 Pompeo (2019); The Real News Network (2019).
50 McCabe (2019).
51 Hennigan (2019).
52 See e.g., Happold and Eden, eds. (2016) and Shagabutdinova nd Berejikian (2007).
53 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN Human Rights) (2018b).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

18human rights experts have argued that it does not make sense that civilians should only have thisprotection during situations of armed conflict.54
The sanctions also violate US law. Each executive order since March 2015 declares that the UnitedStates is suffering from a “national emergency” because of the situation in Venezuela. This is required
by US law in order to impose such sanctions, and the national emergency is invoked under the 1976
National Emergencies Act. This is the same law that President Trump invoked in February 2019 whendeclaring a national emergency to circumvent Congressional appropriation for funds to build a wallalong the border with Mexico. A number of states and public interest organizations have sued the
Trump administration over this maneuver with regard to the border wall.
Of course, it is quite clear that Venezuela has not created any national emergency for the United States.
The executive order also states, as required by law, that Venezuela presents “an unusual andextraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States. This also has no basis in fact. It is
not clear what can be done to enforce the law with regard to these false declarations — US courts
have been very reticent to enforce laws in ways that conflict with the foreign policy decisions of thepresident, even when they appear to violate the constitution.55

Depression, Hyperinflation, and Sanctions:
Blocking Economic Recovery
As noted previously, the Venezuelan economy was already in a deep recession for three years whenthe August 2017 sanctions were imposed, with inflation running at somewhere between 758 percent
and 1,350 percent at an annual rate. Proponents of the sanctions argue that the economy would havecontinued to collapse even without the sanctions that have deprived the economy of many billions ofdollars of foreign exchange. (Although it certainly would not have collapsed at the same rate.) While
many counterfactuals are possible, it is worth looking at what could have been done to get rid of
hyperinflation and stabilize the economy, and how the sanctions affect these options — including
going forward.
The classic definition of hyperinflation in the economic literature is 50 percent per month, or about
13,000 percent annually.56 There have been seven episodes of hyperinflation in Latin America since

54 See e.g., Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN Human Rights) (2018a).
55 See e.g., Franck (1992); Bradley and Morrison (2012).
56 Cagan (1956).

Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela

19World War II.57 In all of these cases, the government eventually adopted a program to get rid of thehyperinflation. The median duration of hyperinflation was about four months.
In a situation of hyperinflation, people increasingly lose confidence in the domestic currency and do
not want to hold it. Therefore, at some point the hyperinflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, the dynamic that is created can make it possible to get rid of hyperinflation easier and more
quickly than taming much lower, but still high, inflation. This happens when, as a result of thehyperinflation, people cease to look at prices in the domestic currency, and instead look to theexchange rate for pricing. At that point, stabilizing the exchange rate can quickly stabilize domestic
prices. For example, in the Bolivian hyperinflation of 1985, hyperinflation was brought under control
within 10 days.58 This Exchange-Rate-Based Stabilization (ERBS) was done by creating a new
exchange rate system with full convertibility and a managed float of the currency. Following that, inorder to change expectations and maintain price stability, the government also had to undertake
serious fiscal and monetary reforms.
Could Venezuela have adopted such a program in the absence of US economic sanctions? It is
certainly possible. Venezuela would not necessarily have needed outside help to have enough reservesto create a new exchange rate system.59 Nor was there any need for further austerity to stabilize thebalance of payments; by 2016 imports had already fallen by more than 80 percent from their 2012
level.60
To the extent that the government did need to borrow — or provide collateral for a debt restructuring— Venezuela should have been able to securitize some of their 300 billion barrels of oil in the ground.
With unimpeded access to the international financial system, there would be some price — even it ifwere only a small fraction of current prices — at which the potential return would balance the risk of
non-payment and would attract investors. These contracts are less difficult to arrange than in the past,as the ability of investors to collect judgements for such assets has increased substantially in recent
years.61 And for a government that wants to avoid an economic collapse, selling off some fraction of
its oil in the ground at a very low price would be worthwhile, especially since these reserves are morethan it could hope to export in a century. Thus, in the absence of sanctions, a government with these57 Hanke and Krus (2013).
58 See Sachs (1987).
59 Their economy has long reached the point where domestic liquidity is so low that it would take less than $2 billion to match all of
the money in circulation at the black market exchange rate.
60 Torino Economics (2019).
61 UNCTAD (2018).

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20

vast oil reserves (in addition to other minerals) would be expected to have the ability to avoid this kindof an economic crisis.62
Again, we can never know what the counterfactual would have been. But what we can know is thatthe sanctions made such a stabilization program practically impossible. Most immediately, they
prevented a debt restructuring that would be necessary to resolve Venezuela’s balance of payments
crisis. The sanctions also prevented the government from pursuing an ERBS program because a peg
to the dollar would require access to the dollar-based financial system, which the sanctions have cut
off as much as possible. The whole idea of restoring confidence in the domestic currency whilestabilizing the exchange rate would seem impossible when a foreign power is cutting off as much of
the country’s dollar revenue as it can, freezing and confiscating international assets, and, as the Trumpadministration has done for nearly two years, pledging to do much more of these things — not tomention threatening to take military action.
Thus one of the most important impacts of the sanctions, in terms of its effects on human life andhealth, is to lock Venezuela into a downward economic spiral. For this reason, it is important to notethat when we look at, for example, the estimated more than 40,000 excess deaths that occurred justfrom 2017 to 2018, the counterfactual possibility in the absence of sanctions is not just zero excess
deaths, but actually a reduction in mortality and other improvements in health indicators. That is
because an economic recovery could have already begun in the absence of economic sanctions.
And conversely, the death toll going forward this year, if the sanctions remain in place, is almost
certainly going to be vastly higher than anything we have seen previously, given the highly accelerated
rate of decline of oil production and therefore the availability of essential imports, and also theaccelerated decline of income per person.

62 According to sources at two major US financial institutions, in 2016 gold swaps which would have provided loans collateralized by
Venezuela’s gold reserves were rejected under pressure from the US Treasury department.

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21

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