There have been some inaccuracies and errors in this thread about Venezuela.
In 2015 Obama imposed some individual sanctions against Maduro government officials, which meant denying them US visas and freezing their bank accounts and assets in the US. They were not properly economic sanctions but rather of an individual nature, although their political content should be rejected, especially their legal basis which was the declaration of the Venezuelan government as an “extraordinary threat to US national security”. The Venezuelan regime is an extraordinary threat to the Venezuelan working class but obviously not to US imperialism. The economic sanctions start at the second half of 2017 with Trump's financial sanctions that hindered the renegotiation of Venezuelan foreign debt bonds. Therefore when considering the magnitude of the economic destruction prior to the sanctions one must consider the spectacular economic contraction of the years 2013-2017 and compare it with the contraction after 2018. Between 2013 and 2017 the Gross Domestic Product contracted by almost half. It is the most spectacular economic contraction of the post-war period for a country that has not been at war or suffered any natural disasters. Exclusive merit of the Chavista bourgeoisie and its kleptocratic capitalism. Three elements should be highlighted: 1.-the largest per capita capital flight in the world achieved thanks to chavista exchange control starting in 2003. The government decided to whom it would sell petrodollars, in what amounts and at what price, generating a gap between the value of the dollar in the official and parallel exchange markets that at one point reached a ratio of 10 thousand to one! As can be imagined, this had the consequence of a massive corruption and outright looting of national wealth. 2. -the decision of the Maduro government to pay more than 100 billion dollars in foreign debt services after the crisis began in 2013, by drastically cutting imports on which the country depended to feed itself, to acquire medicines and industrial inputs, etc., destroying living conditions and production. This policy was so suicidal that even though the nominal debt was smaller after these payments, debt became in fact bigger in proportion to the size of the economy, because the latter had shrunk so much. 3.-the fall in oil production as a consequence of disinvestment and corruption, as well as the non-diversification of the economy which increased dependence on a largely privatized oil industry. These are the main causes of the collapse of the Venezuelan economy before the sanctions. After the sanctions, those causes did not disappear, so the post-sanctions economic contraction is not exclusively attributable to them either, only partially. In 2019 Trump imposes oil sanctions, which have been the most damaging. But when the oil sanctions go into effect, Venezuelan oil production had already fallen from three million barrels per day, the 1999 production level, to just over one million barrels per day. The economic contraction that began in 2013 is not due to the fall in oil prices, as they were above 100 dollars a barrel at that time. The privatization of the oil industry is not a consequence of the sanctions either, since it was carried out in the 1990s and Chavismo never nationalized the industry but implemented a joint venture model, with the participation of Chinese and Russian companies, but also U.S. companies such as Chevron, which is actually the foreign company with the largest oil investments in Venezuela. That model was implemented in 2007, 12 years before Trump's oil sanctions! By the time the oil sanctions were implemented in 2019, four million Venezuelans had already forcibly emigrated due to the misery wages and economic disaster, high criminality and repression. It is understandable that socialists in the U.S. emphasize sanctions, as it is their responsibility to oppose an imperialist policy implemented by their own government. However, it is important that they understand the Venezuelan economic reality so that they do not repeat the false propaganda of the multimillionaires in the Chavista government. As for Venezuelan socialists, we oppose U.S. economic sanctions and all forms of imperialist interference, be it U.S., Russian or Chinese, but we cannot absolve the military regime that has led us to disaster from its economic crimes. Nor can we make recommendations to a dictatorship on how to act in economic matters; dictatorships are not usually very receptive to recommendations. Rather our role is to denounce its privatizations, its minimum wage of less than $3 a month, its plunder and its agreements with imperialism. Those interested in reading more can look for material on the Venezuelanvoices.org page, particularly my article “Venezuela is a flawed model for the Latin American Left.” https://venezuelanvoices.org/2022/02/25/venezuela-is-a-flawed-model-for-latin-american-left/ Or my book "Why did chavismo fail?" http://www.socialistcore.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Why-did-Chavismo-fail-1.pdf -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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