THE US IS STARVING VENEZUELANS IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY
By Daniel Larison, Medium.
March 9, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Massachusetts Peace Action.
The Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status to refugees from
Venezuela, which will permit them to live and work in the United States.
This is the right thing to do, and it is a break with the previous
administration, but there need to be more significant changes to U.S. policy
towards Venezuela. The TPS decision is treating the symptom of Venezuelas
deepening crisis while U.S. sanctions intensify it. As long as our
governments broad sanctions remain in place, they will exacerbate the
economic and humanitarian crises in the country. The U.S. will succeed only
in making conditions for ordinary Venezuelans worse while Maduro and his
allies become more firmly entrenched.
Trumps pursuit of regime change in Venezuela was one of his worst policies,
and it has deepened the misery of the Venezuelan people. It is maddening
that the complete failure of this policy hasnt prompted more demands for
abandoning it. Regime change remains the goal of U.S. policy, and that
practically guarantees that the policy will remain a failure that comes at
the expense of the well-being and lives of innocent people. The Biden
administration should be undoing this policy and lifting broad sanctions so
that at the very least the U.S. isnt making things worse. Unfortunately,
they are mostly keeping the policy they inherited, including support for the
increasingly irrelevant and unpopular Juan Guaidó.
The Biden administration calls its predecessors policy a failure, but then
refuses to make substantial changes to the most destructive part:
A senior Biden administration official portrayed that as a failed strategy.
The United States is in no rush to lift sanctions, [bold mine-DL] the
official said, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss
the policy. But we need to recognize here that unilateral sanctions over
the last four years have not succeeded in achieving an electoral outcome in
the country.
Here we have a good example of why U.S. foreign policy is frequently so
destructive, why there is so little accountability for failure, and why
sanctions are almost never lifted once they are imposed. The administration
official acknowledges the failure of Trumps approach and correctly derides
unilateral sanctions as ineffective, and in the same breath he says that
nothing is going to change. If you know that the sanctions have failed and
will continue to fail, you ought to be in a bit of a rush to get rid of them
because they are contributing to a humanitarian catastrophe.
The administration feels no sense of urgency because there is very little
pressure on them to fix this failing policy, and there is so little pressure
on them because the victims of this policy are largely invisible to the
American public. Our government wages pitiless economic war on innocent
people, but because it claims to be doing so in the name of democracy there
is almost no resistance from Congress or anywhere else.
The Trump administrations decision last year to end the humanitarian
exemption for diesel fuel has greatly worsened the crisis:
Diesel suppliers including Indias Reliance Industries Ltd and advocacy
groups concerned about the humanitarian impact of shortages have urged new
U.S. President Joe Biden to lift the ban on so-called diesel swaps.
Venezuela has not received a cargo of imported diesel since Reliances final
shipment arrived in November, Refinitiv Eikon data show.
You can see here how harmful this is to the population. Fuel shortages will
cripple the countrys supply chain, and more people will starve. The
Venezuelan people have already been enduring years of deprivation, and
sanctions have intensified that suffering so that politicians in Washington
can appear to be doing something. They certainly have done something,
and that is to drive millions of people towards famine and want. The longer
that it takes for the Biden administration to relieve the pressure on the
Venezuelan people, the more that it will own the consequences of this failed
policy that it is choosing to continue.
Biden needs to restore the diesel exemption at once, but an even better
response would be to abandon maximum pressure entirely. Our Venezuela
policy is starving an already impoverished nation, and there is an urgent
need to end that policy.
