At no point did the paper mention the US role in wrecking the Venezuelan “economy as a whole.” It’s a striking example of what Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez described in
Foreign Policy(
1/12/18):
[A] problematic idea driving current US policy is the belief that financial sanctions can hurt the Venezuelan government without causing serious harm to ordinary Venezuelans. That’s impossible when 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine. Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.
Even as Venezuela’s export revenues rose last year, as world oil prices increased, Venezuela’s imports fell by 31 percent, Rodríguez pointed out:
The reason is that the country lost access to international financial markets. Unable to roll over its debt, it was forced to build up huge external surpluses to continue servicing that debt in a desperate attempt to avoid a default.
It’s sanctions, not “years of economic mismanagement,” Rodríguez noted, that prevent Venezuela from turning rising oil prices into food for hungry children:
Major financial institutions have delayed the processing of all financial transfers from Venezuelan entities, significantly hampering the ability of Venezuelan companies to do business in the United States. Even Citgo, a Venezuelan-owned subsidiary that owns 4 percent of the United States’ refining capacity, hasn’t been able to get US financial institutions to issue routine trade credit since sanctions were imposed.
