Venezuela Earthquakes, Deadly Sanctions And Media Deception

The lack of heavy machinery in Venezuela following the devastating earthquakes which struck at the weekend has condemned thousands of people to a slow, suffocating death. These deaths may not have come at the tip of an American missile, but they very much came at the bloody hands of sadistic empire.

The absence of bulldozers, diggers and excavators is a direct consequence of nearly three decades of crushing American sanctions which have sought to impoverish, demoralise, weaken and ultimately collapse the country in the name of freedom. In this explanation, some might see an anti-imperialist talking point lazily seeking to blame the US for a natural disaster.

But it’s just the reality.

US sanctions on Venezuela prohibit Americans from buying, selling or having any contact with the Venezuelan government, any state-owned or other companies on the sanctions list (currently 154 entities), or individuals on that list. This amounts to a huge chunk of the Venezuelan economy. And even if a company is not technically sanctioned, they become de facto sanctioned because western banks won’t process Venezuela-related payments.

The end result is a massive shortage of all kinds of goods and equipment, including and especially digging and earth-moving machines such as bulldozers and excavators which are widely used by the heavily-sanctioned mining and oil industry.

Yet in all the legacy media articles I’ve read, not one has made this link clear and explicit. Journalists appear to have gone to great lengths to avoid this context and laid all the blame on Venezuelan authorities for the absence of life-saving machinery.

A Guardian article on June 26th said “years of economic misrule and corruption have left authorities woefully unprepared for a disaster on this scale.” No mention of sanctions, zero context provided for why the country may have been so unprepared. The Guardian cynically uses a natural disaster which has killed perhaps 50,000 people as merely another opportunity to put the boot in on a country already beaten to the ground.

An ITV article describes families conducting rescue operations themselves because they had "given up waiting for the government.” The government, of course, is the one under US control since the abduction of Nicolas Maduro in January. But the US gets no mention in the article, let alone any blame for the situation.

On Sunday Reuters said Venezuela has been “long mired in a deep political and economic crisis” yet neglects to mention which country helped mire it in this crisis, or the effect of sanctions. For any self-respecting journalist who wants to truthfully convey how Venezuela arrived at this point, this should be a cardinal sin.

The Associated Press said people had “taken the search for missing loved ones into their own hands, digging through the rubble of their own homes, citing the scarcity of government rescuers.” Once again, zero mention of the murderous sanctions designed explicitly to deny the country the machinery it would need in a natural disaster such as this.

A generous interpretation is that these journalists are just lazy and ill-informed. A more realistic interpretation is that they are not neutral arbiters of facts seeking to provide the full story, but cowards and shameless scribes for empire who instinctively reproduce imperial narratives. Blaming the lack of equipment on mismanagement and corruption rather that US sanctions is just their dishonest muscle memory kicking into gear.

And because most people have little idea how sweeping US sanctions are, how they work, and the extent to which they are intended to strangle a target economy, this selective journalism falls on already propagandised ears and helps reinforce imperial narratives.

Now 50,000 are missing, many trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, and many presumed dead. Communities are pleading for the heavy equipment which could either rescue those still alive, or at least retrieve the bodies of their loved ones in order to grant them a dignified farewell. Some is on the way, but it will be too late to save any lives.

Empire has once again committed mass murder, this time as a secondary effect of its hegemonic perversion.

The situation in Venezuela isn’t exclusively on Donald Trump. It’s on every American president, beginning with Bill Clinton, who responded to the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 with devastating sanctions intended to punish the people for electing a socialist who nationalised the oil industry, ejected American oil companies and created a welfare state with the proceeds. Empire clothed its depravity, as it always does, in the ballgown of freedom, and liberal media happily regurgitated the lies about authoritarianism and democracy, despite Chavez being democratically elected in elections deemed free and fair by international observers, four times.

And still, in spite of Venezuela being turned into a compliant US puppet state, the Trump regime has refused to lift sanctions in the face of this disaster. Because empire isn’t interested in saving lives, it’s interested only in the hemispheric domination of the Americas. A natural disaster which further cripples the ability of the people to assert their power and practice self-determination is actually a boon for imperialists.

Empire loves chaos, and it loves using sanctions to create that chaos.

The US, then led by Joe Biden, did the same thing in 2023, refusing to lift sanctions on Syria after earthquakes struck Syria and Turkey, killing tens of thousands across the two countries.

This is simply the imperial playbook at work.

Death from sanctions in Venezuela is, sadly, nothing new. A 2017 study by the economist Jeffrey Sachs found that in one year alone, US sanctions had killed roughly 40,000 Venezuelans through the denial of life saving medicines and medical equipment.

But these numbers are just a fraction of the overall toll.

A recent study from the medical journal The Lancet estimated that US sanctions, supported by countries within the western imperial orbit, have caused 38 million excess deaths since 1970.

The average annual death toll of sanctions, depending on the year being measured, is 400,000 to one million. Currently 54 countries amounting to two billion people are under US sanctions.

Why?

Because, as the researchers Utsa and Prabhat Pratnaik describe it, global south countries which aren’t aligned with the US and who pursue economic sovereignty and independent industrial development “may increase the supply price or challenge the core’s industrial and technological monopolies.” Fully one quarter of humanity is being choked by capitalist empire in an effort to ensure no meaningful challenge emerges that would hinder its ability to force submission and exert control.

A system that uses its economic and financial power to kill up to a million people every year to maintain its hegemony is one of staggering violence and should be widely viewed as illegitimate.

People who die buried under rubble because empire prevents them from owning the machines that could dig them out are just as dead as those killed by direct violence.

And that the story of the earthquake is not a story about the violence of imperial sanctions, or about the illegitimacy of western hegemony, but instead is about the failure of a government under the boot of empire, is further proof, as if any was needed, of media complicitly in the savagery of this empire.

(Thank you for all your support. If you appreciate my work and would like to make a donation you can do so here or you can upgrade your subscription.)