By William Castillo Bolé on December 21, 2025
The sin we have committed in Venezuela is to dare, for the first time in a hundred years, to confront the gross privileges of a senseless and insensitive oligarchy… Hugo Chávez, January 2003
On December 18, 2014, as Venezuelans were preparing for Christmas Day—a date celebrated with unparalleled devotion in our country—the United States Congress passed a strange law specifically targeting Venezuela. Apart from the unusual nature of one country’s parliament passing a law about another country, in that legal instrument—voted unanimously by Democrats and Republicans—the United States gave itself the right to intervene in Venezuela “in defense of democracy and civil society.”
Too busy preparing hallacas (a traditional Christmas dish) and choosing new clothes for the children, Venezuelans were unaware that a tailor-made suit had been designed for us. That day on Capitol Hill, U.S. congressmen justified themselves by citing the need to defend “peaceful Venezuelan protesters,” alluding to the violent and vandalistic actions led by the opposition that year, which left 43 citizens dead. The truth: that “defense of civil society” law established the legal framework and paved the way for future sanctions against Venezuela.
Three months later, in March 2015, Barack Obama, citing this legal instrument, issued a presidential decree declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” In Executive Order 13692, Obama expressed concern about “the situation in Venezuela”; and that concern—as was predictable—led him to create the sanctions program against our country, aimed at “disciplining” that rebellious and uncomfortable Bolivarian democracy that did not comply with U.S. standards.
Since then, Venezuela has been the target of a brutal policy of economic devastation and multifaceted aggression. In ten years, 1,043 unilateral coercive measures, sanctions, persecution, suffocation, and punishment have been imposed against the state, the economy, public finances, the oil industry, and foreign trade by the United States, other governments, and the international financial system. This aggression, unprecedented in Venezuelan history and in almost 200 years of diplomatic relations with the United States, is known as the blockade of Venezuela.
Blockade means besieging, encircling the country. Subjected to a growing process of economic and political hostility—and a relentless campaign of criminalization through the media and digital platforms—Venezuela has been prevented from accessing financial markets, trading oil and other minerals, and has had valuable assets abroad blocked, frozen, and confiscated over the last ten years. In this period the country has been denied access to food, medicine, raw materials, and essential goods, including vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a decade, the blockade has devastated the Venezuelan economy, with severe impacts on the lives, well-being, and human rights of the Venezuelan people. Between 2015 and 2022, the economy contracted to one-fifth of its 2015 value; foreign exchange earnings fell by 90% over the same period, creating a sharp deficit in the national budget that consequently impacted the provision of public services and social protection programs.
The estimated cost of losses to the Venezuelan economy due to the fall in GDP amounted to $642 billion over seven years, or an average annual loss of $91 billion.
US experts in the design of sanctions—such as former Obama administration official Richard Nephew—argue that sanctions should “cause pain” and should be applied “where they can cause the most pain.”
Because of this design concept, unilateral coercive measures imposed harsh restrictions on the Venezuelan oil industry, preventing our country from exercising its sovereignty over its energy sources. Since 2017, through various executive orders issued by the United States, PDVSA, the national oil company, has been prevented from renegotiating its international commitments, and severe restrictions have been imposed on its operations worldwide. The oil sector has been the target of 163 economic coercive measures, accounting for 16% of the total measures against the country.
As a result of the sanctions, in the first seven years of the blockade, the Venezuelan oil industry failed to produce 3.993 billion barrels of oil, resulting in losses of $232 billion.
As a result, Venezuela lost 90% of its foreign exchange earnings between 2014 and 2020. To get an idea from the numbers, Venezuela went from receiving $39 billion in foreign earnings in 2014 to receiving $743 million in 2020. From 39 to less than 1. It is extremely difficult to graph this decline because of the enormous gap between the two figures.
In 2017, Donald Trump blocked sovereign and PDVSA debt and, predictably, the country defaulted. Due to a phenomenon that the UN Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, calls “overcompliance”—which occurs when companies exceed sanctions out of fear of being sanctioned—Venezuela was effectively expelled from the interbank messaging system (Swift), which isolated it financially from the world.
More than $22 billion in the country’s resources and assets are currently blocked or frozen in the financial system or by US measures. The irony is that, while Venezuela was unable to vaccinate its children due to the vaccine blockade, a large part of those funds were confiscated by the United States and handed over in 2019 to the Venezuelan opposition to finance the false and self-proclaimed government of Juan Guaidó, a political creation of Donald Trump, who had him applauded with a standing ovation by the… US Congress!
Up to 41 international banks froze transactions from Venezuela, including imports of food and medicine, turbines for the electricity sector, spare parts for drinking water systems, and raw materials and supplies for domestic industry.
Such restrictions include measures against private companies and national and foreign individuals, travel bans, visa bans, and the freezing of public assets and international reserves in international banks.
As you read this, Venezuela still has 32 tons of gold frozen in the Bank of England and $5 billion in the IMF, amounts that both organizations refuse to return because they “do not recognize” the Venezuelan government. The famous doctrine of state immunity, which is currently being debated in relation to the attempt to confiscate Russian reserves, has already been completely violated in the case of Venezuela.
Several Venezuelan assets have been seized or destroyed by the United States. Venezuela’s main asset abroad, the CITGO Petroleum company, was blocked by an executive order from Donald Trump in 2019 and is in the process of being auctioned off in the US judicial system.
As was to be expected, the economic impacts quickly shifted to the national budget, and from there to social programs and public services.
Between 2016 and 2017, the importation of vaccines and medicines was prevented, which increased the prevalence rate of some diseases for at least three years. The blockade on food caused the nutritional deficit to rise from less than 3%, where Hugo Chávez had left it, to more than 35%. Unilateral sanctions and the phenomenon of over compliance reduced local medicine production by up to 60%, and major pharmaceutical companies stopped sending their products to Venezuela for fear of punishment.
This crisis led to an unprecedented wave of migration that affected broad professional, labor, and social sectors, particularly in health, education, engineering, and specialized technical fields. In some medical areas, Venezuela lost nearly half of its specialists. More than 2.5 million people left the country, a figure far from that reported by anti-Venezuelan propaganda, but which represented an unprecedented cultural and social shock.
The blockade went far beyond Obama’s concerns in 2015, and today it transcends Trump’s military threats. It is a constant, a state policy. Control of Venezuela and its immense resources is a strategic objective of US foreign policy. And recolonizing Venezuela is paving the way—as Álvaro García Linera said in 2017—for the economic and social reconquest of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The sanctions against Venezuela were designed and implemented to bring about a “change of political regime,” a concept that, according to Washington’s own strategists, goes beyond a simple change of government or leadership and involves a kind of “reset” of the political, economic, and legal system of the target country.
As Marx said, history sometimes repeats itself as tragedy and sometimes as farce: regime or model change is something that the United States already did in Chile in 1973 and is now trying to do in Argentina. What used to be done with blood, propaganda, and economic warfare is now done with economic warfare, propaganda (on social media)… and blood.
The sanctions deeply wounded Venezuela’s economic fabric, but they have failed miserably in damaging the national spirit and achieving a change of political regime. Today we can say, without arrogance, that the Bolivarian Revolution has been put to a historic test and has successfully passed it.
In 2018, President Nicolás Maduro launched an economic program to confront the coercion of sanctions; and in 2020—in the midst of the pandemic—he designed a bold financial and legal anti-blockade strategy. Throughout this time, beyond the slander and lies that are spread daily against our country, the Revolution that Chávez began, based on Bolívar’s ideas, has had a people willing to resist aggression through awareness, work, and production.
How the Venezuelan people resisted, what resources and strategies they used to face foreign pressure and become the most dynamic economy in South America today, is a truly surprising topic that I will discuss in a future article.
Source: Alai, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English