Between 2012 and 2020, Venezuela’s economy contracted by 71 percent as the U.S. crippled its oil industry.

Citing information revealed by The Washington Post, the newspaper El Universal pointed out that U.S. government officials warned Donald Trump during his first administration that sanctions against Venezuela could accelerate the exodus of millions of migrants to neighboring countries.

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Between 2017 and 2019, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis delivered at least four reports to the National Security Council detailing how the economic war against Venezuela could affect migration flows from Latin America.

Despite these warnings, the Trump administration imposed some of the harshest economic sanctions in the history of U.S. foreign policy on the Bolivarian nation, arguing that they were a necessary response to encourage a change in government.

Although that U.S. objective was not achieved, President Nicolás Maduro continues to govern Venezuela while dealing with the economic sanctions imposed on his people. Concerns among Trump officials about the potential effects of the sanctions were broader than previously believed, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials.

“This was the point I raised at the time: I said the sanctions would grind the Venezuelan economy to dust and have enormous human consequences, one of which would be migration. The sanctions clearly helped generate faster migration. And we knew it was only a matter of time before these people decided to migrate north,” said Thomas Shannon, who served as undersecretary of political affairs at the State Department during the Trump administration.

Over the past two decades, U.S. arbitrary sanctions have affected nearly one-third of all countries in the world. In the case of Venezuela, U.S. officials were and remain deeply divided over this pressure mechanism. Neoconservative figures like John Bolton, Trump’s former senior advisor, have defended sanctions as a crucial, albeit unsuccessful, tool to oust Maduro from the presidency or at least limit the funds at his disposal.

However, other former officials from Trump’s first administration, who served in the State and Treasury Departments, say it is clear that U.S. sanctions only worsened Venezuela’s economic situation without yielding significant geopolitical benefits for the United States.

“Between 2012 and 2020, Venezuela’s economy contracted by 71 percent—the largest contraction of its kind in modern history for a country not at war—as the United States crippled its oil industry and restricted access to international markets,” El Universal recalled.

teleSUR/ JF Source: El Universal

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