Washington’s crippling sanctions on Venezuela remain in place despite one of the country’s worst-ever natural disasters, Brett Wilkins reports.
President Donald Trump on Jan. 3 at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, following his administration’s illegal invasion of Venezuela and seizure of its president, Nicolas Maduro. (White House /Molly Riley)
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams
Human rights groups have implored the United States and allied countries to lift all sanctions against Venezuela — which experts say have already killed tens of thousands of people — as the beleaguered South American country reels from Wednesday’s devastating earthquakes.
At least 589 people are dead and over 3,000 others injured, with those figures almost certain to keep rising, following a 7.2-magnitude temblor centered in San Felipe, Yaracuy — about 100 miles west of Caracas — and a 7.5-magnitude quake that struck less than a minute later, also in centered in Yaracuy.
The death toll from the devastating earthquake in Venezuela has surpassed 589.
Almost 3,000 people have been injured.
U.S. sanctions are making survival and recovery difficult, as medicine, foreign revenue, and imports are severely restricted.
The U.S. must lift them now. pic.twitter.com/wnbROLx7rb
— CODEPINK (@codepink) June 26, 2026
U.S. President Donald Trump, who authorized the illegal invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, wrote on social media after the earthquakes that his administration “stands ready, willing, and able to help.”
“We will be there for our new and great friends,” Trump claimed.
Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president and acting president since his ouster, thanked the Trump administration for “offering support and solidarity to the people of Venezuela in the face of this tragedy that has plunged us into mourning.”
However, U.S. sanctions — first imposed during then-President George W. Bush’s second term while Hugo Chávez was leading Venezuela and ramped up under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations — remain in place, complicating relief efforts after one of the country’s worst-ever natural disasters.
While the Trump administration has issued narrow exemptions from sanctions to companies looking to profit from Venezuela’s crisis and copious natural resources, primarily oil, these waivers have not delivered broad relief to the people who need it most.
“Today’s catastrophe makes clear what we have long argued: When a country is deliberately weakened through economic warfare, its ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters is also weakened,” the U.S.-based peace group CodePink said in a statement. “The United States has a responsibility to help address the humanitarian consequences of the policies it has imposed.”
CodePink continued:
“Too often, we’ve seen the U.S. and other Western countries exploit natural disasters like this in order to deepen foreign control. In Haiti, the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly pushed militarization and politically conditioned aid instead of genuine recovery led by the country itself. In this moment, the world must refuse to allow Venezuela to be forced down the same path.
We also call on the administration to immediately lift all U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and release Venezuelan funds under US jurisdiction so they can be used for emergency relief, reconstruction, and recovery.”
“This is the time for cooperation, compassion, and respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty,” CodePink added. “We urge the international community to support relief efforts and stand with the Venezuelan people as they rebuild their homes, their communities, and their future.”
Rescue teams from across South America have begun to arrive in Venezuela to help after the devastating earthquake.
The UN has called the response from the region ‘superb’. pic.twitter.com/YDw40ykmYR
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) June 26, 2026
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said Thursday that “while the Trump administration has issued a series of general licenses to allow foreign businesses and banks to operate in Venezuela in spite of U.S. sanctions, the continued existence of these sanctions significantly discourages international economic and financial actors from expanding operations there.”
CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot said that “we must remember that Venezuela suffered the worst depression in the history of the world, without a war, due to illegal U.S. economic sanctions.”
“This deadly destruction was not a mistake, but an expected result that would happen to any country that was cut off by sanctions from the international financial system, and also from the vast majority of its foreign exchange earnings from exports,” he continued.
According to a 2019 CEPR report, as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died due to sanctions during the previous two years. The sanctions ostensibly targeted Maduro’s government, but made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.
“Tens of thousands, and more likely hundreds of thousands, of Venezuelans died as a result of those sanctions,” Weisbrot said Thursday. “The United States is therefore obligated to help prevent further loss of life in Venezuela.”
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer at Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Heartless muddafukka
So long as sociopaths lead superpowers and brainless minnows remain in control of most developed and allegedly “First”World countries, innocent humanity across the rest of the world couldn’t expect any relief to fall from the sky, neither in times of peace nor at times of crises, man-made or natural. Willing or imposed stooges helming Third World or developing societies don’t help the situation either. Venezuelan plight is just a symptom of these long-running imperialistic and “nationalistic” curses that plague human existence !
Donald Trump has shown nothing but cruelty toward people who are suffering. Trump thinks he is making a political point with his enemies when they are in trouble thorough natural disasters by not helping their populations out. That nasty behavior certainly does not impress me.
Simply and openly stating the current situation, in case there are still those who haven’t noticed; any system where one individual has attained overarching power, no matter how it came into being, that system is no longer even hierarchical.
A system where a single individual holds supreme and overarching power is broadly known as an autocracy.
In this form of governance, political hierarchies are non-distributive.
Within this category, absolute authority is typically exercised through several specific forms of government:
Democratic vs. Autocratic Structures
Democracies:
Hierarchies are constructed bottom-up through elections, where checks and balances are used to prevent the unequal distribution of power.
Authoritarianism:
Hierarchies use domination to force compliance from the top down.
At this late stage, need any more be spelled out as to the consequences that are ongoing, and those sure to follow?
Admission: Views expressed in this comment reflect the opinions of the commenter.
After all, it is Journalism, which must, at all times claim its objectivity; as objective as U.S. Academia prides itself. While academia prides itself on objective truth-seeking, achieving pure neutrality is an ongoing challenge. Institutional biases, personal ideologies, and structural privileges often shape research and discourse; so too Journalism, if that is not obvious by now!
A spade is simply a spade! It may be applied to dig up the dirt or to uncover what good has been hidden for far too long.
Note:
Explanatory definitions of convoluted terms by Google AI Overview
The shame of trump’s stupid actions piles up against us, while congress and the courts do little. What country is this, anyway?
Looks and acts like a criminal mass murdering syndicate.
Made by the “elites”, especially those from behind the scenes, pulling the puppet strings.
Exactly. It’s not just Trump. Where is Congress? Where is one democrat voice saying no? Congress is Israeli occupied territory.
Our leader’s moral vacuum reinforced by that of the Speaker’s of the House and the band of sycophantic Cabinet members -together with all but a very few Republicans in Congress -ravage the heart. Consistently deadbeats in the Dept of basic compassion. The Speaker’s fevered harangue today about his lunatic perception of Mamdani’s successful candidates as a Marxist takeover reveals just how clueless this simpleton actually is. Apparently, he has not a scintilla of a grasp anout the intelligence of the American people to choose candidates who are not self serving thugs, lawless fountain contractors, and liars, but ones who care about the well being of us with our socialistic programs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and affordability. He’s ignorant enough to wrongly describe them as communist. Heaven save us from these shallow game playing corrupt self serving troglodytes whose anti constitutional, pro- authoritarian serving behavior reveal them as traitorous to our democratic foundations.
Yet another example of Trump’s a-holism. The man doesn’t have any positive human qualities and is totally unfit to lead our nation, much less the world.
Would that the United States welcomes potential “competition” from states such as Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China in supplying aid to disaster-stricken Venezuela as Pat Nixon did in Peru in 1970 in the aftermath of the devastating Ancash earthquake and accompanying Huascarán landslide, one episode that I go over in my dissertation work concerning US relations with heterodox military regimes in Western Hemisphere states such as Bolivia, Panama, Peru, and Suriname during the Cold War:
“After a military coup brought Juan Velasco Alvarado to power in Peru 21 months ago, United States relations with that country almost degenerated into a cold war. Angered by what Peruvians called the ‘unjust enrichment’ of the International Petroleum Co., Velasco seized the company’s oilfields. Subsequently, Peru also took over U.S.-owned sugar lands. Only intervention by Richard Nixon stayed U.S. retaliation under the Hickenlooper Amendment, which would have imposed economic sanctions on Peru [as advocated by proto-neoconservative diplomats such as Spruille Braden and Ellis O. Briggs]. Even so, the diplomatic climate was markedly frigid, and Peru went unabashedly seeking Russia’s aid to play against its traditional ally. Then last May catastrophe struck. One of the worst earthquakes in history annihilated several Peruvian villages and towns, killing 50,000 people and leaving other thousands homeless. Aid poured in from sympathetic countries, among them France, Spain and Yugoslavia. Cuba’s Fidel Castro flamboyantly donated a pint of his blood. Last week Pat Nixon flew south for a two-day visit to the disaster areas, the first such foreign mission ever undertaken by a First Lady. Air Force One, which carried her there, was piled high with gifts for the Peruvians. A second plane was even more loaded. That was too much for the Russians, who had thus far contributed very little to Peru. They were still smarting from Rumania’s tart observation that, in the wake of floods in their Communist country, the U.S. had contributed more help than fraternal Russia. Three days after Mrs. Nixon left Peru, giant Antonov An-22 cargo [planes] began winging from Moscow to Lima, carrying 100 prefab houses, road-building machines, 200 beds and helicopters to be used in remote areas. On her return flight, Mrs. Nixon had hinted at this anticipated effort: ‘We’re going to have competition in this. That’s good —I welcome that kind of competition.'”
Source:
“Nation: Bidding To Help the Peruvians,” TIME, July 13, 1970
The continued US sanctions against Venezuela post earthquakes proves that the US never cared about the Venezuelans, but only wanted regime change for oil profits. Rodriguez is still complicit as a US puppet. Iranians are now proving to be true to Iranian sovereignty after Venezuela gave up theirs. One hopes people learn from Venezuela’s failures.
The mass murdering u.s.- “elites” have been abducting the state leader of Venezuela and his wife, holding them hostage in the u.s.
So, what do you expect the people of Venezuela and its vice president to do?
Apparently, Venezuela is not Cuba. It has been compromised. Cuba would rather go down fighting.
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2026/01/05/did-venezuela-vp-hand-over-maduro-in-deal-with-the-us/
hxxps://thegrayzone.com/2026/05/25/delcys-gatekeeper-trump-caracas/
Colin Powell quoted “The Pottery Barn Rule.” You break it, you own it. This is Donald Trump’s problem.
I wonder if this will make the Venezuelan people less happy about being ruled by the CIA and Chevron? Up until now, they appear to be loving it, and offering little or no opposition to the CIA takeover of their country. Maybe they’ll be happy with Donald Trump tossing them a roll of paper towels? After all, they have achieved the ideal of the modern left … they are ruled by a woman. What else could they ask for?
They are not ruled by a woman.
They are ruled by the mass murdering u.s.- “elites”, who have been abducting the state leader of Venezuela and his wife, holding them hostage in the u.s.
So, what do you expect the people of Venezuela and its vice president to do?