Overview of Trump-Era Sanctions on Venezuela
Overview of Trump-Era Sanctions on Venezuela
During his first presidency (2017–2021), President Donald Trump instituted a series of ever-expanding economic and financial sanctions targeting the Venezuelan government, its leadership, and core economic sectors—especially oil, gold, and finance—as a strategy to pressure the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro to restore democracy and address gross human rights violations. Initial measures included Executive Order 13808 (August 2017), which prohibited the Venezuelan government and its state-owned oil company PDVSA from accessing U.S. financial markets, and later included prohibitions on the purchase of Venezuelan debt, restrictions on the use of digital currency, and broader asset freezes. In 2018, sanctions expanded to target Venezuela’s gold and oil sectors, ultimately culminating in a de facto embargo on Venezuelan oil transactions with the U.S. and other Western partners from 2019 onward.
Beyond sectoral sanctions, the Trump administration targeted senior Venezuelan officials, the military, judges, electoral authorities, and entities involved in perceived corruption, violence against protesters, and manipulation of food subsidy programs. The rationale provided was a response to Venezuela’s repression of dissent, electoral fraud, curtailment of democracy, government corruption, and documented human rights abuses—which included extrajudicial killings and the use of food aid as a means of political control.
Rationale Behind the Sanctions
The Trump administration publicly justified these sanctions by citing specific allegations: the erosion of human rights guarantees, systematic persecution of political opponents, rigged or manipulated elections, corruption scandals, and the regime’s use of state resources—including food—for partisan purposes. Sanctions sought to deny legitimacy and revenue to Maduro’s government, disrupt its sources of foreign income, and pressure for a transition to democratic governance by weakening the regime’s capacity to endure.
How Sanctions Led to the 2019 Humanitarian Crisis
While the stated intention was to target Maduro’s regime and not the Venezuelan populace, the structure and scale of the sanctions—especially once they comprehensively affected Venezuela's oil exports and blocked normal financial operations—had catastrophic effects on the wider economy. Oil sales historically accounted for more than 90% of Venezuela’s foreign exchange; U.S. restrictions on PDVSA’s revenue flows, freezing of assets, and secondary sanctions all but eliminated the government’s ability to import crucial goods, including food, fuel, and medicines. Financial restrictions extended to state banks and the Central Bank, disrupting transactions and access to remittances, further compounding the crisis.
Already in economic decline due to years of mismanagement and falling oil prices, Venezuela’s main source of revenue evaporated after Trump-era measures, losing billions in income and causing a collapse in imports that were essential for an import-dependent country. The healthcare system, reliant on foreign supplies, broke down as access to critical medicines and medical equipment ground to a halt, endangering lives on a massive scale. Food imports also plummeted, leading to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Public services, including electricity, water, and education, suffered crippling underfunding as social program spending dropped by over 99% from pre-sanction levels.
Humanitarian Consequences for the Venezuelan Population
The impact on ordinary Venezuelans was devastating and multifaceted. Food insecurity surged, with more than half the population unable to consistently access enough food due to the sharp decline in imports and soaring inflation, leading to acute hunger and widespread malnutrition. Maternal and child mortality rates rose, and outbreaks of controllable diseases such as malaria, measles, and tuberculosis surged due to collapsed vaccination programs and medicine shortages. The country’s medical facilities experienced chronic shortages of supplies, surgical equipment, and essential medicines, with blackouts and water shortages routinely disrupting hospitals. Water and sanitation infrastructure broke down, with water supply failures affecting up to 90% of the population and leaving the majority unable to afford hygiene products. Forced migration exploded, with more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing the country by 2024—one of the largest displacements in global history.
Poverty rates peaked, with over 85% of Venezuelans living in poverty and 53% in extreme poverty, rendering basic food baskets unaffordable for most households. Average monthly salaries fell to levels far below subsistence costs, while structural underfunding decimated the education sector, public utilities, and social safety nets. The vast majority of children, women, indigenous people, and those with chronic illnesses were most vulnerable to the consequences of growing food deficiency, lack of access to clean water, disease, and social breakdown.
Amid these conditions, reports and academic studies attribute tens of thousands of excess deaths, widespread child stunting, and the country’s unprecedented migration wave to the deepened crisis initiated or accelerated by sanctions alongside prior mismanagement.
Efforts of the International Community and the Limits of Intervention
The international community, recognizing the scale of the humanitarian emergency, launched multi-faceted aid efforts from 2019, involving UN agencies (OCHA, WHO, WFP, UNICEF), donor governments, NGOs, and regional coalitions. Programs ranged from food distribution, healthcare, nutritional supplements, water and sanitation, to support for refugees and migrants in host countries. The United States itself, outside its sanctions regime, funneled nearly $2.9 billion in humanitarian assistance, while Canada, the EU, and other states funded relief operations delivering food, medical care, and sanitation programs.
Diplomatic initiatives included mediation attempts by regional actors, the Lima Group, the EU-backed International Contact Group, and efforts by the UN to foster dialogue and support fair elections. Direct intervention proposals—such as establishing safe humanitarian corridors—were discussed, but political divisions and lack of consensus often limited their realization.
Despite these large-scale responses, global organizations and humanitarian leaders cautioned that the damage wrought by the U.S. sanctions—particularly on oil, finance, and trade—had already fundamentally debilitated Venezuela’s economy and capacity to recover, complicating the efficacy of international efforts. Humanitarian responses struggled to keep up with the rapidly expanding needs, facing shortfalls in funding, government restrictions, sanctions-imposed transaction problems, and logistical obstacles inside and outside of Venezuela. Financial channels for aid—including remittances and humanitarian transactions—were hindered by banking prohibitions and asset freezes, further delaying and complicating relief.
Even as some U.S. and European policymakers acknowledged the humanitarian harms and subsequently advocated for easing specific sanctions or unfreezing assets for aid use, independent observers, UN rapporteurs, and global NGOs reported that “the damage had already been done”—the population had undergone acute deprivation, disease, and mass migration before aid could even partially offset the crisis.
Lasting Consequences and the Path Forward
The humanitarian consequences for the Venezuelan society were profound and enduring: millions faced hunger, treatable illnesses turned deadly due to lack of medicine, entire communities became displaced, and the basic social fabric—including health, education, and civil security—collapsed. Many international experts now contend that while Venezuela’s crisis was rooted in years of economic mismanagement, the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign from 2017–2019 acted as an accelerant, dramatically worsening the population’s suffering and placing the country in a position from which recovery would require years, even with robust international support.
Aid and diplomatic efforts persist, but as recent UN, CDC, and Johns Hopkins analyses affirm, broad sanctions so deeply diminished Venezuela’s revenue and capacity to provide for its people that the international response—however well resourced—could only partially mitigate the vast humanitarian fallout.
In summary, while the Trump administration’s sanctions against Venezuela were officially designed to restore democracy and address human rights abuses, their expansive targeting of core economic sectors, combined with pre-existing state failures, triggered a severe humanitarian crisis in 2019, from which the Venezuelan population continues to suffer. The international community intervened with significant resources and diplomatic initiatives, but the scale and depth of the crisis, established before or during the early stages of these interventions, meant that millions of Venezuelans endured—and still endure—profound hardship whose roots can be directly traced to this period of economic asphyxiation.
