Venezuela Under Siege: A Hundred Deaths at Sea – Hundreds of Thousands by Sanctions – Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond

By Roger D. Harris – Nov 21, 2025

Washington is targeting the Venezuelan people in an escalating regime-change offensive, combining open military violence with an economic siege that has quietly claimed far more lives.

Most of the world looks on in disbelief at the now-routine murders on the high seas off Venezuela’s coast – serial killings that the newly minted War Department calls Operation Southern Spear.

On October 31, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the attacks, saying that the “mounting human costs are unacceptable.” The People’s Social Summit in Colombia (November 8-9) excoriated Washington. Four days later in Caracas, a meeting of jurists from 35 countries denounced the “homicidal rampage.” The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild charged “egregious war crimes and violations of international human rights, maritime, and military law.”

Even The New York Times, an outlet that is not squeamish about US atrocities, described Washington’s flimsy drug-interdiction rationale as being “at odds with reality.”

The notion that the US – the world’s leading consumer of illegal narcotics, the major launderer of trafficking profits, and the cartels’ favored gun runner – is concerned about the drug plague is ludicrous.

In reality, Venezuela is essentially free of drug production and processing – no coca, no marijuana, and certainly no fentanyl – according to the authoritative United Nations World Drug Report 2025. The European Union’s assessment of global drug sources does not even mention Venezuela.

Most inconveniently for Mr. Trump, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment does not list Venezuela as a cocaine producer and only as a very minor transit country. Nor is Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro cited as a drug trafficker.

The State Department is designating the so called Cartel de los Soles, allegedly headed by Maduro, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), However, the entity is nowhere to be found in the DEA assessment for the simple reason that it does not exist.

Meanwhile, the body count from the killing spree is nearing one hundred, yet not an ounce of narcotics has been found. In contrast, the Venezuelan government has seized 64 tons. Clearly Washington’s intent is not drug interdiction but regime change.

Sanctions kill
As horrific as the slaughter by direct US military violence against Venezuela may be, a far greater contributor to excess deaths has received scant media attention. The toll from sanctions is well over a hundred-fold larger.

Sanctions are not an alternative to war but a way of waging war with a less overt means of violence – but deadly, nonetheless.

Sanctions, more properly called illegal unilateral coercive measures, are as lethal as the missiles Washington rains down on small boats in the southern Caribbean and the Pacific from Ecuador to Mexico.

Economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs demonstrated that US sanctions imposed 2017-2018 drastically worsened Venezuela’s economic crisis and directly contributed to an estimated 40,000 excess deaths.

By 2020, former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated a death toll of over 100,000. An expert in international law, de Zayas argues that sanctions function as collective punishment, harming civilians rather than government officials.

Washington is now escalating its regime-change offensive – while maintaining the sanctions – precisely because Venezuelans have successfully resisted the punitive measures.

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Sanctions disproportionately kill children
A peer-reviewed scientific report in The Lancet reveals that a disproportionate number of the sanction’s victims globally are children under the age of five. In fact, the study finds that more human life is extinguished by sanctions than by open warfare.

The SanctionsKill! Campaign describes itself as an activist project to expose the human cost of sanctions and what can be done to end them. They are inviting health workers to sign a letter to the US Congress and the executive branch to end these child-killing sanctions.

Drawing from The Lancet study, the health workers’ letter details how sanctions are particularly deadly for small children by:

• Provoking increases in water-borne illnesses and diarrheal diseases
• Causing low birth weight
• Exacerbating hunger and malnutrition
• Denying lifesaving cancer care and organ transplants
• Obstructing access to and import of antibiotics and other common medicines
• Hindering sanctioned countries from receiving assistance during natural disasters

Among the signatories are Margaret Flowers, MD, a pediatrician and long-time health reform advocate; professor emeritus Amy Hagopian, PhD, at the University of Washington and former chair, International Health Section, American Public Health Association; internist Nidal Jboor, co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide; and pediatrician Ana Malinow, National Single Payer leader.

Others include health policy professor Claudia Chaufan, MD and PhD, York University; child and adolescent psychiatrist Claire M. Cohen, MD, National Single Payer, PNHP; and Kate Sugarman, MD, Georgetown Law School and George Washington School of Medicine.

Their letter concludes that there is a clear consensus in the literature that broad unilateral economic sanctions have devastating health and humanitarian consequences for civilian populations: “This is a global public health crisis caused by US government policy. We implore you to fulfill your inescapable obligation to end it…Imposing such collective punishment on the innocent is morally reprehensible.”

Sanctions and slaughter
Blogger Caitlin Johnstone quips: “civilized nations kill with sanctions.” That the US kills by both sanctions and open military force does not prove her wrong. Rather, it demonstrates that today’s US empire is not civilized.

Because open warfare is more dramatic than unilateral coercive measures, there is a danger that child-killing sanctions are becoming normalized.

Indeed, this form of hybrid warfare by the US impacts roughly one-quarter of humanity. History shows – as in the case of the 1961 John F. Kennedy sanctions against Cuba – that once imposed, sanction regimes are politically difficult to end.

The campaign against unilateral coercive measures is as central to the struggle for peace as opposition to overt military aggression. Sanctions are not a benign substitute for war; they are an additional mechanism of lethal collective punishment.

PS: The health-workers’ letter will not be submitted until early 2026, so health professionals of all disciplines still have time to sign on.

RDH/OT

Roger D. Harris

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Roger D. Harris lives in California and is with the anti-imperialist human rights organization Task Force on the Americas, the Venezuela Solidarity Network, the US Peace Council, and the Marxist Forum. He writes regularly on Latin American and the Caribbean with a special emphasis on Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.