Maria Corina Machado with George W. Bush in 2005. Photo: Unedited Anti-Imperialism/File photo.
By Joe Emersberger – Jan 19, 2026
He has shown that US tyranny causes millions of deaths, but supports it anyway
Despite having always been a strong opponent of the kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez has harshly criticized illegal U.S. sanctions on his country. He has a very impressive academic and professional background as an economist. He has frequently used his expertise to refute fascists like Ricardo Hausmann (a supporter of Nazi Israel’s genocide in Gaza) who deny the lethal impact of US sanctions on Venezuela.
Grim calculations showing a partial toll of US savagery
More recently, Rodríguez was the lead author of a paper that was published in the prestigious Lancet Global Health journal. [1] The paper showed that illegal economic sanctions (mostly imposed by the US but often joined by its EU vassals) have killed about 560,000 people per year from 2012 – 2021. The paper noted that “This estimate is higher than the average annual number of battle-related casualties during this period (106 000 deaths per year) and similar to some estimates of the total death toll of wars including civilian casualties (around half a million deaths per year).” One reason the death toll is so high is because roughly 25% of the world population (about 2 billion people) live under US sanctions.
It should be stressed that the data Rodriguez used in this paper came largely from the UN. The UN, even before the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza, exposed itself as being quite capable of publishing dubious statistics that serve the US imperial agenda. So that bias may have made his estimate lower than it would otherwise have been. In spite of that, Rodriguez’s estimate was horrific. And for the 1970 – 2021 period, his research shows the death toll from illegal US-led sanctions to be 38 million.
The obvious conclusion to draw from Rodriguez’s research is that the US is a very murderous dictatorship. With total impunity, the US wields lethal authority over billions of people who are not US citizens, or even residents. Empire is another word for that kind of dictatorship.
No. Trump cannot win an election in Venezuela “democratically”
But in a New York Times op-ed on January 8, Rodriguez has shown himself to be completely oblivious to the implications of his own research. He wrote the following:
If Venezuela were a democracy, then Ms. Machado’s party would be in power. But Venezuela is not a democracy, nor will it become one overnight simply because Mr. Maduro is no longer around. When the Trump administration made the decision to carry out a surgical operation to extract Mr. Maduro instead of occupying the country, it also chose, at least in the short term, to work with a state structure designed and run by supporters of Mr. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez.
This passage is sickening for a few reasons. He refers to the attack that killed about a hundred people as a “surgical strike”. In fact, nowhere in the op-ed does he say a word about the deaths caused by the kidnapping of Maduro. But most offensive of all is Rodriguez’s claim that “if Venezuela were a democracy, then Ms. Machado’s party would be in power.”
Maria Corina Machado’s party should be outlawed in Venezuela, and Machado herself should have been jailed decades ago. Machado signed the Carmona Decree in 2002 when Hugo Chavez was overthrown for two days. The decree, issued by the short-lived US-backed dictatorship of Pedro Carmona, voided the 1999 constitution that voters had ratified and dissolved all the country’s democratic institutions including the National Assembly and the Supreme Court. In 2005, Machado told the New York Times that she was only at the National Palace the day the decree was issued to visit Pedro Carmona’s wife who was “a family friend”. She told the Christian Science Monitor she thought the Carmona Decree was a sign in sheet. These are risible claims. It was disgraceful of Rodriguez to tell New York Times readers that Machado’s support for the 2002 coup could be doubted. And recall that the New York Times enthusiastically welcomed Carmona’s brief dictatorship.
She has always made clear that she wants to slavishly serve the US dictatorship in Venezuela and violently exterminate the Chavista movement she despises. As Rodriguez concedes in his New York Times op-ed, she has called for foreign invasion (mass slaughter) in Venezuela, and applauded Trump’s recent homicide spree targeting Venezuelans on the high seas, and never condemned Trump illegally sending hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to prison in El Salvador as if they were slaves. Unmentioned by Rodriguez was that Machado is also a staunch supporter of the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza.
Rodriguez claimed in the op-ed that Machado has the support of 70% of Venezuelans. That’s outlandish, but also irrelevant to whether she could ever win a democratic election. Anyone who accepts the legitimacy of a US-backed candidate winning in Venezuela should not complain if Trump were to use starvation sanctions and military force to ensure that his allies prevail in elections within the United States. The main thing preventing that in the US (for now) is that Democrats and Republicans are two factions of the same party: both totally committed to serving oligarchs and ensuring that “Israel” can perpetrate genocide. All factions of the US oligarchy have profited from the “two party” scam and will not easily give it up.[3]
Moreover, even if Machado’s fascist views were shared by the Venezuelan majority, they would still be illegitimate. Democracy does not mean the majority is allowed to perpetrate mass murder. That’s what Machado would do if the US were to fully commit to installing her into power. Trump obviously balked at the US troop casualties and long term expense of installing Machado and carrying out her homicidal fantasies. Rodriguez completely glossed over Machado’s fascistic nature and described her as overly stubborn – almost as if she were too virtuous to get Trump’s support.
No grounds for accepting that Machado’s party won in 2024
Despite admitting in his op-ed that Machado is an extravagant liar who has said that Maduro’s government helped steal the US election in 2020 from Trump, Rodriguez has an unshakable faith in Machado’s tally sheets from the 2024 presidential election (which she claims were won by her proxy, Edmundo Gonzalez). Gonzalez refused to present evidence to the electoral chamber of the Supreme Court. Venezuela’s Electoral Council has not published a breakdown of the vote by polling station. It has been alleged that this can only be because the government is hiding evidence of fraud since it has almost always done this in the past.
That argument ignores the lesson of the US-backed coup in Bolivia in 2019. The Morales government in Bolivia gave OAS and EU monitors full access to results in real time of the presidential election. The OAS and EU concocted brazen lies about the results that incited a military coup. These lies were fully backed by the western media and prominent human rights groups like Human Rights Watch. As usual, nobody suffered appropriate consequences for what was done to Bolivia. The OAS General Secretary at the time, Luis Almagro, who aggressively promoted the lies, did not even lose his job over it.
And of course, Francisco Rodriguez – like the rest of the western establishment – has been calling Venezuela a dictatorship years before 2024. Rodriguez did not accept the legitimacy of Maduro’s victory in 2018. Rodriguez had been a key advisor to the very distant second place finisher in that election, Henri Falcon. Rodriguez also accepted the legitimacy of the Trump-appointed Juan Guaido as interim president of Venezuela in 2019. More recently, Rodriguez happily endorsed Leopoldo Martinez who ran for Congress in the US as a Democrat. Rodriguez said Martinez “stood up to authoritarianism, faced political persecution, and kept fighting for democracy.” In fact, Leopoldo Martinez accepted a job with the Carmona Dictatorship as its Finance Minister.
Wider implications of living under US dictatorship
Venezuela’s government, even after being bombed by the US, has to tread very carefully and try to use diplomacy to survive. Trump wagers that Venezuela’s diplomacy will eventually devolve into surrender. After kidnapping Maduro, his war on Venezuela remains unpopular in the US. A majority (51%) oppose invading Venezuela and only 36% support it. A plurality (46%) doesn’t even approve of the kidnapping of Maduro. That’s remarkable given the constant vilification of Maduro across the political spectrum – and how supposedly low US casualties were as a result of the kidnapping. But the US “anti-war movement” such as it is, poses a miniscule threat. It is not nearly disruptive enough – party due to its own errors, but mainly because it operates under the constraints of dictatorial rule.
Venezuela cannot kidnap Trump in retaliation or bomb Washington DC. We should all wish it could. A lack of a credible military deterrent has always forced Venezuela to go ridiculously easy on US-backed subversives like Machado and Juan Guaido, who was never even arrested as he wandered all over Venezuela for years as the US-appointed interim president.
To be free of US tyranny, every country needs to have a credible military deterrent of its own – or one shared through reliable military alliances. Without that, “democracy” will mean either capitulation to the US or suffering of brutal consequences for daring to defy it – while the tyrants in Washington suffer no consequences at all.
NOTES
[1] His criticism of sanctions was so strong that he was willing to write a positive blurb about a book Justin Podur and I wrote about Venezuela even though we took a strongly pro-Maduro perspective. Also, capitalism can be blamed for hundreds of millions of deaths since 1990 through a comparison with Cuba as I showed in another Substack article.
[2] Rodriguez’s co-authors were Silvio Rendon and Mark Weisbrot, the co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) where Rodriguez is a senior research fellow.
[3] Albeit in the post genocide in Gaza world things look possible that were once seemed unthinkable.
(Substack)
Joe Emersberger
Joe Emersberger is an engineer, writer, and activist based in Canada. His writing, focused on the Western media’s coverage of the Americas, can be found on FAIR.org, CounterPunch.org, TheCanary.co, Telesur English, and ZComm.org.
