The Murderous Machinery of Sanctions Causes Half a Million Deaths a Year

By Misión Verdad – Jul 30, 2025

In the 21st century, economic sanctions have become a decisive factor in mortality. A study published on Friday, July 25, 2025, in The Lancet Global Health estimates that such measures are the cause of 564,000 deaths each year, more than half of those in children under five.

The research, led by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot, is based on data from 152 countries over five decades, and documents how embargoes imposed by the US empire and the European Union act as “silent killers,” restricting foreign currency, medical supplies, and food, which increases mortality rates without leaving the visual mark that accompanies armed conflict.

From 2010 to 2022, 25% of the world’s countries suffered, at least once, some form of sanction imposed by the US empire, the EU, or their satellite partners; in the 1960s, it was barely 8%. This exponential increase coincides with the consolidation of so-called hybrid warfare: an ecosystem of pressure that combines psychological operations, lawfare, control of digital platforms, and financial strangulation.

Under the euphemism of “restrictive measures,” the White House has institutionalized economic siege as a low-cost weapon of mass destruction. It does not require congressional authorization, does not deploy its own troops, and, thanks to the media monopoly, does not fill screens with corpses.

This veil of normalcy is an integral part of the mechanism. By designating a country as an “unusual threat”—the administrative clause that enables sanctions decrees in the US colonial legal system—Washington pushes it out of the global banking system. The flight of foreign currency, the disruption of supply chains, and the collapse of the budget translates into hospitals without supplies, shuttered power plants, and water systems failing due to a lack of chlorine or pipes. The Lancet study shows that the longer the embargo continues, the higher the mortality rate: in the case of infants, the rate increases by ten log points when the embargo exceeds seven years.

The expansion of this financial weapon coincides with the consolidation of the dollar and the euro as global settlement currencies. No other actor has the capacity to bring down entire economies with a simple flip of the liquidity switch.

Results and cases that refute economic neutrality
As aforementioned, the research is based on a panel of 152 countries covering 1971–2021. For each region, the authors compiled mortality rates in seven age groups, from newborns to adults aged 60–80, based on records from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Human Mortality Database. Data on sanctions was obtained from the Global Sanctions Database and classified by scope (economic or non-economic), perpetrator (US empore, European Union, or the UN), and nature (unilateral or multilateral).

The study combines two-way fixed effects models, Granger causality tests, and instrumental variables derived from UN General Assembly votes. This design isolates the effect of sanctions from other factors such as civil wars, per capita income, age structure of population, or political regime.

The results are consistent across different specifications. On average, unilateral sanctions increase mortality among children under five by 8.4 log points, and that of adults aged 60 to 80 by 2.4 log points. When these coefficients are applied to specific populations, the estimate for 2010–2021 is 564,000 deaths each year.

This surplus represents nearly 3.6% of all deaths recorded in countries under sanctions, and far exceeds the annual average of deaths linked to armed conflict (approximately 106,000 in the same period). In terms of age distribution, 51% of deaths occurred among children under five, and 26% among people over 60.

The length of the embargo exacerbates the problem. In infant mortality, a financial sanction adds 5.9 log points in the first three years, 8.3 points between the fourth and sixth years, and ten points when the episode exceeds seven years.

The analysis finds no statistically significant effects for sanctions regimes approved by the UN Security Council, suggesting that breadth and unilaterality—not the mere existence of restrictions—are determinants of the level of damage.

Three national experiences illustrate this trend in particular. Venezuela, subjected to financial and oil sanctions since 2017, experienced a 71% economic contraction and peak shortages between 2012 and 2020, directly affecting the availability of cancer and antiretroviral treatments.

In Iraq, the embargo imposed after the invasion of Kuwait coincided with more than 500,000 child deaths during the 1990s, according to UNICEF.

Syria has accumulated successive rounds of sanctions since 2011, reinforced by the Caesar Act in 2020, and today has 90% of its population living below the poverty line, an environment where health vulnerability is multiplying.

In all three cases, the combination of financial restrictions and obstacles to importing spare parts, food, or medicines was reflected in a sustained deterioration of water, electricity, and health services, resulting in a documented increase in preventable deaths. The pattern is consistent with the global averages revealed by The Lancet: when sanctions are broad, prolonged, and dictated by major economic powers, mortality rates rise to levels comparable to—and even higher than—those of a conventional armed conflict.

Belarus and Cuba Strengthen Their Alliance in Response To Western Sanctions

Human cost out of focus, tactical advantage of the blockade
International humanitarian law prohibits any measure that indiscriminately punishes the civilian population. The Geneva Conventions are explicit on this point; depriving a country of essential supplies constitutes collective punishment, which is classified as a war crime.

Data from The Lancet indicates that broad economic sanctions concentrate excess mortality among children under five and older adults, groups completely unrelated to any political struggle.

Within the sanctioning countries, the power to impose restrictions stems from national emergency laws that grant the executive branch broad discretion. Only a few actors, backed by control of the international financial and payments system, are needed to exclude an entire country from supply chains without effective multilateral review.

The moral discussion is raised from two perspectives:

• Deontological approach: if life and health are inalienable rights, a policy that causes more than half a million deaths each year—77% of which are among children and the elderly—is morally unacceptable.
• Consequentialist approach: legitimacy would depend on the harm preventing a greater evil. However, evidence shows that broad sanctions are used primarily to induce regime changes that do not align with Western strategic or economic interests, not to stop large-scale atrocities. This, added to the acknowledged ineffectiveness in achieving these objectives, is the human cost documented by The Lancet. From this perspective, the scales overwhelmingly lean toward delegitimizing the measure.

The research leaves the following findings:

• Scale of the damage: unilateral sanctions cause a death toll comparable to that of open (conventional) wars.
• Demographic bias: most victims belong to vulnerable groups traditionally protected by humanitarian laws, not political actors.
• Robust causal relationship: the effect persists after controlling for income, political structure, and internal conflicts. It also increases with the embargo’s duration, and reduces when the measure is multilateral.

The data confirms that the financial embargo has become a central element of hybrid warfare. It allows for the projection of power over sovereign territories without the political cost of deploying troops. By cutting off foreign currency, spare parts, and pharmaceuticals, it turns a society’s infrastructure into an invisible battlefield.

For countries subjected to sanctions, induced shortages are not a surgical intervention but a sustained form of coercion. With 564,000 deaths per year, the label of “nonviolent measures” collapses. Studies like The Lancet’s lift the statistical curtain that attempts to hide them. Ignoring this evidence is tantamount to legitimizing murder as a political tactic.

(Misión Verdad) with Orinoco Tribune content

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/JRE/AU