More than 3,800 people have died in Venezuela’s June 24 double earthquake, with 16,700 injured, according to current government reports. A medical crisis has emerged for thousands of survivors, and 17,800 are homeless.

There are heart-wrenching reports of people trying to dig survivors out of the rubble with their hands, with dozens of children suffering amputations because they could not be reached in time.

At a time like this, Venezuelans and the international community shouldn’t have to fight for an end to the sanctions that have destroyed the nation’s economy and that hobble its recovery, nor for the country to have access to the billions of dollars worth of assets that belong to it. But we do, because the role of sanctions and frozen assets has received far too little public attention.

From 2012 to 2020, Venezuela suffered what is likely the most severe economic contraction in a depression that has occurred without a war. Data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show a 74 percent decline in its GDP during that time. This is a loss of income about three times larger than what people here in the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This was not a natural disaster like the earthquake, but a man-made one. IMF data show that 88 percent of this loss took place following US economic sanctions that began in 2015. The destruction accelerated with the Trump sanctions, starting in 2017, that cut the country off from most international finance and then from the vast majority of its foreign exchange earnings. These shocks would have pushed almost any country into a severe crisis, and that’s exactly what happened, demonstrating to the world how sanctions really could destroy an economy.

As a result, Venezuela was already facing a humanitarian crisis before the earthquakes hit. According to data from the European Commission, before June 2026 there were 7.9 million people (of a population of 28.5 million) who were in need of humanitarian assistance. Forty percent of Venezuelans were facing moderate to severe food insecurity, and about 56 percent of the population was in extreme poverty. Eighty-six percent were dependent on contaminated water sources.

Nearly half of Venezuela’s doctors, and many health professionals and other skilled workers — including 200,000 teachers — left the country as the economy fell apart.

A study I coauthored with Francisco Rodríguez and Silvio Rendón, with results published last July in The Lancet Global Health, estimated that broad unilateral sanctions like these — the vast majority of which are imposed by the United States — cause an additional 564,000 deaths annually. This is comparable to the lives lost worldwide due to armed conflict. A majority of these deaths were estimated to be among children under 5 years old.

The death rate among Venezuelans grew throughout Venezuela’s depression, with more than 100,000 additional deaths during the years (2015–20) of the economic collapse that had sanctions.

Venezuela has crucial resources that it is not being allowed to access. The United States and Europe are blocking the nation from more than $11 billion dollars that Venezuela should legally have. About $4 billion is sitting at the Bank of England; it was frozen there from........

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