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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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Yeah, but you have to ask why the conditions exist to begin with. The idea that Maduro, or the Chavistas are to blame here ignores reality. You can be a Venezuelan and also reject the reality that created the conditions which forced you to leave. In some cases those same Venezuelans fled, like some Cubans had also done, because the system being implemented to root out the neocolonial apparatus impacted them due to their material ties to that system. Meaning, some of these people were reaping rewards as servants of the neocolonial apparatus, while working people in the country suffered.
So, for example, a study out of Lancet Global Health estimates that US sanctions applied to Venezuela cause the deaths of more than 564,000 people each year. More than half of the dead are children under the age of 5.
So, I fully understand why people would leave. The other thing that your statement also seems to not acknowledge the class character of those who are fleeing. A 2007 Reuters article talks about the initial class character of those fleeing:
Those wealthy and middle class citizens being referenced in Cuba were plantation owners, managers, and operators of American corporate interest in the country. This wasn't all that different for Venezuela. From the same article:
"upper bourgeoisie", those are not my words, those are the words of Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University, who was interviewed by Routers for this story. The class character of those leaving in the Chavez era isn't even being obscured from you here, it is stated rather mater-of-factually. The destination for many of these people were places like the US and Europe, according to IUSSP:
But as time marches on, and the sanctions ramp up, the class character of those leaving also changes, and that class character comes with it different destinations. By 2016, when the poorer band of people within the country decided to leave, many of them fled to nearby countries, and often were binational which likely eased the process of moving, again IUSSP:
So I'm not shocked to see that many of the Venezuelans you encounter in Europe might be celebrating the kidnaping of Maduro, who, to them, very likely represents the early changes that drove them, or their parents, out of Venezuela. You don't, however, encounter the droves of people living in the region who left the country afterward. They might have a different understanding.
It's worth noting that, the sanctions as applied to Venezuela are not unique, and have some very specific timing. They follow a very similar pattern to many other sanctions handed out by the US over the years. They have the same kind of impact on the population from country to country. Access to food and medical care enter into a crisis state. This was true in Nicaragua, Syria, and Venezuela. They all have the same clear goal, regime change. This isn't the stated goal, but as was the case in Nicaragua, Syria, and Ukraine, these sanctions are only ever lifted once existing leaders and governments fall.
Specifically, in the case of Venezuela, you can see that these sanctions seem to have a very specific timing. Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan opposition economist, in his study "Sanctions, Economic Statecraft, and Venezuela’s Crisis", find a pattern in Venezuela's oil production that highlights the direct impact of sanctions on the industry.
He notes that, joint ventures with foreign multinationals were the driving force behind the stabilization of oil output in 2008 to 2015. The economic sanctions explicitly hit these joint ventures:
Industry analysis at the time were predicting that Venezuela's oil output would recover by 2017. This would indicate that there were no economic factors within Venezuela itself that prevented oil production. The failure to recover seems to be a direct result of US sanctions:
He concludes that "economic sanctions and other actions of economic statecraft aimed at the Venezuelan government have strongly impacted the country’s economic and humanitarian conditions” and that “it is hard to deny that they have had a sizable negative impact on living conditions in the country”.
This all really calls into question the idea that the Chavistas are at fault for the conditions under which people live in the country. One has to wonder what the country would be like if these sanctions were never imposed at all.