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Comment by googlemike | Hacker News Reader

How is it that, no matter what, people will always find a way to blame the US? I think in this case, the country just ran itself to the ground.

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Even if the US sanctions did not primarily caused the crisis in Venezuela; their sanctions certain add more oil to the fire.

Ref. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/world/americas/venezuela-... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/sanctions-venezuela-i...

Though the US is not the sole cause of many problems, they certainly go out of their way to make many of them worse. In Venezuela, they've placed crippling sanctions on the country for years, and promoted political instability by openly backing numerous coups.

Sanctions are a neutral policy, like Google pulling out of China. The US is holding back from interfering in Venezuela (only supporting the constitutionally elected leader) and also refusing to participate in the suffering of the people.

Nonsense. Sanctions kill. It's like withholding food from a person who is already hungry.

The US has offered food to those who are hungry. Lack of food is not the problem (Maduro has only very recently allowed aid to enter the country).

Maduro has always allowed aid into the country. He refused aid from the US as they have a history of using such aid to import weapons and such. Most humanitarian groups immediately chastised the US for even trying to send aid in that manner, both because of their history and that it's hard to take their offers in good faith while they simultaneously withold $11 billion of Venezuela's oil proceeds.

Please read more about the history of US involvement in Central and South America.

The U.S. is imposing sanctions on Venezuela, to the effect of millions of dollars a day lost. As part of the sanctions, the U.S. has also seized hundreds of millions of dollars of Venezuelan assets in foreign bank accounts. There is a direct cause and affect between U.S. policy and life in Venezuela.

> blame the US

The US seized $1 billion from Venezuela, sent the army to the Colombian border, and is calling for the Venezuelan army to revolt.

This is from an analysis from January last year when Trump announced additional sanctions on Venezuela:

"An even more problematic idea driving current U.S. policy is the belief that financial sanctions can hurt the Venezuelan government without causing serious harm to ordinary Venezuelans. That’s impossible when 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine. Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/12/why-more-sanctions-wont...

We sponsored an attempted coup in 2002 and spent the next two decades trying to undermine their government, complete with sanctions. Read something.

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