This election takes place while Venezuelans suffer under more than 930 “unilateral coercive measures”—sanctions—imposed by the United States, Canada and their European allies. “These should be elections without imperial sanctions,” argued the Mexican philosopher Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez recently. But that is not what is happening.
Early in 2023, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said sanctions on Venezuela “have exacerbated the economic crisis and hindered human rights,” and called for the measures to be lifted. Türk visited Venezuela in January 2023. His comments reflected similar remarks made two years earlier by Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights. She said that the Venezuelan “government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on one per cent of its pre-sanctions income.”
Again this time, complex international negotiations unfolded to produce a basis for the election, finally established through the Barbados Accords. The document was signed in October 2023 by the Maduro government and an alliance of opposition parties known as the Unitary Platform.
Read Jim Hodgson’s full blog post here.
