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As death and injury tolls from Venezuela's pair of devastating earthquakes last week continue to rise, a coalition of human rights and anti-war groups called on President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday to lift the US sanctions that have crippled the nation's economy.

"As long as sweeping economic sanctions remain in place and Venezuelan assets remain frozen abroad, reconstruction will be unnecessarily delayed, and millions of people will continue to suffer," said the letter, which was written by Just Foreign Policy, the Latin American Working Group, and Venezuelan American Community Action and shared exclusively with Common Dreams.

It has been signed by more than a dozen other groups, including the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Peace Action, and the Presbyterian Church's Office of Public Witness.

The earthquakes have killed nearly 2,300 people as of Wednesday, a death toll that is expected to rise, with the number of missing people greater than 40,000, according to an unofficial estimate. The United Nations' resident coordinator said the UN was preparing more than 10,000 body bags for the country "in anticipation of the death toll rising further."

The quakes caused $6.7 billion in damage, the equivalent of 6% of the country's gross domestic product, the UN Development Program estimated last week.

In the letter sent Wednesday, the groups welcomed the State Department's mobilization of support for Venezuela, which has included search and rescue teams, military personnel for disaster relief, and at least $150 million in humanitarian assistance through aid partners and the UN.

But they said, “It is clear that emergency relief alone will not be enough.”

"Venezuela’s recovery will require access to its own financial resources and the ability to import the equipment, construction materials, medicine, fuel, spare parts, and other goods needed to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, roads, ports, and critical infrastructure," they said.

They said acquiring these needs has been made vastly more difficult by US sanctions that have "deliberately crushed Venezuela's economy, restricting the government's ability to import goods, maintain infrastructure, and deliver basic services to its population."

Even before the earthquakes, they pointed out, nearly a third of Venezuela's population was in need of humanitarian assistance in May, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

They said US "responsibility" for the state of Venezuela's economy has only grown since Trump's operation in January to topple and abduct President Nicolás Maduro.

Despite Venezuela's oil exports rising 25%, its economic growth plummeted to an annual rate of just 2.5% in the first quarter of 2026, according to an analysis of bank data by Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at CEPR, who said it was "the lowest rate of growth observed since the second quarter of 2021."

"The data suggests the US may be holding Venezuelan oil revenues in deposit accounts and not disbursing them to the Venezuelan government," the letter said, "currently leaving ordinary Venezuelans with too little of the promised economic improvement and directly contradicting the Trump administration's claim that Venezuelans are doing better than ever."

Given the US role in creating these conditions, as well as the role of US sanctions in turning Venezuela's economic crisis in the 2010s into one of the worst depressions of the last 50 years, the coalition said the Trump administration must not continue using economic warfare to force political concessions.

They also condemned calls from Democrats, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (NH) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks (NY) earlier this month, for the Trump administration to "exercise its leverage" on Venezuela's current government, led by President Delcy Rodriguez, to push for democratic elections.

"The primary leverage the US has long held over Venezuela includes indiscriminate economic sanctions, alongside threats of military action that are illegal under US and international law," the coalition said.

"Using economic pressure against a civilian population as a political tool was unconscionable before this earthquake," they continued. "In its aftermath, any call to tighten that leverage, or to attach political conditions to aid or in exchange for a lifting of economic sanctions must be recognized for what it is—an act of collective punishment against long-suffering civilians who should not face further indiscriminate harm due to US policy."

The coalition said that the Trump administration's limited, temporary unfreezing of some sanctions to allow humanitarian relief transactions was "wildly insufficient," as it did not unfreeze other sanctions that have hamstrung Venezuela's economy.

"The Venezuelan government must be free to receive and allocate earthquake relief and to direct humanitarian support to those who need it most," the letter said. "Anything short of a full lifting of sanctions will hobble the overall response before it gets off the ground."

They called for the US to provide "massive humanitarian assistance" without political strings attached.

They also said the US must release Venezuelan oil revenues held in US accounts and pressure other countries like the UK and Portugal to do so as well.

"This is Venezuela’s money, and it is now urgently needed," the groups said. "Withholding it during a national catastrophe of this magnitude is indefensible."

They also called on the US to lift all sanctions on Venezuela, which they said "impede the delivery of humanitarian goods, reconstruction materials, and financial transfers needed for disaster response and economic recovery."

"The United States has a short window to demonstrate that its relationship with the Venezuelan people is not merely transactional," the letter concluded. "The scale of aid must match the scale of the harm the United States has played a role in creating. Anything less would confirm what many Venezuelans already fear: that American concern for their welfare begins and ends where American geopolitical and economic interests do."