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delcy rodríguez
Advocates Renew Call for End to US Sanctions After Devastating Venezuela Earthquakes
"This is the time for cooperation, compassion, and respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty," said CodePink.
Jun 25, 2026
Human rights groups on Thursday implored the United States and allied countries to lift all sanctions against Venezuela—which experts say have already killed tens of thousands of people—as the beleaguered South American country reels from Wednesday's devastating earthquakes.
At least 188 people are dead and over 1,500 others injured, with those figures almost certain to rise, following a 7.2-magnitude temblor centered in San Felipe, Yaracuy—about 100 miles west of Caracas—and a 7.5-magnitude quake that struck less than a minute later, also in centered in Yaracuy.
US President Donald Trump, who authorized the illegal invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, wrote on social media after the earthquakes that his administration “stands ready, willing, and able to help."
“We will be there for our new and great friends," Trump claimed.
Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's vice president and acting president since his ouster, thanked the Trump administration for "offering support and solidarity to the people of Venezuela in the face of this tragedy that has plunged us into mourning."
However, US sanctions—first imposed during then-President George W. Bush's second term while Hugo Chávez was leading Venezuela and ramped up under the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations—remain in place, complicating relief efforts after one of the country's worst-ever natural disasters.
While the Trump administration has issued narrow exemptions from sanctions to companies looking to profit from Venezuela's crisis and copious natural resources, primarily oil, these waivers have not delivered broad relief to the people who need it most.
"Today’s catastrophe makes clear what we have long argued: When a country is deliberately weakened through economic warfare, its ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters is also weakened," the US-based peace group CodePink said in a statement. "The United States has a responsibility to help address the humanitarian consequences of the policies it has imposed."
🇻🇪 CODEPINK extends our deepest condolences to the people of Venezuela following the devastating earthquakes that have taken hundreds of lives, injured thousands, and left entire communities in urgent need of assistance.Our full statement: buff.ly/QzYcQ3p
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— CODEPINK (@codepink.bsky.social) June 25, 2026 at 2:22 PM
CodePink continued:
Too often, we’ve seen the US and other Western countries exploit natural disasters like this in order to deepen foreign control. In Haiti, the US and its allies have repeatedly pushed militarization and politically conditioned aid instead of genuine recovery led by the country itself. In this moment, the world must refuse to allow Venezuela to be forced down the same path.
We also call on the administration to immediately lift all US sanctions on Venezuela and release Venezuelan funds under US jurisdiction so they can be used for emergency relief, reconstruction, and recovery.
"This is the time for cooperation, compassion, and respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty," CodePink added. "We urge the international community to support relief efforts and stand with the Venezuelan people as they rebuild their homes, their communities, and their future."
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington, DC-based think tank, said Thursday that "while the Trump administration has issued a series of general licenses to allow foreign businesses and banks to operate in Venezuela in spite of US sanctions, the continued existence of these sanctions significantly discourages international economic and financial actors from expanding operations there."
CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot said that “we must remember that Venezuela suffered the worst depression in the history of the world, without a war, due to illegal US economic sanctions."
"This deadly destruction was not a mistake, but an expected result that would happen to any country that was cut off by sanctions from the international financial system, and also from the vast majority of its foreign exchange earnings from exports," he continued.
According to a 2019 CEPR report, as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died due to sanctions during the previous two years. The sanctions ostensibly targeted Maduro's government, but made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.
“Tens of thousands, and more likely hundreds of thousands, of Venezuelans died as a result of those sanctions," Weisbrot said Thursday. "The United States is therefore obligated to help prevent further loss of life in Venezuela."
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Alex Saab and the Fragility of the Venezuela Solidarity Movement
It’s difficult not to see the renewed imprisonment of Alex Saab as a disappointing capitulation to US coercion after so many of us fought for his freedom, but we cannot forget the task at hand.
May 24, 2026
The recent deportation of Alex Saab from Caracas to the US on May 18, 2026 has generated shock, confusion, anger, and intense debate across sectors of the international solidarity movement and many Venezuelans themselves.
Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who became closely associated with the Venezuelan government during the years of heavy US sanctions, is seen by many Venezuelans as someone who helped the country bypass sanctions, obtain fuel and food, open financial channels, and resist economic collapse under blockade conditions.
The US accuses Saab of corruption and money laundering connected to Venezuelan state contracts, but for many people in Venezuela and across the international left, Saab came to represent something larger than an individual businessman: the broader struggle over sanctions, sovereignty, and Venezuela’s ability to survive under extraordinary economic and geopolitical pressure.
The Venezuelan revolution did not survive the last decade of US economic warfare without contradictions. It survived through improvisation, exhaustion, loyalty, fear, sanctions, migration, stubbornness, and an almost unbearable national fatigue that few outside the country truly understand.
Reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.
The United States did not merely sanction Venezuela. It attempted to break it. It froze national assets, it openly pursued regime change, backed parallel governments, economically strangled the country, and ultimately launched a military operation to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores from Venezuelan soil.
To understand why Saab became such a powerful figure, one must first understand what Venezuela became under sanctions: a country forced into survival mode.
And now, after the deportation of Saab to the United States and the growing accusations against Delcy Rodríguez, I watch many people speak with the confidence of hindsight. As if everything had always been obvious. As if Venezuelans navigating one of the most aggressive campaigns of economic warfare, destabilization, and military coercion in modern Latin American history had the luxury of moral purity.
As a Venezuelan American, I am struggling too to understand and process this moment. I stood there too. I called for Alex Saab’s freedom when he was detained in Cape Verde during the height of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela. At the time, the reality that existed for many of us was that Saab was a Venezuelan diplomat helping the country navigate sanctions.
Recently, Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez publicly stated that Alex Saab has maintained relationships with US agencies since 2019. These revelations, combined with Saab’s deportation, have generated painful questions for many people who spent years defending him publicly.
What did we actually know?
What kinds of compromises were going on inside a country trying to survive under siege?
These are painful questions. And at this moment, there are still far more questions than answers.
Maybe painful compromises were made.
Maybe Saab was never what many believed him to be.
Maybe serious betrayals occurred.
Maybe the deportation was justified.
Maybe realities existed behind closed doors that ordinary Venezuelans never had access to. Or maybe decisions were made inside an impossible reality where preventing wider war, deeper collapse, and even greater harm for ordinary Venezuelans became more urgent.
Because since the kidnapping of Maduro, Venezuela has not been operating in an atmosphere of freedom. It is operating under threat.
And it is easy to demand uncompromising heroism from a country under attack when you are not the one responsible for preventing millions of people from falling into even greater catastrophe.
People who defended Saab for years are now confronting the possibility that parts of the story may have been hidden from them. Others are immediately translating uncertainty into accusations of betrayal against Delcy Rodríguez and the entire Bolivarian process.
But I think there is something dangerous about how quickly so many people are rushing toward absolute conclusions while fragments of information, accusations, leaks, and political narratives are still colliding in real time.
Maybe there will come a moment for deeper criticism of Delcy Rodríguez and others within the Bolivarian process. Maybe new information will eventually clarify realities that today remain obscured by contradiction, secrecy, pressure, and war.
But I think there is a certain political myopia in discussing Venezuela's internal contradictions while removing the broader reality of US pressure and coercion from the story entirely.
Because regardless of what may eventually be revealed about Alex Saab, the larger reality remains unchanged: Venezuela was subjected to years of sanctions, destabilization, economic strangulation, coup attempts, international isolation, and eventually direct military intervention.
The aggressor has not disappeared from the story.
And reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.
It’s difficult not to see the renewed imprisonment of Alex Saab as a disappointing capitulation to US coercion after so many of us fought for his freedom, but we cannot forget the task at hand. If we are serious about ending US aggression toward Venezuela, we cannot allow our solidarity with the Venezuelan people to be deterred. They have shown us how to sustain a revolution amid contradictions, and that is what we must do.
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Trump Says He's 'Seriously Considering Making Venezuela the 51st US State' as He Brags of Stealing Its Oil Wealth
"Trump's true priority, ahead of absolutely everything else, is to go down in history in big letters," said one journalist. "Remaking everything, no matter in which direction or with what consequences."
May 11, 2026
President Donald Trump said on Monday that he is considering trying to annex Venezuela and make it a US state in an imperialist effort to seize more of its oil wealth.
It's one of nearly half a dozen nations or territories Trump has threatened to use US military might to illegally conquer and add to the US during his term, including Greenland, Canada, Cuba, and Panama.
According to Fox News correspondent John Roberts, Trump said in a phone call that he was “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st US state,” citing the Latin American nation's possession of tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil.
“They were miserable. Now they’re happy. It’s being well run,” Trump recently told Full Measure's Sharyl Attkisson. “The oil that’s coming out is enormous, the biggest in many years. And the Big Oil companies are going in with the biggest, most beautiful rigs you’ve ever seen.”
One poll from the Venezuelan firm Meganálisis in March found that while the public was initially happy to be rid of their autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro—who was abducted by US forces in January—the majority now feel that Trump's action had little to do with democracy or the well-being of the Venezuelan people and more to do with handing control of the country's nationalized oil reserves to American companies, which Trump stated as his primary objective after ousting Maduro.
Trump left Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in place as Venezuela's interim leader with the promise that she'd act as a pliant collaborator with the US, whom she allowed to declare control over Venezuela's oil resources "indefinitely" amid market transitions.
The environmental activist group Global Witness has estimated that over the next 10 years, as much as $150 billion in oil revenue that was expected to go to the Venezuelan treasury, which could have funded projects to develop the impoverished country, instead may flow into the coffers of foreign companies.
Trump has spoken about the idea of Venezuela becoming the 51st state before, including after the country defeated Italy in the World Baseball Classic in March, when he posted on Truth Social: “STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE?”
Last month, during a discussion about his desire to "take" Iran's oil, Trump described his takeover of Venezuela as something akin to the resource-hungry imperial conquests of centuries past.
"I'm a businessman first," he told reporters during a press briefing. "We've taken hundreds of millions of barrels [of oil], hundreds of millions... and paid for that war many, many times over. You know the old days, 'to the winner belong the spoils.' And I said, 'Why don't we use that?' We haven't had that in this country probably in 100 years." He then went on to lament the US-led efforts to "rebuild" Germany after World War II.
While the US has lifted personal sanctions on Rodríguez and some sanctions on the Venezuelan oil and banking sectors, most of the sanctions that have contributed to the country's economic collapse remain in place. "Full unrestricted access to global capital markets has not been restored," explained Roger D. Harris from the Task Force on the Americas and the US Peace Council in Common Dreams last week.
Actually adding Venezuela as a US state would require approval from both Congress and Venezuela itself—and Trump does not appear to have the latter.
Issuing a rare rebuke of the US on Monday, Rodríguez responded that becoming the 51st state "would never have been considered" by Venezuela.
"If there is one thing we Venezuelan men and women have, it is that we love our independence process, we love our heroes and heroines of independence," the interim leader said.
Though wars of conquest are expressly forbidden under international law, it's not clear what leverage Rodríguez would have to resist if Trump attempted to make good on his goal of expanding US territory.
Argemino Barro, a Spanish political journalist and author, said the possibility that he's serious can't be dismissed.
"Yes, of course, we can dismiss it as provocation or delusion, say that it's impracticable for XYZ reasons, etc. But this kind of comment is a window into the mindset of a man who fabricates his own reality, and not only that, but imposes it on others," Barro said. "Trump wants to build the world's largest triumphal arch right in the middle of Washington, overshadowing the Lincoln Memorial; he wants his face on coins and passports; his name appears on institutions, one airport. Annexing Venezuela, in his mind, fits 100%."
"I think Trump's true priority, ahead of absolutely everything else, is to go down in history in big letters. To enter the league of Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, and Genghis Khan," he added. "Remaking everything, no matter in which direction or with what consequences."
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