I wanted to share this specific article from one economist that is on the moderate wing of the opposition parties. related to
Henri Falcon, who was US sanctioned because he 'legitimized' the electoral process of 2018.
the radical fascist opposition, that wants Venezuela leveled from the ground, always accused the government of corruption, usually without presenting evidence, and making the assessment that corruption destroyed Venezuela's economy.
before Maduro was kidnaped, Venezuela had had 18 quarters of economic growth, with data certified by the CEPAL (UN agency for Latin America).
but before that, the contraction was strong.
so, beyond showing comparative data of sanctions, with plausible weak correlation/causation,
Francisco Rodriguez, the economist I was talking about, ran an article comparing Latin American countries' corruption with Venezuela's corruption, set up some markers to do so, and established that all the countries are relatively close in corruption.
he then sets up different markers of predictivity that tests corruption v sanctions. he proceeds to test the scenarios. in both scenarios, only sanctions explain the behavior of the economy in the tested scenarios.
though it might be obvious, it's worth noting, because fascists across the continent like to spread the notion that it was corruption.
https://franciscorodriguez.net/2020/01/11/sanctions-and-the-venezuelan-economy-what-the-data-sayhttps://sanctionsandsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/January-2022-Venezuela-Case_Rodriguez.pdf>We have attempted to address the methodological concerns raised by other authors in this debate. In particular, we have shown that the identification of a negative effect associated with sanctions in the post-2017 data is not dependent on the use of Colombia as a control, as claimed by HMB, but is instead robust to the choice of counterfactual. We applied synthetic control methods to produce an adequate control group, estimating a large negative post-treatment effect. We also used cross-national data to estimate the effect of oil sanctions such as those imposed on Venezuela earlier this year. And we have shown that the alternative militarization hypothesis has problems accounting for variations in the time-series data: even using the most generous specification to this hypothesis, we find that it can explain at most one-seventh of the decline in output that the 2017 sanctions account for. In contrast to the militarization, corruption or investment hypotheses, which must be modified in ad hoc ways to fit the data, the sanctions hypothesis yields additional predictions – that production should have stabilized or grown in Chinese and Russian joint ventures, or that it would not have been affected in sanctionsexempt subsidiaries – which are confirmed by the evidence.one simple argument to counter this, if you don't want to engage with fascists but still reply them, is: if socialism brought so much corruption, and was about to fail by its own merits, why does it need to be sanctioned? let it fail on its own.
now, they tried to move the discourse that sanctions never existed.
bessent saying they will remove sanctions on Venezuela is now a nice way to slap them in the face. they lose all arguments.