DISINFO: Venezuela crisis caused by US sanctions
SUMMARY
The crisis in Venezuela is caused by US sanctions and asset seizures, which together amount to an economic war on the Latin American country.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin narrative on Venezuela. The current and most acute stage of the Venezuelan economic crisis was caused largely by the 2014 oil price crash. However, the national economy had suffered from mismanagement and over-reliance on crude exports since at least mid-2000s; shortages of consumer goods -- which had become a chronic issue by 2010 -- have been linked to government and military corruption, overspending, and price controls. By the time the first round of US sanctions was imposed in 2017, the Maduro administration had already started deploying the term "economic war" to explain away its own policy failures and to trivialise the scale of the crisis. A 2015 government pamphlet dismissed inflation as a "fascist" concept that "does not exist in real life" (pp. 5, 8), and gave assurances that money-printing was a sound fiscal practice (p. 7).