Some noteworthy points:

• The sanctions are “depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports.”
• The sanctions “reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation.”
• The sanctions “have inflicted, and continue to inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–2018.”
• That means 2019 deaths haven’t been added to this estimate. The year’s nearly half over, and more aggressive sanctions went into effect this past January.
• Because of the sanctions, “some 22,000 doctors — about one third of the total — have left the country.”
• “The loss of so many billions of dollars of foreign exchange and government revenues was very likely the main shock that pushed the economy from its high inflation, when the August 2017 sanctions were implemented, into the hyperinflation that followed.”
• The massive number of already highly at-risk Venezuelans hurting from the 2017 sanctions “virtually guarantee that the current sanctions, which are much more severe than those implemented before this year, are a death sentence for tens of thousands of Venezuelans. This is especially true if the projected 67 percent drop in oil revenue materializes in 2019.”
• “The United Nations finds that the groups most vulnerable to the accelerating crisis include children and adolescents (including many who can no longer attend school); people who are in poverty or extreme poverty; pregnant and nursing women; older persons; indigenous people; people in need of protection; women and adolescent girls at risk; people with disabilities; and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex.”
• The sanctions “would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory.”

This should be the biggest story in the country right now: https://t.co/Q3fBxEdCSC

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 25, 2019

To be clear, this unforgivable atrocity rests predominantly on the shoulders of the Trump administration. It is true that Venezuela has had deep economic troubles for years due to declining oil prices and other issues, and it is true that the sanctions in question follow a longstanding agenda of previous administrations and were built on the foundation of an Obama policy declaring the Venezuelan government an “extraordinary threat to national security”. But the report is clear in its assessment that what took the nation’s economy from a state of high inflation to hyperinflation was the August 2017 sanctions, and that’s what’s been causing these high numbers of deaths which will get even worse due to the January 2019 sanctions.