2017: President Trump’s Sanctions on Venezuela Resulted in Increased Deaths Due to AIDS

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a chronic condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus, called HIV. HIV damages the immune system so that the body is less able to fight infection and disease.  There is no cure for HIV/AIDS. 90% of patients with the virus can expect to contract AIDS which is fatal in 8 to 10 years. Medicines (antiviral treatments [ART]) can keep the disease from getting worse.

In 1991, Venezuela began to provide ART as part of a program that served the population free-of-charge.[1] The percentage of HIV-positive people receiving ART reached 60% by 2015[2]. All of the ART medicines were imported. The government provided foreign currency to the National Health Ministry for the purchase of ART which then was distributed to pharmacies and hospitals. The foreign currency came from the sale of oil by Venezuela’s state oil company (PDVSA).  According to UNAIDS, 110,000 people in Venezuela were living with HIV in 2015. [3]  

In 2016, the price of oil declined by 60% which led to a decline of $63 billion in Venezuela’s oil sales. The government sought restructuring of its foreign debt which could put off interest payments and make foreign currency available for imports of medicine and food. On August 24, 2017, US President Trump prohibited US financial institutions from participating in a restructuring of Venezuela’s debt. Venezuela paid $200 million in interest payments in late 2017. Trump prohibited CITGO, a US subsidiary of PDVSA, from sending dividends back to Venezuela. (CITGO had provided $2.5 billion in dividends to PDVSA from 2015 through 2017). Critics pointed to the US sanctions for reducing Venezuela’s resources and reducing its ability to purchase ART. [1]

Due to the reduced availability of foreign currency, no funds were made available to the Health Ministry for ART purchases in 2017 and 2018.[1] Public hospitals had no ART medicines.[4] 10,000 HIV-positive people left Venezuela to seek ART in other countries.[4] Some people bought expensive treatments from foreign sources or on the black market. Many patients increased the intervals between treatments. In 2017-18, the percent of patients receiving ART decreased to 30%.[2] The number of people dying from AIDS increased from 2000/year to 5000.[2]

Nationwide ART access was re-established in 2019 with funding from the World Bank through the Global Fund.  The percent of people receiving ART (60%) and the number of deaths due to AIDS (2K) have returned to the 2015-levels. [2] 1400 HIV-positive people who left Venezuela for treatment returned to the country by 2022.[5]



     

1.Irons, Rebecca, Resistance and the regimen:the Microthanatopolitics of Venezuelan antiretroviral scarcity and HIV drug adherence failures, Social Science & Medicine, October 2024

2. UNAIDS, Venezuela Data, https://www.unaids.org/en/regionscountries/countries/venezuela

3. Lancet,Venezuela’s economic crisis hampers HIV/AIDS Treatment, March 18, 2017

4.New Humanitarian,Leave or Die. The choice confronting HIV-positive Venezuelans, November 5, 2019

5.UNAIDS, Venezuela, 2022

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  2020:U.S. Drug Monitoring Data Show that Venezuela is not a Major Source of Illegal Drugs On March 11, 2020, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) released a Research Report authored by Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde: Beyond the Narcostate Narrative: What U.S. Drug Monitoring Data Says About Venezuela. [1] The Report concluded that: ·         “Venezuela is not a primary transit country for U.S. bound cocaine. About 90% of all    U.S.-bound cocaine is trafficked through Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routes, not through Venezuela’s Eastern Caribbean seas.” The Research Report relied on data from the U.S. Interagency Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB), a multi-source collection of global illegal drug trafficking events that is gathered from intelligence data such as detection and surveillance as well as interdiction and law enforcement data. The authors noted that:” According to the Department of Defense ‘The ...
Read more

The Venezuela Reader - A Blog Focused on Recent History and Venezuela-U.S. Relations

Image
  The Venezuela Reader- A Blog Focused on Recent History and Venezuela-U.S. Relations My name is Leonard G.- I am The Venezuela Reader. I am a retired agricultural policy analyst living in the Washington, DC area. After retirement and when Covid closed off many activities, I began reading about US foreign policy. I was particularly intrigued by Venezuela. So, I began reading about Venezuela five years ago and haven’t stopped. Faced with mountains of paper, I took it on myself to summarize events in Venezuela’s history and in its relations with the US. I challenged myself to write one-page summaries which are factually accurate and documented with outside sources -newspaper articles, academic articles, government reports. I have already drafted over 200 one-page summaries covering events and milestones including elections, riots, court rulings, US sanctions, oil policies, social policies, food and agriculture, racism, drug trafficking, important reports, and biographies. I am...
Read more
Image
  2025:Former United Nations Drug Official Calls Venezuelan Narco-State Narrative a Great Hoax   Pino Arlacchii was the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) from 1997 to 2002. He recently wrote an article about the U.S. declaration that Venezuela is a “narco-state.” [1] His article was translated into English and released by Venezuelanalysis. [2] Here are excerpts from his article:[2]   Pino Arlacchi : The Great Hoax Against Venezuela: Oil Geopolitics Disguised as “War on Drugs” ·        “During my time as head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), I frequently travelled to Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, but never to Venezuela. There was simply no need. ·        “The Venezuelan government’s collaboration in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America, rivalled only by Cuba’s impeccable record. This makes Trump’s nar...
Read more