Western sanctions on the South have caused 560.000 deaths each year since 2012.

PASCUAL SERRANO

An research from the prestigious scientific journal The Lancet has calculated what the mortality rate caused by the Sanctions imposed by the US, the EU, and the UN. The data is chilling. Unilateral sanctions during the period 2012-2021 caused 564.258 deaths each year. And if we go back to the unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and the EU since 1970, they are associated with a total of 38 million deaths.

According to calculations using the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), 25% of countries were subject to some form of sanction by the US, EU, or UN in the 2010-22 period, compared with an average of just 8% in the 1960s.

The United States and Europe have dramatically increased their use of sanctions. During the 1990s and 2000s, an average of 30 countries were subject to Western unilateral sanctions in a given year. And now, in the 2020s, there are more than 60: a surprisingly high proportion of countries in the Global South.

By contrast, during the 1970s, there were, on average, about 15 countries subjected to unilateral Western sanctions each year. In many cases, these sanctions sought to restrict access to international finance and trade, destabilize industries, and exacerbate crises that led to the collapse of states.

Research The Lancet Analyzes the effect of sanctions on health using a panel dataset of age-specific mortality rates and sanctions episodes for 152 countries between 1971 and 2021.

The authors note that "international sanctions are restrictions on international transactions imposed by governments to achieve their foreign policy objectives. Whether sanctions affect health conditions in the affected countries and whether these impacts are severe enough to cause a significant number of deaths are among the most contentious issues in contemporary thinking about economic policy."

The study distinguished between sanctions imposed unilaterally by the US or the EU and those imposed simultaneously with a multilateral UN sanctions regime on the same target.

According to Al Jazzera analysts Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Omer Tayyab“The United States and Europe have long used unilateral sanctions as a tool of imperial power to discipline and even destroy governments in the Global South seeking to shake off Western domination, chart an independent path, and establish any kind of meaningful sovereignty.”

As early as 1970, when the popular socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, the U.S. government imposed brutal sanctions on the country. According to documents declassified in 2014 Regarding the foreign policy of Richard Nixon's administration between 1969 and 1973, in talks held in the days following Salvador Allende's electoral victory, Nixon asked Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to "make the economy scream" in Chile to prevent Allende's confirmation in power.

Sanctions against Chile, especially on its copper exports, sparked social unrest and paved the way for the U.S.-backed coup that established the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Similarly, the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 after the Gulf War are, responsible for the death of 560.000 children, according to a study by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization).

In Venezuela, a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), prepared by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, found that the economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017 caused 40.000 additional deaths in just one year, from 2017 to 2018.

The new researchn The Lancet provides a comprehensive overview for the first time. Led by economist Francisco Rodríguez of the University of Denver, the study estimates the total number of additional deaths associated with international sanctions between 1970 and 2021.

The results are striking. The authors conclude that unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and the EU since 1970 are associated with 38 million deathsIn some years, such as the 1990s, more than a million people were killed. In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, sanctions caused more than 800.000 deaths.

Only the Unilateral sanctions during this period (2012–2021) caused 564.258 deaths each year, equivalent to 3,6% of the total deaths observed in the sanctioned countries. This estimate is higher than the average annual number of combat casualties during this period (106.000 deaths per year) and similar to some estimates of total war deaths, including civilian casualties (around half a million deaths per year)..

The study notes that the highest incidence of deaths occurred in children under one year of age, followed by the 60- to 80-year-old age group. Overall, deaths of children under 5 years of age accounted for 51% of all deaths caused by sanctions during the period 1970-2021. Since 2012 alone, sanctions have caused the deaths of more than one million children.

Therefore, the majority of deaths (77% during the same period) were in the age groups 0 to 15 years and 60 to 80 years, that is, the most vulnerable population, which shows the even more criminal nature of the sanctions.

It is important to emphasize that hunger and deprivation are not a collateral consequence of Western sanctions; they are a key objective. This is clear from a State Department memorandum, written in April 1960, which explained the purpose of U.S. sanctions against Cuba. The memorandum acknowledged that Fidel Castro, and the revolution in general, enjoyed widespread popularity in Cuba. It argued that “all possible means should be employed promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” by denying it money and supplies, reducing monetary and real wages, and causing hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the government.

Researchers of The Lancet They insist that their “findings showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality,” but the strongest effects were those from unilateral, economic, and U.S. sanctions, while they did not find the same devastating effect for UN sanctions.

According to analysts, “Unilateral sanctions imposed by the US or the EU could be designed to have a greater negative impact on target populations.” In contrast, “most—though not all—UN sanctions regimes in recent decades have been designed as efforts to minimize their impact on civilians.”

""U.S. sanctions, on the other hand, are often aimed at creating conditions conducive to regime change or political behavior, and in some cases, policymakers acknowledge the deteriorating living conditions in targeted countries as part of the mechanism intended to achieve their objectives," the researchers say.

Former US President Woodrow Wilson ya He referred to sanctions in 1923 as "something more terrible than war." Clearly, the figure of more than 560.000 deaths annually due to unilateral sanctions over the past decade is a greater massacre than that of any war.

And let us not forget that unilateral sanctions, that is, those that do not arise from an agreement of the United Nations Security Council, viThey are based on international law and the Charter of the United Nations, which establishes the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of States, sovereign equality, the promotion of friendly relations between countries and freedom of trade.

Pascual Serrano He is a journalist and writer. His last book is "Forbidden to doubt. The ten weeks in which Ukraine changed the world”