Venezuela should be one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. Its 303 billion barrels of oil reserves is by far the largest in the world. Saudi Arabia, with 267 billion barrels of reserves, is the only nation that comes anywhere close to Venezuela in that regard. Despite their country’s abundant natural wealth, millions of Venezuelans struggle to find the most basic of life needs.

Out of Venezuela’s population of 28.4 million, 20.1 million need humanitarian assistance in essential areas such as food, health, nutrition, and education. An estimated 82 percent of Venezuelans are said to experience food insecurity, with nearly 70 percent suffering from multidimensional poverty. These dire living conditions have led to an exodus, exacerbating an already serious migration crisis in the hemisphere. More than 7.7 million people have left Venezuela since 2015.

Venezuela’s deep malaise can be attributed to two main factors. The first is the set of ruinous socialist policies pursued by the late Hugo Chávez, and continued by his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The Venezuelan government has heavily subsidized the prices paid by domestic consumers for gasoline and other oil products for years. Throughout that same period, there have been large quantities of oil giveaways to friendly socialist countries such as Cuba. On top of that is the perennial gross mismanagement of the oil sector by government-appointed officials. All that has severely starved the nation’s oil industry of the funds it needs to invest in new production equipment and maintain existing ones.

Those self-inflicted wounds have been compounded by a second set of external factors: U.S. sanctions. Targeted sanctions were first imposed in 2005 on Venezuelan individuals and entities that the U.S. government deemed to have engaged in criminal, anti-democratic, or corrupt actions. The sanctions were later broadened to include entire sectors of the Venezuelan economy. In January 2019, the Trump administration sanctioned PdVSA, the state-owned oil company. The executive order issued by President Trump froze all property and interests in property of PdVSA subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and prohibited U.S. persons from doing business with the company. It meant that U.S. oil majors such as Chevron could no longer operate in Venezuela.

That wide range of internal and external negative factors has crippled Venezuela’s oil sector, and by extension its national economy. Just before Hugo Chávez entered office as president in 1999, Venezuela produced 3.4 million barrels of oil per day. By 2020, production had dropped by 90 percent to below 350,000 barrels per day. Last year, Maduro promised to hold free and fair presidential elections in exchange for sanctions relief. The Biden administration issued licenses to Chevron and a handful of companies to resume operations in the country. That has helped boost oil production to about 800,000 barrels a day at present. For perspective, Saudi Arabia currently produces 12.4 million barrels of oil per day.

Even with the increased daily output of 800,000 barrels, Venezuela will generate nowhere near enough revenues to service its heavy external debt and fund domestic programs. The country is shunned by investors so it cannot borrow to make the much-needed improvements in the sector. And, the Biden administration is threatening to reimpose the sanctions it waived because Maduro reneged on many of the promises he made last year. His apparent stealing of the recently concluded presidential election will only make matters worse.

It is nearly impossible for anyone to untangle this mess to determine which of those sets of internal and external negative factors has done more damage to the Venezuelan economy. Those South American leaders who give aid and comfort to Maduro and his autocratic regime should ask themselves whether they can in good conscience justify their actions that end up creating hell for so many millions of Venezuelans. They can blame the U.S. all they want, as they so often do for every problem in Latin America, but 70 percent of Venezuelans just sent a loud a clear message in the recent election that they want to rid themselves of Maduro and his ruinous policies. Shouldn’t those ordinary citizens be allowed to speak for themselves?

Likewise, legitimate questions must be asked about the efficacy of the types of sanctions that the U.S. applies on Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries. Such measures are appropriate in some cases. The current sanctions on Russia are fully justified because it is a nation that has launched an unprovoked attack on another. All means necessary must be taken to defund that evil war machine. But does it make sense to keep sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela for decades, when they don’t bring about any discernible changes in the behaviors of the targeted individuals and groups? Should we just slap on sanctions and go about our normal business while the small numbers of people that are supposed to be the targets can so easily evade them and take millions of their citizens hostage for so long? We don’t like to see hundreds of thousands of people crashing our southern border, but some of the policies of our leaders help create that migration crisis.

The U.S. should by all means do the best it can to help people who are oppressed in their own countries by despotic rulers. In fact, those suffering masses are always looking up to the democratic world and asking it for help. In an ideal world, that responsibility of assisting the vulnerable in their struggles against tyranny would lie with a global body such as the U.N. But the world we live in today is nothing close to idyllic. So, it falls on our leaders to find more creative ways to bring about the desired changes in places like Venezuela and Cuba where millions of ordinary people are suffocating.

Average citizens like me, who have the immense privilege of living in free societies, have a duty to keep asking the types of questions that will force our leaders to rethink some of their policies. Arguably, some of those policies do too much harm rather than good.