Venezuela’s current economic and humanitarian crisis started in mid 2013. With oil prices still over $100 per barrel, the country entered in a recession that has not stopped since. 6 years later, Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by more than 60%. Income poverty went from 40% to 90%. The real minimum wage shrunk by 95%. Infant mortality went up by about 70%. In 2017, 70% of Venezuelan adults faced an average of 11 kilos in involuntary weight loss. The collapse has pushed over 10% of Venezuelans to migrate, producing a refugee crisis of Syrian proportions.

As the country unraveled under the regime’s mismanagement and graft, Chavismo has always been in search for excuses. First, they blamed the crisis on the fall of oil prices. All evidence negated their narrative: The economy had been receding for almost a year before oil prices dropped in late 2014, but more importantly, no other oil dependent country in the World went through a downturn that remotely resembled the depth of the Venezuelan collapse. Still, Chavismo would not let reality get in the way of their story.

Maduro is now telling a different story. In his search for excuses, he pivoted to the idea that sanctions are to blame for the chaos that the country is in. Surprisingly, a number of commentators support the regime’s excuse. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot argue that the financial sanctions of late 2017 caused the death of 40,000 Venezuelans.

Jeffrey Sachs promptly contradicted himself, saying that their report did not warrant such a claim, and that he didn’t “want anyone to think that there is precision in these numbers”. In general, analysts should not intervene in public debates as academics if their contributions lack analytic precision. But more importantly, the idea that Venezuela’s calamities have been “deliberately caused” by US sanctions has been thoroughly refuted.

In a Brookings Policy Brief, Bahar, Bustos, Morales and Santos show that 1) sanctions did not affect Venezuela’s sovereign risk, 2) sanctions cannot be pinned as the cause of oil production drops, 3) imports for food and medicines had already dropped by about 70% between 2013 and 2016, before any sanctions on the country were passed, 4) infant mortality grew by 44% between in the same period, and 5) the minimum wage dropped 92% between 2010 and the passing of sanctions. The only logical conclusion from these findings is that the culprit of the Venezuelan crisis sits in Miraflores, not in the White House. This is largely the same conclusion reached by the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.

Sanctions did not cause the Venezuelan collapse because the future does not cause the past. But building from Chavismo’s latest fallacy, some now argue for an “oil-for-food” arrangement with the regime. This policy was tried with the Iraqi government in the 90’s, with a dismal record of corruption that allowed Saddam Hussein to extract $2 billion in illicit revenue. Recently, the former Venezuelan treasurer under Hugo Chavez pleaded guilty in a US court to receiving over $1 billion in bribes during his tenure — that is, just one person in the regime received more bribes than all the bribes paid by the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht in the biggest corruption scandal in Latin America’s recent past. Chavista corruption is on a league of its own — it is indeed the cause of the crisis. Setting a patently vulnerable system that gives resources and agency to the culprit of this catastrophe will not improve the livelihood of Venezuelans — it would only lead to more corruption.

Moreover, such a program would stabilize Chavismo’s usurping strength. The regime does not allow humanitarian aid managed by independent agencies to enter the country because Maduro weaponizes the humanitarian crisis, conditioning access to subsidized food and medicines for hungry and sick Venezuelans according to his political demands. An “oil-for food” program would imply that the underlying problems that led to the crisis will remain in place into an unforeseen future.

To truly address Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, the international community needs to engage the country with development support of unprecedented proportions for Latin America. Venezuela needs aid from multilateral organizations and bilateral sources in the order of $100 billion in order to address the most immediate humanitarian urgencies, to rebuild its most basic infrastructure, to reassert the State’s monopoly of force in the territory, and to jumpstart the national economy. Venezuela needs to restructure its foreign debt in an orderly and transparent fashion. Venezuela needs to mobilize private investment into the country in order to create new jobs with decent wages. Venezuela needs to reform its extractive sector so that it starts meeting its potential as the country with the highest oil reserves in the World. If these things do not start to happen soon, we expect another 1 million Venezuelans to join the droves of refugees arriving in neighboring countries in the next 6 months.

None of the things that need to happen to address this collapse will occur as long as Chavismo usurps power. To truly address the humanitarian catastrophe, political leadership in the country needs to change soon. The fact that sanctions have not yet provoked a transition is no reason to argue for their suspension or for policies that improve the culprit’s usurping strength. To the contrary, it is reason for the international community to consider options that decisively increase the pressure on the regime, and present smart transitional justice alternatives able to unlock the current stalemate in favor of the legitimate interim government of Juan Guaidó.

What’s the alternative if we hope for an urgent and successful resolution to this deadlock? The alternative is for the international community to present Chavismo with a truly credible threat: A transparent set of deadlines and red lines that, if expired or violated, would prompt a number of definitive actions for which the international community must be decisively prepared for.

The realization that only a credible threat can alter the stalemate in any negotiation framework should not be surprising for people following the news on Venezuela in the last few years. There is simply no transitional justice or democratic governance scheme that is preferable for Chavismo to reigning over a resource-rich territory that is strategically located for narco-trafficking activities, however economically isolated the country may become. The only way for a transition to become acceptable in a negotiation with Chavismo is for them to understand that the alternative will be worse than ceasing to usurp power.

The goal of a peaceful resolution to the constitutional crisis would be enabled by the introduction of a credible threat, as it would align incentives of key regime insiders with transitional justice opportunities set to improve the individual appeal of an end to the Chavista regime. A credible, multilateral threat should produce a positive resolution before any actions are required.

The rollout of this strategy relies on the selfless commitment of all the international allies with the Venezuelan cause. Venezuela’s destiny forks into two possible pictures: Either we follow our neighbors in their steady and democratic path towards prosperity and justice, or we fall as an impoverished nation under a brutal dictatorship, similar to Cuba or North Korea. In this pivotal moment in our history, it would be shameful for the World to abandon the hope of millions of Venezuelans to reclaim democratic control over our country from a criminal and brutal clique. It may be an uncomfortable conclusion, but a credible threat on Chavismo is the only alternative for a democratic transition in Venezuela - it’s the right thing to do.