[TEASER] Venezuela Pt. 3: Sanctions as Economic Warfare w/ Cira Pascual Marquina

Upstream

News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are publishing this episode a few days early. Solidarity with Venezuela!

This is a free preview of the episode " Venezuela Pt. 3: Sanctions as Economic Warfare w/ Cira Pascual Marquina." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

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In Part 3 of our ongoing series on Venezuela, Cira Pascual Marquina joins us to discuss sanctions with a focus on the US-imposed coercive economic measures on Venezuela. Cira Pascual Marquina is a researcher and popular educator at El Panal commune in Venezuela. She's the author of the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution with Chris Gilbert and co-host along with Chris of the Marxist educational project Escuela de Cuadros.

Our conversation with Cira opens with an update on the United States' military buildup in the Caribbean and the escalation of threats by the Trump administration against the Venezuelan people and their elected president Nicolás Maduro. We discuss what sanctions are more broadly, how they work, and how they are deployed as a weapon of war against governments that defy US hegemony. We then take a deep dive into the history of sanctions against Venezuela, the impact they've had, how the government and the people of Venezuela have resisted these sanctions, and how we can stand in solidarity with Venezuela during this period of heightened US aggression.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode, thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers
0:05.8	for making upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us
0:12.3	to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue
0:17.6	to offer political education media to the public and build our movement.
0:22.3	Thank you, comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
0:27.1	Oh.
0:31.4	Oh.
0:36.1	Oh.
0:36.9	Oh. One third of the world's population is under sanctions that have been put on by the United States.
0:55.0	They function as a siege.
0:57.0	They cut specifically in the Venezuelan case, but I think in most cases,
1:03.0	they cut access to food, medicine, financial flows.
1:07.0	According to a very recent Lancet article, it came out this year, sanctions actually have produced about more than half a million deaths, almost 600,000 deaths every year around the world.
1:23.6	The impact is mostly on children, on the elderly, on women, and of course, especially in the world. The impact is mostly on children, on the elderly, on women, and of course, especially,
1:31.7	it affects the working class, the poorest in the country. You're listening to Upstream.
1:38.1	Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew
1:47.0	about the world around you.
1:49.2	I'm Della Duncan.
1:50.4	And I'm Robert Raymond.
1:52.4	Far from being a form of soft power imposed judiciously against certain rogue governments,
1:59.7	sanctions actually serve as a form of economic warfare
2:03.6	waged by the West against those governments and states that seek sovereignty from the grip of U.S.
	...

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