Economic sanctions imposed unilaterally by some States do kill. This was recalled by a publication of Misión Verdad, based on a study by the journal The Lancet Global Health.
The analysis – led by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot, and supported by data from 152 countries – states that these restrictive measures “imposed by the United States or the European Union were associated with 564,258 deaths per year between 1971 and 2021”.
Although the stated objective is to force behavioral changes, according to the researchers, “all economic sanctions ultimately function as health sanctions,” affecting access to medical services, food security and socioeconomic development, which especially harms “children, women and the most marginalized populations.”
Another article published in the journal reveals that, as a result of sanctions, there has been a “3.1% increase in infant mortality and a 6.4% rise annually in maternal mortality between 1990 and 2019.”
It argues that the increase in sanctions has been steady since 1950, according to the Global Sanctions Database. However, “their success rate in achieving the stated goal remains at around 30%”.
Mission Truth exposes that “Venezuela, subject to sanctions as of 2017, recorded between 2012 and 2020 an economic contraction of 71 %, and shortage peaks that directly affected the availability of oncological treatments and retrovirals. In Iraq, the embargo imposed after the invasion of Kuwait coincided with the death of more than 500 000 children during the 1990s, according to Unicef,” he underlines.
“Syria accumulated successive rounds of sanctions since 2011, reinforced with the Caesar Law, in 2020, and today has 90% of its population below the poverty line.”
In the case of Cuba, according to the latest report presented to the United Nations, just four months of blockade “is equivalent to the financing required to cover the needs of the country’s basic list of medicines for a year”.
“For countries under sanctions, induced shortages are not a surgical intervention but a sustained form of coercion. With an additional 564 000 deaths per year, the label of ‘non-violent measure’ collapses,” the publication reads.

(Shorthand Versions – Presidency of the Republic)
Dear President Lula;
Dear Heads of State and Heads of Delegations:
I believe I must begin by thanking you, on behalf of my country and my people, for our integration into BRICS as a partner.  BRICS today is synonymous with hope.  The hope that multilateralism will be saved from the chaos and ineffectiveness into which the arrogance of a few has plunged the UN, which 80 years ago was born to prevent war from being an alternative for the solution of conflicts, urgently in need of the profound reforms that the Global South has been demanding for more than half a century.
The octogenarian organization is dangerously fragmented and seriously threatened by a progressive erosion of multilateralism that translates into high risks for international peace and security.
The horror of the last weeks and months clearly shows where the diplomacy of force leads.  The Government of the United States, using and abusing its undoubted military, economic, financial and every other kind of power, except moral, constantly acts with absolute disregard for the principles and norms of International Law and the Charter of the United Nations.  It withdraws from various international organizations and forums; declares plans for land usurpation and annexation of territories; justifies and promotes supremacist ideas; carries out massive, violent and racist deportations of migrants, and no longer even hides its ambitious and spurious geostrategic interests.
It is the same power that supported the recent aggressions of the Government of Israel against Iran and carried out a direct attack on the Persian nation with the bombings perpetrated against three nuclear facilities.

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