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Trump Confirms Future Venezuela Visit as US is Forced to Negotiate With Chavismo
(orinocotribune.com)
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The US Military Aided Mass Child Rape in Afghanistan. Now Its Soldiers Are Committing This Crime at Fort Bragg
(orinocotribune.com)
By Alan MacLeod – Feb 9, 2026
There is an epidemic of child sex crimes in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since 2021, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, dozens of elite soldiers stationed at the military base have been convicted of raping children, distributing child pornography, and other similar offenses.
Many of these soldiers served in Afghanistan, where it is now acknowledged that the U.S. military aided their local allies in “bacha bazi” (boy play): the practice of kidnapping and keeping boys as sex slaves, large numbers of whom were enslaved on U.S. military compounds.
MintPress News explores this dark and deeply disturbing topic.
Unspeakable Crimes
In August 2023, Joshua Glardon – a first sergeant in the 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg – was sentenced to 76 years in prison, followed by lifetime supervised released, for the distribution of child pornography across the internet. An unnamed woman – his accomplice – was sentenced to 30 years in prison after she “confessed to allowing him to rape” her child.
Just two weeks later, Major Vincent Ramos was arrested at North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport on one count of statutory rape of a child younger than 15, seven counts of statutory sex offense with a child younger than 15, and two counts of indecent liberties with a child. A logistics officer based at Fort Bragg, he was later charged with two more counts of indecent liberties with a child.
And one month after that, in October 2023, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Stuart P. Kelly of the 82nd Airborne Division was sentenced to 16 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge after pleading guilty to raping and abusing a child under the age of 12. Kelly had made the child touch him and perform oral sex on camera.
Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Carlos Castro Callejas was handed a 55-year jail term, a dishonorable discharge, and a demotion to the rank of private, after facing 13 charges of rape of a child under 12 years old.
All four of these men were not only based at Fort Bragg, but have served lengthy tours in Afghanistan. But they are merely the tip of a shockingly large iceberg of dozens of individuals from Fort Bragg who have been arrested on crimes related to abusing and trafficking minors.
According to investigative journalist Seth Harp, who uncovered a massive narcotics smuggling and distribution network run by elite military operators at the base in his book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces,” there has been a tenfold increase in such cases since 2021 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But even more chilling is the choice of victims for these sexual predators; “I have not heard in years about one case of these special forces guys raping a woman. In the same time, I’ve heard about 15 cases of them raping children,” he told Abby Martin and Mike Prysner on the Empire Files podcast.
All this raises a plethora of serious questions about what is going on at the base, and what sort of dark and chilling secrets are being kept there.
“Laughing Off” Child Sexual Assault
A sprawling, city-sized base on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Fort Bragg is home to some 50,000 military personnel, making it one of the largest military installations anywhere in the world. It is home to many of the U.S.’ most elite organizations, including JSOC, Delta Force, the 3rd Special Forces Group, and the 82nd Airborne Division.
It also lies minutes away from I-95, the primary north-south interstate route on the American Eastern Seaboard. I-95 stretches from Miami in the south to the Canada/Maine border in the north, making it a crucial transport highway. Fayetteville is near its halfway mark. “It is a natural point, almost like a city that grew up upon the Silk Road in ancient times,” Anthony Aguilar told MintPress News, “It is a matter of fact that throughout this part of North Carolina, along the 95 corridor, there are vast amounts of sex trafficking and human trafficking in these areas. It is because of the accessible route from border to border that these things are trafficked or smuggled.” Anthony Aguilar is a former United States Army Lieutenant Colonel, Special Forces Green Beret, and a former Battalion Commander at Fort Bragg. In 2025, he became a whistleblower, revealing serious misconduct about U.S.- and Israeli-backed operations in Gaza.
He alleged that other commanders at Fort Bragg are well aware of the epidemic of child sex crimes, but “laugh about it or brush it off,” stating:
“Military leadership at the highest ranks are aware of what is happening, and they choose to cover it up. Not ignore it; they don’t ignore it. They acknowledge it. They choose to cover it up, because nobody wants to look like their unit is a bad and undisciplined unit. Nobody wants to look like troublemakers.”
Aguilar shared with MintPress an example of this from was when he was a commander of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. A warrant officer was accused multiple times of sexually assaulting and abusing his stepdaughter – a minor – and producing pornography of these events. His chain of command decided not to do anything about it, but simply transfer him to Aguilar’s unit.
“He came to ours, and he did it again. My position on it was: court-martial, grand jury hearing, criminal case, criminal prosecution before a military judge,” he said. However, he was unable to carry this out as, “a three-star general circumvented my authority to charge him, and took that court-martial case up to his level, and then recanted those charges, and simply offered him a deal: ‘get out the Army and we won’t charge you criminally.’” The warrant officer took the deal, was discharged, and faced no criminal charges. Clearly disturbed by the event, Aguilar noted:
“That is why this continues to happen. That is why this is part of the culture. That is why these things continue to grow. It is because commanders at the highest level continue to hide it. They lie about it. And they do not hold those who do it accountable, in fear that it makes them look bad as a commander.”
“Women Are For Children, Boys Are For Pleasure”
Many American soldiers and operators encountered a similarly widespread practice of child sexual assault in Afghanistan – and found a correspondingly permissive attitude from U.S. officials and military top brass.
The practice is called bacha bazi, a process by which men exploit and enslave adolescent boys, coercing them into cross-dressing, wearing makeup, dancing suggestively, and acting as sex slaves. The bachas (boys) are generally aged between nine and fifteen years old, and inordinately come from impoverished or vulnerable backgrounds. Many grew up in orphanages, are street children, or have been sold into slavery by relatives facing starvation. Others are simply abducted. Bacha Bazes (boy players) are typically older, wealthier men who consider the ownership of one or more young boys to be a status symbol, often giving them money and expensive clothing. In Afghanistan’s strictly gender segregated society, a common saying is that “women are for having children, boys are for pleasure.”
The United Nations has condemned bacha bazi. “It is time to openly confront this practice and to put an end to it,” Radhika Coomaraswamy, then Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, told the U.N. General Assembly in 2009. “Laws should be passed, campaigns must be waged and perpetrators should be held accountable and punished,” she added.
Although it had been known for centuries, occurrences in Afghanistan exploded in the 1980s with the ascendancy of the U.S.-backed Mujahideen government. It was briefly quashed under the Taliban (1996-2001), but returned again in the 21st century under the U.S.-protected Afghan government, made up of many of the same elements who were in power two decades previously.
How Washington Participated In Mass Child Sexual Slavery
A U.S. soldier takes position in Mush Kahel village, Ghazni province, Afghanistan, July 23, 2012. Andrew Baker | DoD
The United States government actively tried to ignore the practice – an open secret in military and diplomatic circles. However, as it was withdrawing from the country, the State Department belatedly released a report admitting that, for nearly 20 years of occupation, there existed, “a government pattern of sexual slavery on government compounds.” U.S.-trained and funded authorities, it noted, “continued to arrest, detain, penalize, and abuse many trafficking victims, including punishing sex trafficking victims for ‘moral crimes’ and sexually assaulting victims who attempted to report trafficking crimes to law enforcement officials.” NGOs who helped the children, the report noted, advised them not to go to the police, as they were often the ones responsible for enslaving them in the first place.
Bacha bazi was primarily practiced by high-status individuals put in power by U.S. occupation forces – police, military, teachers, and government officials. Many of these people lived with their boys on U.S. compounds. This meant that, in practice, the U.S. taxpayer was subsidizing the widespread rape of children, one of the many reasons that American personnel were so unpopular with the local population, and why the U.S.-installed government fell within days of the 2021 military pullout. As Harp stated:
“The whole time that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, they were working with, protecting, funding, and arming guys who were systematically raping little boys, keeping them in chains on U.S. military bases – chained children on U.S. bases who were raped on a nightly basis! What can we even make of this? I struggle to wrap my mind around not only the evil of it, but how little anybody ever said about it.”
One example of the levels of depravity of the U.S.’ allies comes from Jordan Terrell, a former Fort Bragg paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. At Forward Operating Base Shank in Logar Province in 2014, Terrell recalls seeing a group of young bachas running around the base. One, he noticed, “had something hanging out of his butt.” At first confused by the site, he later realized that what he saw was the child’s prolapsed anus from being repeatedly sodomized. “Dudes were exposed to that stuff so much,” he said, “The Afghan National Army, Afghan police… The contractors who cooked our food. Those guys raped children.”
Officially, Washington saw nothing. On 5,753 occasions between 2010 and 2016, the U.S. military was asked to review Afghan units to see if there were any gross human rights abuses noted. American law requires military aid to be cut off from any offending unit. On zero occasions did they report any abuses.
Yet bacha bazi was so widespread that virtually all U.S. personnel had heard about it. Aguilar stated that soldiers were relieved to make it to Friday every week, joking that: “It’s man-boy love Friday, so we are not going to get attacked very much today, because they are all having sex with their young boy concubines.”
The practice was as open as it was widespread. In 2016, an Afghan police commander invited a Washington Post journalist to his office for tea, where he gleefully showed off what he called his “beautiful boy slave.” The Afghan police were just one of a myriad of organizations the U.S. government sponsored during its 20-year, $2 trillion occupation of the country.
“I heard of it a number of times from both U.S. military and State Department officers throughout Afghanistan and in D.C., usually off-hand, with an exasperated what are you going to do type affect to their comments,” Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. Marine Corps Captain and State Department official told MintPress News, adding:
“It was clear that such crimes were not to be intruded upon. I doubt there was official paperwork to that effect, but it was clearly understood that we were to accept the rape of children as part of the bargain in our relationship with the Afghans we had put and kept in power.”
In 2009, after growing increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Hoh resigned from his position at the State Department in Zabul Province.
Other Americans who tried to blow the whistle on the disturbing practice (and American complicity in it) ended up dead. One was Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr., who was kept up at night by the shrieks of children being raped by Afghan police in rooms beside him at Forward Operating Base Delhi in Helmand Province.
Via a phone call, Buckley told his father that, from his bunk, “we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it.” His officers told him to “look the other way” because “it’s their culture.” It would be the last time his father heard Buckley’s voice, as he was murdered on the base days later by the very locals he was trying to train and protect.
Others who have taken matters into their own hands have had their careers destroyed by the military. Green Berets Captain Dan Quinn and Sergeant First Class Charles Martland found out that a local police commander in Kunduz Province had kidnapped a boy and was keeping him chained to the bed as a sex slave. After learning that she had turned to the Americans for help, the commander also beat up the boy’s mother. Quinn and Martland confronted him, but he laughed it off, telling them “it was only a boy,” after all. Incensed, the pair threw him to the floor, punched and kicked him.
Quinn was relieved of his command and sent back to the United States, where he left the military. Martland was originally going to be expelled from the Army, but, after a public backlash, he was quietly reinstated.
Drug Abuse, Child Abuse
The prevalence of Bacha bazi closely mirrors that of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. The practice was far less common in the 1970s and 1980s, under the U.S.S.R.-backed, secular, Communist government. In an effort to overthrow the regime and bleed the Soviets dry, Washington spent $2 billion funding, training, and arming local Mujahideen militias (including Osama bin Laden). The Mujahideen seized control of Afghanistan in 1992, not long after the demise of the Soviet Union.
Presented as brave and gallant freedom fighters, the Mujahideen were lauded in the West. But, as in Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and much of the rest of the world, the U.S. so often allies itself with deeply unsavory movements in order to achieve its ends.
Not only were the Mujahideen religious reactionaries, but they displayed a conspicuous penchant for kidnapping and molesting children, and the practice exploded once they attained power.
Although bacha bazi was widely adopted by the Mujahideen, it was never accepted by much of the public, who saw it as barbaric and monstrous. Therefore, despite their depiction as the Afghan equivalent of the Founding Fathers in the Western press, many in Afghanistan saw their new rulers as little more than a gang of U.S.-imposed pedophile warlords.
The Mujahideen would be supplanted in only four years by the Taliban, who rose to power in no small part due to the nationwide revulsion and outrage over bacha bazi. Indeed, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban until his death in 2013, shot to fame due to his prominent opposition to the practice. In 1994, he led a group of armed men on a series of raids to rescue kidnapped and enslaved boys and girls.
The stunt made him a national hero, and greatly increased the Taliban’s strength and prestige. From a force of just 30 fighters, his militia grew to 12,000 by the year’s end, as thousands joined his cause, paving the way for their march on Kabul in 1996. Upon seizing power, the Taliban outlawed bacha bazi, making it punishable by death. Thus, while the Taliban are hardly known for their human rights policies, they were at least able to gain some public support through their actions to stamp out child rape.
This period, however, proved to be short-lived, as just five years later, in 2001, the United States would invade Afghanistan in order to topple the Taliban, putting in place many of the deposed Mujahideen figures from the previous regime. The return of the U.S.-backed government saw the reemergence of bacha bazi, with many top government, police and military officials flaunting their child concubines. This included even family members of President Hamid Karzai.
Likewise, drug production in Afghanistan directly correlates with U.S. involvement in the country. In the 1970s, heroin production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But as the Western-backed regime change war dragged on, Washington looked for other ways to support the insurgency. They found their answer in opium, and soon, refineries processing locally-grown poppy seeds sprang up on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons entered Afghanistan from their ally, Pakistan, and returned filled to the brim with opium.
As Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress,
“What the resistance fighters did was they turned to opium. Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium — 100 tons per annum — had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade.”
The operation caused a worldwide boom in opium consumption, with heroin addiction more than doubling in the United States alone. The drug became a cultural touchstone, as illustrated in popular movies such as Trainspottingand Requiem for a Dream. By 1999, annual production hadrisen to 4,600 tons.
Once again, the deeply religious Taliban stepped in to suppress the practice. A 2000 ban on opium cultivation led to a precipitous drop in production, with just 185 tons harvested the following year. Although the prohibition hit local farmers hard, it did begin to combat Afghanistan’s terrible opioid crisis, again gaining the Taliban some legitimacy with the local population.
Like with bacha bazi, though, the U.S. occupation reversed this trend. Under American supervision, opium production skyrocketed, reaching a high of 9,000 tons in 2017. Afghanistan became the world’s first true narco-state, with McCoy noting that by 2008, opium was responsible for well over half of the country’s gross domestic product. By comparison, even in Colombia’s darkest days, cocaine only accounted for around 3% of its GDP. More land in Afghanistan was under cultivation for opium than was used for coca across all of Latin America.
Many of those making fortunes from the business were the U.S.’ closest allies. This again included the Karzai family; the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali, was among the biggest and most notorious drugs kingpins in the region.
Shortly after coming back to power, the Taliban again banned the production of opium, sending teams of men across the country to eradicate poppy fields. In what even Western corporate media called “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history,” production fell by over 80% almost overnight, and has only continued to decrease since then. The speed and success of the operation raised serious questions about the United States’ true relationship with the global drug trade.
An Incredibly Lucrative Business
Soldiers at Fort Bragg were closer than anyone else to the unseemly underbelly of the Afghanistan occupation. Units such as JSOC, Delta Force, the 3rd Special Forces Group and the 82nd Airborne Division worked closely with Afghan security forces, and had a front row seat to their activities.
“The Fort Bragg Cartel” uncovers a giant gun and drug trafficking network centered around the base, revealing how soldiers used military planes to sneak arms and narcotics into America, distributing them across the continent. Criminals in the U.S. military, Aguilar notes, have learned a great deal about trafficking and smuggling contraband, stating that:
“When you deploy as a military and you have all of your 90 cubic inch containers that get locked up will all your stuff in it. Those don’t get inspected when they fly back over on a military aircraft and land at Fort Bragg…[They learn] How easy it would be to transport and traffic weapons, drugs, and yes, even humans, back and forth, from country to country. It is all very doable. And it is all very lucrative.”
Military bases are the perfect smuggling operation centers. There is little oversight or inspection, and soldiers can move around the country from base to base, and are less likely to be stopped and searched by the police. A disproportionate amount of those soldiers convicted came from backgrounds in logistics, where they were trusted with transporting large shipments of goods to and from the U.S., all with minimal input or scrutiny from higher ups.
Selling guns and drugs is one thing. But trafficking and raping children is quite another. How could anyone consider engaging in such sickening behavior? And why has the practice exploded around Fort Bragg? For some, the answer was psychological: American troops, taught to dehumanize their enemies and exposed to child abuse on a daily basis come to see it as normal behavior. As Terrell suggested, “In some sick way…when they came back, maybe they just internalized it, and turned it into a sexual proclivity.”
There is, however, a simpler explanation: money. Some Fort Bragg soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and exposed to bacha bazi came back to the United States and see an opportunity to make huge amounts of money trafficking humans, and creating and selling child pornography.
“It is less of a matter of soldiers coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan and having this learned behavior of sexual deviance, child pornography, or abusing children, it is a learned behavior that child pornography and sex trafficking minors is very very profitable,” Aguilar said; “They see that, and they think, ‘This is really lucrative.’”
The Taliban have once again made bacha bazi a capital offense. It is unclear if the new law has suppressed the practice, or merely driven it underground. After all, Afghanistan’s sanction-hit economy means that the economic incentives for destitute families to sell their sons to rich officials are as pressing as ever. Moreover, there are reports that some Taliban commanders allegedly hold bachas themselves.
What is clear, however, is that the tactics and practices used by the United States military abroad are increasingly being used against the domestic population. From surveillance and militarized policing to increasing intolerance of dissent, civil liberties are being eroded by forces using techniques honed on subjects in Western Asia. In November, an Afghan commando and former member of a CIA-trained death squad, carried out a mass shooting in Washington, D.C.
While it is clear that the U.S. invasion destroyed Afghanistan, it also took its tole on America itself. The occupation directly contributed to the opioid crisis at home. And it appears that it is also connected to the epidemic of child sexual abuse documented here, as soldiers abuse children for profit. What has been happening at Fort Bragg, then, is part of the wider psychological degradation of American society, one that is controlled a by a government that has sacrificed everything sacred to protect and advance its imperial ambitions.
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US Officials Boast Their Illegal Sanctions ‘Collapsed’ Iran’s Economy, Causing High Inflation and Protests
(orinocotribune.com)
By Ben Norton – Feb 12, 2026
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted Trump’s illegal “maximum pressure” sanctions seek to “collapse” Iran’s economy by cutting off oil exports, fueling inflation: “Making Iran broke again”.
Donald Trump has openly called for “regime change” in Iran. He has surrounded the country with what he calls a “massive armada”, and has suggested that he wants to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
While Trump threatens to bomb Iran again, after attacking it in 2025, the US government has been dropping devastating economic bombs on the nation.
Top US government officials boast that they are trying to “collapse” Iran’s economy.
The Trump administration is waging what it calls a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran, which the White House says is “aimed at driving Iran’s oil exports to zero”.
Washington’s strategy is to starve Iran of export revenue by sabotaging its oil industry. By denying Tehran access to hard currency, the US aims to cause high rates of inflation and destroy the value of Iran’s currency, the rial.
This US economic warfare does great harm not only the Iranian government, but to all of the 93 million Iranians who live in the country. Civilians are bearing the brunt of the pain.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on “making Iran broke again”
Washington’s strategy for scorched-earth economic warfare was clearly spelled out by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge-fund manager from Wall Street.
In an interview with Fox News in January, anchor Maria Bartiromo asked Bessent about the impact of the sanctions that the US government has imposed on Iran.
Bessent bragged that these unilateral coercive measures, which flagrantly violate international law, have caused Iran to run out of dollars, which means Iran cannot pay for imports or stabilize its currency, leading to significant inflation.
“Their economy collapsed”, Bessent gloated. The top US official then took credit for the violent protests and riots in Iran.
These were Bessent’s full remarks (all emphasis added):
MARIA BARTIROMO: What do you want to say about sanctions? Something else you’ve been working on, of course. What are you planning there in terms of Iran, and the impact there? Do sanctions actually work?
And the same question with regard to 500% secondary sanctions or tariffs on countries who purchase energy products from Russia.
SCOTT BESSENT: OK, so two things here. There are Treasury sanctions. And if you look at a speech that I gave at the Economic Club of New York last March [2025], I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranian citizen, I would take my money out.
President Trump ordered Treasury and OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put “maximum pressure” on Iran.
And it’s worked. Because, in December, their economy collapsed.
We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports.
And this is why the people took to the street.
So this is economic statecraft. No shots fired.
In the Fox News interview, Bessent cited a speech that he delivered at the Economic Club of New York in March 2025.
In those remarks, the US Treasury secretary admitted that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran was “designed to collapse its already buckling economy”.
This is what Bessent said:
Last month, the White House announced its “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, designed to collapse its already buckling the economy.
The Iranian economy is in disarray: 35% official inflation — official inflation — a currency that has depreciated 60% in the last 12 months, and an ongoing energy crisis.
I know a few things about currency devaluations. And if I were an Iranian, I would get all of my money out of the rial, now.
In the same address at the Economic Club of New York, Bessent vowed: “We will close off Iran’s access to the international financial system, by targeting regional parties that facilitate the transfer of its revenues”.
“Our maximum pressure campaign [is] designed to collapse Iranian oil exports”, he said.
“We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector”, he declared.
Bessent then quipped, “Making Iran broke again will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy”.
“If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither”, he added.
When Bessent gave this speech at the Economic Club of New York, he was surrounded by Wall Street executives. They applauded with glee as he vowed to “collapse” Iran’s economy.
Sitting directly behind Bessent on stage was the billionaire oligarch Stephen Schwarzman, who is CEO of Blackstone, the largest alternative asset manager on earth, which is known for its massive private-equity arm.
Blackstone is the largest landlord in the United States. The Wall Street firm owns more than 300,000 rental housing units in the US.
Schwarzman also happened to be one of the main funders of Trump’s presidential campaign.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Bloomberg noted that the billionaire oligarch’s “bet pays off”, and that the Wall Street executive would be “well-positioned to influence business, tax policies”.
Billion oligarch Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, sitting behind US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during his speech on “collapsing” Iran’s economy
Close correlation between US sanctions and inflation
The US Treasury secretary’s admission that Washington is intentionally trying to cause hyperinflation in Iran is extremely revealing.
Western media outlets and pundits often blame the high rates of inflation in sanctioned countries like Iran on corruption and mismanagement.
However, it is not a coincidence that many of the countries with the highest rates of inflation on Earth have been sanctioned by the United States and the West more broadly, including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Iran.
The US government has waged brutal economic warfare against these countries, seeking to deny them access to the dollar-dominated international financial system and collapse their local currencies.
Corruption and mismanagement are not irrelevant (and they exist in every country), but they distract from the most important factor: sanctions.
In the case of Iran, a look at World Bank data shows that there is a very close correlation between US sanctions and inflation.
It should be emphasized that the US economic war against Iran is bipartisan, and it did not start under Donald Trump.
When the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Iran, they also contributed to high levels of inflation.
In the 2000s, before the US massively escalated its sanctions on Iran, the country’s inflation rate was relatively low, bottoming at 10% in 2006.
That year, in October, the Bush administration imposed heavy sanctions on Iran and threatened to sanction non-US oil and gas companies that invested in the country.
This scared off foreign investors and trading partners, while significantly increasing transaction and insurance costs for Iranian firms. Inflation promptly shot up to 17.3% in 2007 and 25.4% in 2008.
The US Keeps Openly Admitting It Deliberately Caused The Iran Protests
Iran managed to get inflation under control by 2010, when it fell to 10.1%.
However, in July of that year, the Obama administration hit Iran with heavy sanctions, while also threatening sanctions on foreign financial institutions and companies that worked with the country.
Unsurprisingly, inflation skyrocketed over the next three years, rising to 26.3% in 2011 and 27.3% in 2012, before peaking at 36.6% in 2013.
In 2012, the Obama White House published a sadistic press release boasting of how its illegal sanctions were “grinding the Iranian economy to a halt” and “crippling” it.
Obama stated:
Because of our efforts, Iran is under greater pressure than ever before… Few thought that sanctions could have an immediate bite on the Iranian regime. They have, slowing the Iranian nuclear program and virtually grinding the Iranian economy to a halt in 2011. Many questioned whether we could hold our coalition together as we moved against Iran’s Central Bank and oil exports. But our friends in Europe and Asia and elsewhere are joining us. And in 2012, the Iranian government faces the prospect of even more crippling sanctions.
However, in 2014, inflation in Iran cooled off significantly. This was likely due in large part to the interim agreement that Iran signed with Western countries in November 2013, as part of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.
Then, in 2015, Iran and the P5+1 countries (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and the European Union) signed the final version of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The JCPOA was written into international law with UN Security Council resolution 2231.
This agreement lifted sanctions on Iran — and, immediately after, inflation fell, reaching the lowest point in decades in 2016, at just 7.2%.
The signatories of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) in 2015
However, Trump came into office for his first term as US president in 2017, and in May 2018, he unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, sabotaging the agreement, and reimposed sanctions on Iran, in clear violation of international law.
Inflation in Iran then shot up to 39.9% in 2019.
The Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, and Iran has struggled with high rates of inflation (around 40%) ever since, as US sanctions have ripped through the economy.
The correlation is very clear. And US officials have not even tried to hide the fact that their unlawful sanctions have caused inflation in Iran. Treasury Secretary Bessent is proud of it.
US Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg, a hardline neoconservative hawk, bragged on Twitter that “President Trump’s strategy of MAXIMUM PRESSURE has brought the regime to its knees [sic]”.
Helberg did not mention the tens of millions of Iranian civilians who are suffering from this brutal US economic warfare, which has intentionally wrecked their currency and has thus eliminated their purchasing power, while causing shortages of crucial goods.
UN experts: US sanctions are illegal and violate human rights
Independent experts on international law have said for many years that US sanctions on Iran are illegal, and violate human rights.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has published many reports denouncing US sanctions.
A 2019 press release stated that the “imposition of unilateral coercive measures on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran by the United States” and “the use of economic sanctions for political purposes violates human rights and the norms of international behaviour”.
“Such action may precipitate man-made humanitarian catastrophes of unprecedented proportions”, the OHCHR warned.
Prominent American economists calculated that illegal US sanctions on Venezuela caused at least 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018, in a conservative estimate.
The top UN expert on unilateral coercive measures, Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy, stressed, “Regime change through economic measures likely to lead to the denial of basic human rights and indeed possibly to starvation has never been an accepted practice of international relations”.
In another publication in 2022, a group of UN experts said that US sanctions were violating the human rights of all Iranians.
“It is time for sanctions that impede Iran’s ability to improve the environment and reduce the ill effects on health and life, to be eased or lifted completely so that Iranians can access their right to a clean environment, the right to health and to life, and other rights”, the UN experts wrote.
Western politicians, such as Andrew Yang, insist that “the US should help the people of Iran”.
If they truly wanted to help the Iranian people, the most effective — and easiest — thing they could do would be to lift the illegal sanctions that they have imposed on Iran, which have intentionally devastated the economy and caused extreme suffering to tens of millions of civilians.
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Against Venezuela between 2017 and 2020, Donald Trump’s first administration implemented the most aggressive sanctions regime in contemporary history on an oil-producing country. The design of this policy, far from responding to human rights concerns as officially alleged, attempted to paralyze the Venezuelan economy.
A study by Francisco Rodríguez on the subject documents that the fall in Venezuelan oil production accelerated from a 1% loss per month in January 2016–August 2017 to a loss of 3.1% per month for the following 16 months. Thus, if the financial sanctions of August 2017 had not existed, oil production would have remained stable. The sanctions resulted in an estimated loss of between 616,000 and 1.23 million barrels per day.
Trump 1.0: acceleration of Venezuelan oil decline
US Executive Order 13808 of August 2017 was the first direct impact against PDVSA’s financial circuit, restricting access to international financing and freezing assets under US jurisdiction. This measure specifically affected companies with access to external financing, which represented 46% of the loss of production attributable to sanctions.
The second blow came in January 2019 with the designation of PDVSA (Venezuela’s publicly owned petroleum company) as a sanctioned entity and the recognition of the parallel government of Juan Guaidó, which caused an additional contraction of 35.2% in production between January and March of that year.
The third phase, the secondary sanctions of February–March 2020 against Russian and Mexican companies in charge of international marketing, generated a fall of 55.7% between February and June 2020.
Impact of the sanctions imposed by Trump 1.0 on PDVSA’s value chain: graph made with public data. Photo: Misión Verdad.
The mechanism of destruction operated through multiple pathways. The confiscation of Citgo, valued at approximately US $8 billion, deprived Venezuela of US $900 million per month in dividends and the ability to acquire diluents necessary to process Venezuelan extra-heavy crude oil.
The price differential between Venezuelan Merey crude oil and Brent reached discounts of up to 40% in 2018, with sales prices of US $18 per barrel in 2020 compared to US $41 for the international benchmark.
Estimated differential between crude oil markers due to sanctions until 2021: graph made with public data. Photo: Misión Verdad.
President Nicolás Maduro revealed in September 2020 that Venezuela lost 99% of its oil revenues between 2014 and 2019, a fall that some analysts compared to that of an economy under conventional military conflict.
Stages of the United States attack on PDVSA until 2023: graph made with public data. Photo: Misión Verdad.
PDVSA’s value chain suffered an impact of 70.83% on its operational effectiveness. Sequential sanctions affected exploration, production, refining, and trade, restricting access to technology, spare parts, and specialized services. The withdrawal of service providers such as Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes—limited to mere asset preservation operations—left the industry without preventive maintenance capacity. The number of operational oil platforms fell into direct correlation with production, showing that the collapse did not correspond to external management factors but to the material impossibility of operating under extreme financial and commercial restrictions.
Oil platforms and crude oil production in Venezuela: graph made with public data. Photo: Misión Verdad.
The progressive recovery of VenezuelaThe Venezuelan response to the US siege configured a process of energy geopolitical reconfiguration with global implications. In 2020, the Venezuelan government, led by President Maduro, implemented the Comprehensive Productive Recovery Plan (PRIP), structured in four phases: containment of the fall, stabilization of production, sustained recovery, and growth.
Recovery of oil production in Venezuela: graph made with public data. Photo: Misión Verdad.
The vice president at that time, Delcy Rodríguez, emphasized in 2025 that “Venezuela’s oil and gas production is maintained, and in the process of recovery, with its own efforts, which is the path that should guide us, there is no other way.” In addition, she has defended the Venezuelan right to cooperation with friendly countries, particularly China, Russia, and Iran.
Official data from the Central Bank of Venezuela indicate that oil production grew by 18.23% in the first quarter of 2025, reaching levels above 800,000 barrels per day according to direct communications from PDVSA to OPEC. This recovery was developed through the activation of the Productive Councils of Oil Workers (CPTP), the rehabilitation of critical infrastructure, and the replacement of pipes in Lake Maracaibo. The Anti-Blockade Law of October 2020 created the legal framework for commercial operations under exceptional conditions, allowing the diversification of export routes to Asian markets.
Strategic cooperation with Iran was particularly crucial. The exchange of Venezuelan crude oil for Iranian gasoline, publicly documented since 2020, allowed the internal supply of fuels to stabilize while rebuilding national refining capacity. China, through the National Oil Corporation (CNP), and Russia, via Rosneft, maintained operations in joint ventures that became “islands of productivity” within the sector. These strategic partnerships made it possible to reduce dependence on Western markets and establish alternative marketing mechanisms, although with financial costs exceeding 30% as a result of secondary sanctions.
The operational recovery produced in measurable macroeconomic results. Venezuela’s GDP grew by 9.32% in the first quarter of 2025, marking 16 consecutive quarters of expansion and closing 2024 with an annual growth of 8.54%.
According to the Preliminary Overview of the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean 2025, presented by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Venezuela was one of the countries with the highest growth in the region in 2024 (8.5%) and 2025 (6.5%), far exceeding the regional average (2.3-2.4%). This trajectory, developed in parallel with the relative containment of inflation (at 130% in 2018) to double-digit levels today, shows that the Venezuelan economy managed to adapt operationally to the sanctions regime through the reconstruction of alternative marketing chains and the strengthening of South–South cooperation.
The strategy of de-dollarization of oil sales has been a direct response to evade the financial architecture of the OFAC, linking national production to an emerging power bloc that challenges the hegemony of the petrodollar.
Venezuelan oil: a vital part of a systemic competitionLast January, the National Assembly approved the Partial Reform Law of the Hydrocarbons Organic Law, an instrument that redefines the framework for participation in the Venezuelan oil sector. The reform maintains the public domain of the deposits while introducing mechanisms of contractual flexibility: it allows the participation of private companies domiciled in Venezuela in primary activities, establishes royalties of up to 30% and integrated taxes of up to 15%, and incorporates international arbitration clauses for dispute resolution. The maximum duration of joint ventures is set at 25 years, extendable for an additional 15, with the return of assets to the state at the end of the contracts.
This legislative reform acquires particular relevance in the face of the plans announced by the Trump administration after the US military attack on Venezuela of January 3, 2026, that resulted in the abduction of President Maduro and the first lady, Cilia Flores. Although the legislative reform seeks to attract investment, it establishes state control frameworks and fiscal conditions that prioritize sovereignty and the recovery of national operational capacity not delivery of assets.
The criminal episode created a conjuncture of uncertainty but did not alter some structural difficulties. Trump’s plans, classified as “a break with precedents to take control,” depend on a political and legal strategy and on the will of corporations that today look more suspiciously at geopolitical risks.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio detailed a three-phase plan—stabilization, recovery and transition—that would include the US obtaining and selling Venezuelan oil and controlling the income in order to allegedly “benefit the Venezuelan people.” However, the viability of this scheme faces significant structural obstacles:
- Years of sanctions have left the petroleum industry with a prolonged lack of access to capital and regular maintenance, so the need for massive investments in rehabilitation deters corporations, which evaluate legal risks—sanctions could be reinstated given Trump’s ambiguity—and huge operations.
- Operating joint ventures maintain existing contracts with counterparts from China, Russia, and Iran, and the unilateral termination of these contracts would involve considerable legal and commercial costs.
- The reform of the Hydrocarbons Law of 2026 establishes that the ownership of the deposits remains inalienable, limiting the scope of any transaction that aims to transfer strategic control of the resource.
- The experience of sanctions has shown that Venezuelan oil marketing can operate with relative autonomy from Western financial circuits, reducing the effectiveness of coercion as a foreign policy instrument.
US sanctions, far from consolidating Washington’s energy hegemony, accelerated the diversification of Venezuela’s partners towards powers that compete directly with the United States globally.
Trump’s attempt to force PDVSA to act according to Washington’s interests collides with reality: Venezuelan oil infrastructure no longer depends exclusively on US technology. The presence of strategic partners in the Orinoco Belt and the current debts with non-Western creditors act as a natural brake. In addition, the sanctions that Trump himself imposed in his first term destroyed the logistical bridges that their corporations would now need to operate efficiently.
Beyond Trump’s statements, the international context adds an additional variable of complexity. China’s advances in technological and energy sectors has resulted in Beijing taking the lead in 57 of 64 critical technologies between 2019 and 2023, including renewable energy, semiconductor manufacturing, and quantum computing. This reality transforms the dispute over Venezuelan oil into a component of a broader systemic competition, where the control of conventional energy resources is strategic for global energy dynamics.
The final paradox lies in the fact that the “maximum pressure” exerted by Trump in his first administration generated the conditions for a reconfiguration of the Venezuelan oil sector that could hinder the objectives of his second administration. The diversification of strategic partners and the updating of the legal framework create a scenario that is made more complicated by a transformed operational reality.
Venezuelan oil, far from constituting an accessible booty for the US, has become an indicator of the emerging energy multipolarity, where unilateral coercion loses effectiveness when faced with a diversification of alliances.
It is a battle that has ceased to be a bilateral issue to become a significant chapter in the reconfiguration of global power.
From Blockade to Asphyxiation: the US War on Cuba Enters Its Most Brutal Phase
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/CB/SL
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By Max Blumenthal – Feb 10, 2026
A US-funded opposition journalist revealed the Trump DOJ has crafted a secret indictment of Venezuela’s Acting President to “hold it over her head,” and will execute it if she “derails.”
The Trump administration is using a secret indictment to assert leverage over Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, according to the editor-in-chief of the US government-funded outlet, Armando.info.
“One of the information we manage is that the US is holding an indictment against [Rodriguez] to make it public, just in case she derails,” Valentina Lares Martiz revealed during a February 6, 2026 webinar hosted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an outlet also sponsored by the US government.
“Just to hold it over her head?” asked OCCRP deputy editor Julia Wallace.
“Yeah, so, I think she, she and her brother [Jorge Rodríguez], they are in this survival mode, and they will have the capacity to move the pieces, as long as the US backs her up,” Armando.info’s Lares Martiz affirmed.
A January 17, 2026 report by the Associated Press revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration classified Acting president Rodríguez as a “priority target” almost as soon as she was appointed as Vice President in 2018.
David Smilde, an academic who crusades for regime change in Venezuela at the US government and ExxonMobil-funded Atlantic Council, described the DEA investigation of Rodríguez as “logical.” Smilde explained to the AP that the investigation “gives the U.S. government leverage over her. She may fear that if she does not do as the Trump administration demands, she could end up with an indictment like Maduro.”
During the OCCRP webinar, Steven Dudley of the State Department-funded Insight Crime outlet remarked that “this isn’t without precedent, in terms of [the US government] hanging an indictment over somebody to cajole them into doing their bidding.”
Dudley added, “They don’t need an indictment to cajole people. They have a giant military, and they’ve shown that they’re willing to use that military. That is the biggest stick.”
Confronting “a military aggression unprecedented in our history”
Delcy Rodríguez stepped in as Acting President following a deadly US military raid on Caracas this January 3 which left over 100 dead, including 32 Cuban military officers, and resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. In an interview with The Atlantic the following day, US President Donald Trump recognized Rodríguez as the new leader, but warned, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Since then, Rodríguez has presided over the passage of an Organic Law on Hydrocarbons which rolled back the socialist reforms the late President Hugo Chavez made to the country’s state oil company, PDVSA. In a January 16 speech to Venezuela’s National Council of Economic Productivity, Rodríguez explained the impetus for the new law:
“Enough time has passed, and Venezuela has been subjected to an unprecedented economic blockade. Well, recently, there has been a military aggression unprecedented in our history, and Venezuela must move forward…without compromising historical principles or compromising Venezuelan dignity. And in that direction, we have made the decision, seeing the successful results of the business models contemplated in the organic anti-blockade law, to take the models that are there and incorporate them into the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons.”
While the law allows Venezuela to draw new revenue streams from an oil sector that has withstood years of punishing sanctions, the Trump administration has assumed custody of Venezuela’s oil revenue at the point of a gun, holding the profits in a private account in Qatar which is not accountable to Congress.
Rodríguez and her older brother, Jorge, have both served in influential roles under Maduro, with Delcy Rodriguez operating as Vice President while overseeing hydrocarbon policy. In 2018, she initiated a project to survive Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, successfully guiding an Organic Anti-Blockade law through the Constituent Assembly which reformed PDVSA. Since Maduro’s abduction, the Rodríguez siblings have been under mounting pressure to accommodate onerous demands from Washington in order to prevent a destabilizing process of regime change. Looming behind every move is the memory of their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leftist militant who was tortured to death in prison by CIA-trained interrogators under a pro-US government in 1976.
In the past, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has used sealed indictments to deny targets of its global lawfare regime the chance to pre-empt investigations. As The Grayzone revealed, Trump’s DOJ secretly indicted Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on December 21, 2017, just one day after CIA spies learned that Assange was planning to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had been given sanctuary. On April 11, 2019, British police stormed the embassy on US orders and arrested Assange in a blatant violation of diplomatic sovereignty.
Colombian-born Venezuelan official Alex Saab was also the target of a secret US indictment that was only publicized after he was abducted from an airport in Cape Verde while on an official diplomatic mission in 2020.
During the OCCRP webinar, Armando.info’s Lares Martiz noted that the US slapped sanctions on Delcy Rodríguez in 2017, however, “she doesn’t have an open and formal investigation against her.”
But that could all change, she insisted, if the Acting President defies the Trump administration’s paternalistic instructions.
Jorge Rodríguez: Venezuela Exercises Full Control Over Its Sovereignty
Pro-transparency Armando.info: based at a Delaware mailbox, funded by Washington
Lares Martiz is in a prime position to know if the US is preparing a secret indictment of Rodriguez, as the publication she edits, Armando.info, functions at the center of a network of US government-funded journalistic outlets which exist to shop dirt on Latin American leaders targeted by Washington.
Though its staff operate from Bogota, Colombia, Armando.info is registered at a post office box in Newark, Delaware, where it is listed by Delaware’s Division of Corporations as “not in good standing.”
One of Armando.info’s top donors is the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA spin-off which channels US money into opposition parties and media promoting regime change. The outlet is also listed as a member of the “global network” of OCCRP, which has received most of its budget from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
A 2024-25 Frontline documentary series about Armando.info’s work in Venezuela, “A Dangerous Assignment,” made it clear the outlet’s staff were dedicated anti-Chavista operatives seemingly coordinating their work with the US government. The documentary chronicled the investigation by Lares Martiz and her colleague, Roberto Deniz, of the Colombian-born Venezuelan official Alex Saab, who had spearheaded a food importation program known as CLAP that aimed to prevent widespread hunger amid crushing American sanctions by providing food at below market value to the Venezuelan public. Published by the US government’s Public Broadcasting Service, “A Dangerous Assignment” received “investment support” from Luminate, an NGO founded by US intelligence-adjacent billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
In 2020, Saab was abducted under orders from US authorities following a series of Armando.info reports accusing him of using the CLAP program as an avenue for corruption. He was released from US federal prison through a December 2023 prisoner swap. By this point, Armando.info’s leadership had left Venezuela following lawsuits by Attorney General Tarek William Saab.
In the aftermath of Maduro’s abduction, the Armando.info team is homing in on Saab once again, and apparently working to whip up a dossier on the newly-inaugurated president.
But during the OCCRP webinar, Lares Martiz conceded that she lacks compromising information on Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge: “they are hardly [in any] cases of corruption that I have written [about], or in Armando.info, or even OCCRP has investigated.”
But she suggested that US intelligence is actively investigating Venezuela’s state oil company in search of dirt on Venezuela’s new president. “Everything is related to corruption in PDVSA,” she remarked. “I think it’s going to be looked up very carefully.”
On January 16, Rodriguez met in her office with CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Later that month, CNN reported that the CIA “is poised to help actively manage the Trump administration’s dealings with Venezuela’s new leadership.”
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