During 2023, Venezuela once again demonstrated its heroic spirit because it was a challenging cycle that demanded more than other periods, “perhaps because it was the third year of consecutive recovery in which, once defeated at the time last year, hyperinflation induced and reactivated the oil and non-oil productive apparatus, we had to maintain the achievements and meet the growing expectations and needs of the people,” highlighted the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, during the presentation of the Annual Message to the Nation.
With a model in which the people are the protagonist, the national leader noted that it is not the work of a single person, but rather it is the work of all Venezuelans in the construction of improvements that revitalize the different sectors that give them life to the country:
“It’s all of Venezuela. It is a whole people (…) I am referring to the 30 million Venezuelans, I am referring to the work of agricultural producers, peasants, fishing men and women, businessmen, businesswomen, workers, my beloved working class, entrepreneurs, students, intellectuals, men and women of culture, the whole Venezuela protagonist of this epic of the 21st century that we live in a very exemplary way and tell the world with true facts,” he noted.
He recalled the events at the beginning of the frontal war in 2015, as well as the first signs of blockade, which generated a decrease in oil production to 87%. In this sense, he pointed out that it reached its lowest level in 2020 with 339,000 barrels per day, compared to the 2.5 million that were produced in January 2015.
He explained that Venezuela stopped producing 3,993 million barrels of oil as a consequence of the criminal sanctions imposed by the United States, an action that resulted in the loss of 323 billion dollars.
President Maduro detailed that the total losses for the national economy, including the public and private sectors, due to the fall in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2015 and 2022, was 642 billion dollars:
“A genocide, an economic massacre. “Those who asked for sanctions for Venezuela are the guilty ones, those who asked for them, those who demanded them, those who justified them and those who took them are the culprits of this genocide, of this massacre that Venezuela has suffered from 2015 to the present day,” he claimed.
He also described that the losses for the public and private sectors were devastating, lowering the level of productivity from 80% to 5% once the sanctions began to take effect, given that they lacked raw materials or spare parts.
In this sense, the Dignitary highlighted the resistance that the private sector has also had and the importance of its participation in the start of a new, more prosperous economy for the nation.
