© e Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. Economic Sanctions as State Crime: Empire, Law and the United States’ Economic Warfare in Latin America Jose Atiles *, * J. Atiles, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 3080 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; email: jatiles@illinois.edu is paper argues that US unilateral economic and financial sanctions on Latin American countries constitute state crime. Although critical scholarship on sanctions has shown that these coercive measures contravene international law and harm the populations of targeted countries, crimino- logical scholarship has neglected the analysis of sanctions. Focusing on sanctions as structural violence, this paper explores how the power dynamics in imposing unilateral sanctions on Latin America align with understandings of state crimes and imperialism. e paper engages with the theoretical frameworks of state crime and the criminology of empire, provides an overview of US unilateral sanctions on Latin American countries, and suggests a research agenda for studying eco- nomic sanctions as state crime. KEY WORDS: economic coercion, sanctions, international law, criminology of empire, crimes of the powerful INTRODUCTION On 13 February 2020, Venezuela referred the United States to the International Criminal Court (ICC), alleging that US economic sanctions against Venezuela amounted to a crime against humanity (Akande et al. 2021; Whyte 2023). 1 is referral follows nearly a decade of US sanc- tions, including Executive Order 13884 of 5 August 2019, which froze Venezuelan assets in the United States, including $347 million transferred to the self-proclaimed president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó 2 and the Venezuelan opposition (Whyte 2023). Sanctions led to a severe contrac- tion in Venezuelan government revenue, acute malnutrition, an inflationary and emigration cri- sis, 3 and the excess deaths of 40,000 Venezuelans in one year (Weisbrot and Sach 2019; Galant AQ1-AQ3 AQ4 1 Previously, on 26 September 2018, the United States and five other countries referred Venezuela to the ICC, accusing the government of President Nicolas Maduro of having commied human rights abuses amounting to crimes against humanity. is was done under Article 14 of the Rome Statute of the ICC. AQ5 2 Juan Guaidó was recognized by the United States and some European Countries as Venezuela’s President in 2019. 3 Stein et al. (2024) reported that the Trump administration was warned that sanctions would fuel migration and hunger, yet it proceeded to impose additional sanctions. e British Journal of Criminology, 2025, XX, 1–19 hps://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaf003 Original Manuscript 1.5 1.10 1.15 1.20 1.25 1.30 1.35 1.40 1.45 1.50 1.55 1.60 1.65 1.70 1.75