Caracas - The international financial blockade imposed on Venezuela has made the country lose 35 billion dollars by concept of production of goods and services from 2013 to 2017, the Foreign Ministry reported on Monday.

According to a research carried out by the Unit of Economic Debates of the Latin American Geopolitical Strategic Studies (CELAG), the objective of the sanctions by the United States and the European Union is to suffocate the country's finances and destroy national productivity to justify a military intervention.

The study, published on the website of the Foreign Ministry, noted that the measures are based on the expulsion of Venezuela from international financial markets in order to prevent Caracas from accessing credits.

However, the Venezuelan Government has complied with its foreign debt payments punctually, but agencies like Standards & Poors or Moody's, which assess economic risks, have graded Venezuela with more than 2,500 points since 2015, with peaks of 5,000 and even 6,000 points.

The reasons stated by those companies when evaluating countries are dark, but the trend is to give good grades to those nations that favor free market policies and to punish those that do otherwise.

Therefore, the Venezuelan debt, despite being paid sustainably, has been evaluated with great probabilities of default with an evaluation that is worse than those granted to countries in war like Syria.

In that scenario, Venezuela paid more than 17 billion dollars of its foreign debt from 2013 to 2017, at a rate of some 3.3 billion dollars a year.

In that regard, the CELAG study explained that if the annual average value of hard currency (19.2 billion dollars) that did not reach the State's coffers due to the blockade is added, Venezuela's economy and society lost 22.5 billion dollars a year due to an international strategy of financial isolation.