Venezuela, a country with only $10 billion left in reserves to run on, is in trouble. The people are starving. The government has gone full-on authoritarian, and now desperate human beings are dying in the streets.
From an Associated Press report on Friday:
Authorities in Venezuela say 12 people were killed overnight following looting and violence in the South American nation’s capital amid a spiraling political crisis.
Continuing, the report further highlighted the gravity of the situation:
Most of the deaths took place in El Valle, where opposition leaders say 13 people were hit with an electrical current while trying to loot a bakery protected by an electric fence.
These are people without options, forced to turn to thievery to stay alive. And they died because of it.
On April 6, The Economist reported that over the past year, 74 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 20 pounds. Venezuela, incidentally, has topped Bloomberg’s Economic Misery Index for the past three years.
At the end of March, for instance, Maduro effectively shut down Venezuela’s congress — his primary political opposition — and gave those legislative duties to his puppet Supreme Court.
The latest news coming out of the South American nation — aside from the deaths of people trying to steal bread to live — is that General Motors, whose Venezuelan production facility was overtaken by local authorities, has now ceased all operations in the country.
To put that in perspective, consider that in 2016, only 3,000 vehicles were sold in Venezuela, a country of 30 million people.
The U.S. Southern Command has floated the idea of using the United States’ military to contain unrest in Venezuela, though historically American intervention in South America is both widely unpopular in the region and wildly unsuccessful.
As we look on at the continuing horrors in the Middle East and what seems, at the moment, to be the makings of World War III in Asia, let’s not lose sight of the fact that right now, the people of Venezuela are in pain.
My prayers to the innocent suffering people of Venezuela. Someone tell me where all the monies from that countries oil production is going? Certainly not to its people. That government was overthrown when Chavez died and then its people made to suffer. The elite culling the herd there. My instincts tell me that soon international banks (IMF) will soon be lending monies to the country to further strengthen it hold on it and then the rebuilding will commence.
EXCELLENT POINTS!! This is eugenics in action.
Isn’t socialism great? Don’t worry, There is plenty of money for the elites, the military and the secret police. There always is. Don’t forget the banksters who are behind this (as always is the case with socialism). They got a 695% return on their money during Chavez’s reign. After all, every mobster knows the secret to survival is to pay your bosses first.
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What this article
fails to ask is why the situation has developed in Venezuela. It
makes the erroneous assumption that it is due to the socialistic
governments of Chavez and Maduro. And does not mention that CIA has
funded repeatedly efforts to try to topple both Chavez and Maduro and
the vast majority of the people are better off under their
administrations, and the food shortages have been engineered by the
elites which have bled Venezuela for decades with the aid of the US
which covets Venezuelan oil reserves. A totally unbalanced article!
Hear Hear! Nailed it. All this suffering was planned by outsiders to seize Venezuela and rape it to death.
So true; thanks Guadamour.
Exactly
Venezuela is going back in time. Those countries that after world war 2 went to a socialist agenda have changed backed to a capitalist agenda. It is really insane to seize the free enterprise economy. Governments programs are full off corruption and incompetence regardless of where you are in the world. Look how China has been able to grow due to the free enterprise in that country.
The central bankers are making an example of Venezuela to all nations that don’t obey. The biggest folly of the Venezuelans is by not producing more consumer products, and relying on imports and to much on oil.
Too late to moralize…
Way too late for Sean Penn, Springsteen, Obama and others to call for help.
Like the writer states, US intervention is unpopular and wildly unsuccessful.
For once, we should watch the situation but not directly intervene.
Maybe Soros and his ilk can do something…socialism is right up his alley, etc.
Well, are we there yet!? Are we finally beginning to realize the global HARM we’ve done—not in Global Warming—the casualities are a LOT less “Theoretical” than that. It’s not just Venezuela, BTW. There is a huge food and fresh water problem going on all over the planet. Our “NEWS”, focused as it is on TRUMP hardly has time to actually report WORLD news. We hardly know the reality now of Million if not Billion of people.
We in the USA may not have created much of what the planet faces but nearly EVERYWHERE where we’ve put our hand in (where we’ve implemented OUR foreign policy) we’ve destabilized eveywhere we’ve intervened.
Corrupt government IS a Global problem. Venezulia has the biggest OIL reserves of any soverign nation state. But you can’t eat or drink oil. The government THOUGHT they could implement huge social reform WHEN their financial future looked brighter. They stopped producing FOOD and other products for the world markets and OPEC decided to undersell, the USA, Russia, Venezuala et al. in their determination to remain in control of the world’s supply of oil. That’s only one factor and people here have pointed out OTHERS. In fact there are generally some of the most “informed” insights I’ve seen a “viewing public” offer.
It’s too litttle too late but we’ll soon enough have our own all encompasing issues to worry about.
The problems in Venezuela are not due to socialism. They were caused by capitalist meddling and consequential market distortions:
Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that ‘socialism means poverty.’
In reality, millions of Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved through the Bolivarian process. The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to the revolution.
At the same time, private food processing and importing corporations have launched a coordinated campaign of sabotage. This, coupled with the weakening of a vitally important state sector of the economy, has resulted in inflation and food shortages. The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.
Corruption is a big problem in Venezuela and many third-world countries. This was true prior to the Bolivarian process, as well as after Hugo Chavez launched his massive economic reforms. In situations of extreme poverty, people learn to take care of each other. People who work in government are almost expected to use their position to take care of their friends and family.
Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His election was viewed as a referendum on the extreme free market policies enacted in Venezuela during the 1990s.
Venezuelans told of how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wouldn’t be collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said: “Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment.”
Chavez took office on a platform advocating a path between capitalism and socialism. He restructured the government-owned oil company so that the profits would go into the Venezuelan state, not the pockets of Wall Street corporations. With the proceeds of Venezuela’s oil exports, Chavez funded a huge apparatus of social programs.
In 1998, Venezuela had only 12 public universities, today it has 32. Cuban doctors were brought to Venezuela to provide free health care in community clinics. The government provides cooking and heating gas to low-income neighborhoods, and it’s launched a literacy campaign for uneducated adults.
During the George W. Bush administration, oil prices were the highest they had ever been.
Big oil revenues enabled Chavez and the United Socialist Party to bring millions of Venezuelans out of poverty. Between 1995 and 2009, poverty and unemployment in Venezuela were both cut in half.
After the death of Chavez, Nicolas Maduro has continued the Bolivarian program. “Housing Missions” have been built across the country, providing low-income families in Venezuela with places to live. The Venezuelan government reports that over 1 million modern apartment buildings had been constructed by the end of 2015.
The problems currently facing Venezuela started in 2014. The already growing abundance of oil due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was compounded by Saudi Arabia flooding the markets with cheap oil. The result: massive price drops.
Excerpts from:
US-Led Economic War, Not Socialism, Is Tearing Venezuela Apart
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-led-economic-war-not-socialism-is-tearing-venezuela-apart/5535633