Is Venezuela America’s Future? Will Our Nation Descend Into Chaos As Food Riots And Other Unrest Takes Control? Will Martial Law Be In Our Future As Well?
Amber William
MyDailyInformer.com
April 13, 2017
During the 1970s, Venezuela was the richest country in Latin America. With the region’s highest growth rates and the lowest levels of inequality, it was also one of the most stable democracies in the Americas. But starting in the early 1980s, things fell apart. The nation endured three coup attempts and one presidential impeachment. Per capita growth plunged, and mass protests became the norm. What happened?
It’s got more oil than any country on the planet but its people eat garbage and gangsters rule. Defying a media ban, Eric Campbell goes undercover in the onetime socialist idyll of Venezuela.
The political and economic elements at play in the pre-Chávez Venezuelan economy are covered in individual chapters by some of the region’s most distinguished analysts. Omar Bello, an economic affairs officer at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (eclac) and Adriana Bermúdez, a credit risk specialist in the Venezuelan private sector, look at the role of market reforms; Francisco Monaldi of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Michael Penfold of Venezuela’s Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), discuss the rise and decline of democratic governance; and Dan Levy of Harvard’s Kennedy School and Dean Yang of the University of Michigan analyze the impact of immigration.
“This situation is vastly deteriorating,” Diego Moya-Ocampos, senior Latin America analyst at IHS Country Risk, told CNBC Thursday. “We expect the economy to contract at least 11.5 percent, inflation to hit 700 percent, already the highest in the world.”
Venezuela has one of the worst economies in the world with food shortages and massive inflation. NPR’s Planet Money team explains how it got so bad.
And now to one of the worst economies in the world – Venezuela. The country is suffering from food shortages and massive inflation even though it sits on one of the world’s richest deposits of oil. The economic crisis has led to a political one. Robert Smith from NPR’s Planet Money team reports on how Venezuela ran out of everything.
And as Mr. Chávez’s Socialist-inspired revolution collapses into economic ruin, as food and medicine slip further out of reach, the new migrants include the same impoverished people that Venezuela’s policies were supposed to help.
“We have seen a great acceleration,” said Tomás Páez, a professor who studies immigration at the Central University of Venezuela. He says that as many as 200,000 Venezuelans have left in the past 18 months, driven by how much harder it is to get food, work and medicine — not to mention the crime that such scarcities have fueled.
This scene is particularly distressing because Venezuela used to have plenty of money. Even a decade ago, the oil flowed out, and dollars flowed into the country, and Venezuela could buy anything it wanted from the rest of the world. Alejandro Velasco is a history professor at NYU, and he says there was this attitude in Venezuela. Why make anything yourself?
“Parents will say, ‘I would rather say goodbye to my son in the airport than in the cemetery,’ ” he said.
Desperate Venezuelans are streaming across the Amazon Basin by the tens of thousands to reach Brazil. They are concocting elaborate scams to sneak through airports in Caribbean nations that once accepted them freely. When Venezuela opened its border with Colombia for just two days in July, 120,000 people poured across, simply to buy food, officials said. An untold number stayed.
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