Christmas came early this year in Venezuela. The season officially began on October 1, following the edict of authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro. “I am going to declare that Christmas will be brought forward to October 1st,” he said.
The absurdity would be laughable if this were not a perfect snapshot of Venezuela’s black-and-white dystopian reality. The oil-rich country is in economic ruin, unable to even turn on the lights…Life there is so difficult that a quarter of the population (about 8 million people) has been evacuated.
“He needed a distraction,” said former New York Times reporter William Newman. “Bread and Circuses.”
The title of Neumann’s book on Venezuela says it all: “It’s never so bad that it can’t get any worse.” “Everyone knows he lost the election,” he said. “He is the emperor without clothes.”
St Martin’s Press
Venezuela, which has a history of on-again, off-again democracy, held elections in July. President Maduro claimed he had been re-elected, but in a bold act of defiance, the opposition produced voting machine tallies proving that: Edmundo González was actually elected presidentwhich is better than a 2-to-1 margin. Impartial election observers agreed.
President Maduro called in the military to force the rejection of the election. González was told to leave the country or leave the country. (He appeared in Spain.) In the ensuing chaos, at least 20 people were killed and more than 2,000 were captured.
Maria Colina Machado, the face of the opposition, would have run for president herself had Maduro not banned her, but she is in hiding. “I have been charged with terrorism,” she told “Sunday Morning” via Zoom. “The dictatorship is looking for me and wants to get me as soon as possible.”
So how did a country with the world’s largest oil reserves end up like this? According to Newman, “It rained money. They spent it, they squandered it, they stole it. It stopped raining. So people starved. And that’s essentially what happened in Venezuela.”
Venezuela has been producing oil since 1914, but the problem known as the “resource curse” began in earnest when the charismatic and controversial Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. Ta. When he took office, the price of oil was $7 a barrel, Newman said. “Within a few years, it would be over $120 a barrel, so Chavez was very lucky because he was just at the beginning of this great commodity boom.”
Chávez spent vast amounts of oil money on social programs and borrowed more money, plunging the country into debt. But ordinary Venezuelans felt well-off and were listening to calls for change.
The United States was his favorite bogeyman. At the United Nations in 2006, Chavez called President George W. Bush “the devil.”
When Chávez died of cancer in 2013, his hand-picked successor was Nicolas Maduro, who was neither as popular nor as lucky. Oil prices have plummeted. Inflation reached an unimaginable 300,000%.
President Maduro responded to popular dissatisfaction with the crackdown, with millions leaving the country.
A map of Venezuelan exodus since 2014 shows the United States ranked fourth among destinations. More than 750,000 people have been granted or have applied for temporary protected status in the United States. So the crisis in Venezuela is here, before our eyes, in our cities.
CBS News
Niulka Meléndez retired in 2015. “We’re broken,” she said. “We collapsed as a country…we had no institutions, no freedoms.”
Temporary protected status allows her and her husband to legally live and work in the United States. They founded VIA (Venezuela and Immigrant Assistance), a volunteer organization that assists new immigrants to New York City.
Meléndez introduced me to a woman who left Venezuela with her family of eight, including four young children. She is also afraid to reveal her name here. “When the armed group known as colectivos came to my house, they took everything I had,” she said. “They even took away my mixer, everything, my computer, everything. And they beat us because we didn’t have money, to be exact, they took 500 I didn’t have that amount.”
So they risked their lives to cross the Darien Gorge. Since the July election campaign, Venezuela has resumed hemorrhaging of its people and resumed exports in crisis.
Maria Colina Machado said: “Venezuela today is in the midst of the world’s largest migration crisis. Almost 25% of Venezuela’s remaining population is considering deportation. This is a huge number. This is 500 6 million Venezuelans could potentially leave the country.” ”
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Story produced by Wonbo Wu. Editor: David Bhagat.
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Marta Teichner
