WASHINGTON, D.C. Jan. 30 (DPI) – Reports out of Venezuela suggest life is getting desperate for many of the oil-rich country’s 30 million people, as the government can’t come up the hard currency to import food and other staples. A hard life of tight rationing, sudden improvisation, ongoing corruption and rampant cheating is the norm now in Caracas and the country’s other urban centers.
Readers on various sites are taking the reporter’s narratives a step further, speculating on the impact of economic collapse and social disorder in a country already disabled by an incompetent regime and the now-controlling influences of Cuba and China.
“The situation is deteriorating rapidly in Venezuela,” one poster wrote this morning. “Maduro’s government today authorized the military and the police to use lethal weapons against protests.”
Some readers recognize that the U.S. – which has kept an arm’s length relationship with the Chavista regime – must assert itself in Venezuela in the months ahead.
Socialism, just like capitalism, can only be successful without bloated bureaucracy, military dictatorship, and make-your-friends-rich corruption– the revolution just replaced one elite with another. Chavez was a tin-horn dictator, and although he improved education, medicine, the arts, and the plight of the poor, farming and manufacturing were ignored, depending totally on oil revenue and imports… not a very enlightened system.
Venezuela, is a super-corrupt totalitarian regime, whose main beneficiaries are the power elite, and the high rank officers in the armed forces, who
also, are involved in drug trafficking. It is an scandalous absurdity, and a huge insult, to the people of Venezuela, that the country, with the biggest proven oil reserves in the world (more than Saudi Arabia), can not feed its own people, because of primitive military nationalism, catastrophic bad policies, and super rampant corruption, in favor of the people in power, and the supporting armed forces.
The biggest exploiter of this huge mess is China, getting huge bargains in oil and natural resources, setting a deep foothold in South America, and
making Venezuela, an almost depending colony. The well educated Venezuelans fled from Chavez, who set the conditions for the tremendous misery, in every field, that permeates Venezuela, and the participation of the Cuban security apparatus, to make it an ideal, police state!! Civil war may be possible in this country!Venezuelans deserve this, and I hope they get more of the pain. If you are going to vote for the likes of Chavez and Maduro, you deserve to suffer the consequences of their policies. And it’s not just voting for them; most Venezuelans actually cheered them on in the open, thereby reinforcing their loyalty to these socialists. You want to support socialists, then you have to live with what their policies are going to do to you. No sympathy or empathy from me. Hopefully the Venezuelans will finally wake and realize that dependency on a single source of income, subsidization of all manner of good, and nationalization of critical assets (like oil fields) is a losing proposition.