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More than 24,000 murders were recorded in Venezuela last year. This year, Caracas alone is averaging 35 murders a day. Many locals choose simply not to go out after dark. Crews billeted in Caracas with American air carriers are ordered to stay in their hotels, no exceptions. Billboards throughout town go dark at night, because the power grid is crumbling. The shortages started to get serious in December as collapsing oil prices proved the final straw for a wildly mismanaged economy.

Oil accounts for 95 per cent of export earnings. In the years since Mr Chavez came to power, oil output has dropped 25 per cent and huge quantities are essentially given away, to neighbours to curry favour or to Venezuelans for whom petrol is roughly one penny a gallon – or basically free. Items that today are almost impossible to find in the capital include milk, baby milk, nappies, deodorant, soap and shampoo. So too are many medicines. Also absent from the shelves are condoms, bringing the threat of increased HIV rates and unwanted pregnancies from unprotected sex. Queues form outside supermarkets before dawn and purchases are being rationed by the government. Military police patrol checkouts to quell fights.

“It’s horrible, horrible,” lamented Lina Lorusso, 77, in the aisles of a San Lorenzo supermarket in the Chacao district of Caracas, jealously clasping a bag of beans and two cans of peas. It’s the third supermarket she had tried that day. “I have watched people hitting each other and shouting. If you find anything it’s three times more expensive than it used to be.” Ms Lorusso arrived in Venezuela 57 years ago from Bari in southern Italy. Now she is watching as her grandchildren go back to Italy. “The situation here is like it was when I left,” she explains, her lower lip trembling. “Please help us.”

“It’s like a post-war economy with hyper inflation, shortages, fixed prices and the country’s capacity to produce goods destroyed,” Amabilis Castillo, 27, a treasury products analyst for an international bank, explained. A possible default by Venezuela on its ever-expanding debt is also looming.

President Maduro, according to the most recent polls, has seen his support fall to a perilous 22 per cent. When he took to the airwaves a week ago to trumpet foiling one more conspiracy to topple him most observers rolled their eyes, including the US which dismissed as “ludricous” any notion it had played a part. Since becoming President, he has spoken of more than a dozen purported such plots. But this time he said an ex-general had been arrested and 10 other officers implicated. If the added flourish that jets were to bomb the palace was fantasy, his fears of a military mutiny may have had more foundation. Within hours Venezuela’s high command was on television reiterating its loyalty to the President.

this is what they cant for trying to build a socialist paradise within a multi party system that tolerates dissent from right wing pro american groups actively seeking to thwart the socialist revolution and construction. better a rightly guided one party system that exterminates or imprisons the troublemakers.

As long as YOU are the one doing the extermination and the imprisonment I am guessing?


 :D ;D :D

When a government ignores basic mathematics, it is like ignoring the laws of physics, this is the kind of results from that way of thinking, I believe Ecuador is similar in terms of political leanings and is having the same thigns happen over there and now a left leaning party has taken over Greece I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to those guys too.

Greece is already on the same track. I doubt Spain will follow tho, it's a part of EUR way too powerful to be kicked out like they are doing with the Greeks.

Everything was going well under Chavez. Unfortunately, Maduro turned out to be incompetent. They had the option of using the oil revenue to diversify their economy. Instead, the government wasted all that money in handouts and subsidies. Had they invested a part of that in education and industrialization, things would have been vastly different now.