It seems that Venezuela is the topic for this week. Venezuelans are starving, but socialist dictator, Nicolas Maduro, does not seem
to care. Humanitarian food and medical aid was sent to help the people, but
Maduro blocked the Venezuelan border crossings and would not allow the trucks
into the country. When his people tried to get food and supplies off the trucks
stopped on the Simon Bolivar Bridge between Colombia and Venezuela, Maduro’s
troops fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd and set the trucks on
fire. Two people died, and twenty-nine others were shot. A total of 285 people
were injured.
The United States and at least fifty
other nations back Juan Guaido to replace Madero, but Madero is making it plain
that he is not going out without a fight. President Donald Trump has not ruled
out military intervention, but the situation may lead to it if Madero continues
to attack his own countrymen.
Daniel Di Martino grew up in
Caracas, Venezuela, but his family escaped to Spain in 2017. Di Martino escaped in 2016 when he came to
the United States as a student. He knows firsthand the effect of socialism on a
country, and he spelled it out in an article at USA Today.
I watched what was once one of the
richest countries in Latin America gradually fall apart under the weight of big
government.
I didn’t need to look at statistics to
see this but rather at my own family. When Chavez took office in 1999, my
parents were earning several thousand dollars a month between the two of them.
By 2016, due to inflation, they earned less than $2 a day. If my parents hadn’t
fled the country for Spain in 2017, they’d now be earning less than $1 a day,
the international definition of extreme poverty. Even now, the inflation rate
in Venezuela is expected to reach 10 million percent this year.
Venezuela has become a country where a
woeful number of children suffer from malnutrition, and where working two
full-time jobs will pay for only 6 pounds of chicken a month.
Di Martino makes it clear in his
article that the problem in Venezuela is socialism, and he is trying to warn
Americans of the results of it. He says that things went well in the first
years, but then everything went downhill from there. I join Di Martino in his
hope that President Trump is correct in that the United States will never be a
socialist country!
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