Venezuela and Socialism

            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!