Venezuela is toast

[Lenno]

Many Venezuelans are now facing the prospect of lack of access to clean water, a crisis affecting everything from people’s homes to public hospitals, a report from Reuters detailed on Wednesday.

At the Central Venezuelan University hospital, once renowned across Latin America, many appointments, clinics, and operations have been canceled as a result of water shortages. Many of the hospital’s bathrooms are closed, while patients are forced to use a tiny tap on the ground floor providing just a trickle of water.
“I have gone to the operation bloc and opened the tap to wash my hands, as you must do before a surgery, and nothing comes out,” gynecologist Lina Figueria told the agency.
In people’s homes, individuals are left unable to drink water or wash amid the country’s ferociously hot summer climate.
Last month, Breitbart reported how people began staging protests due to water failures mainly affecting the capital Caracas. Groups of demonstrators blocked highways around the city to protest the lack of clean water supplies, which they complained would expose them to infectious diseases.
The water shortages are mainly caused by a lack of maintenance to the city’s water network and a lack of necessary funds to replace broken parts. Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro has blamed the issue on the behavior of unspecified right-wing “terrorists” who he accuses of sabotage.
“For many years this deterioration process was not noticeable. But now the water transport systems are very damaged,” said Jose De Viana, former president of Hidrocapital, the state company in charge of Caracas’s water.
Last month, Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez announced a “special plan” to fix the issue but failed to provide details of how he would do so, while no temporary solution has been found.
The country’s last major water shortage was in February 2016, when the government announced a weekend “maintenance” session designed to maintain sufficient water levels during a period of drought with the average temperature at that time of year around 68 F.
According to two recent surveys on the country’s living standards, around 75 percent of Caracas residents do not consistently have access to running water, while 11 percent believe dirty water has caused skin problems and stomach illnesses.
Water shortages are one of the countless difficulties Venezuelans experience regularly in the current crisis caused by the implementation of Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution.”

Millions of people now have extremely limited access to basic resources such as food and medicine due to skyrocketing rates of hyperinflation that have left the country’s currency practically worthless. Based on real exchange rates, the country’s monthly minimum wage is roughly equivalent to around two dollars ($2) a month.
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email h

[Lenno]

[Lenno]

Socialism In Action: Over 1 Million People Flee Venezuela, UN Says Country Building Towards ‘Crisis Moment’


How far north will they flee?
Via Daily Mail:

The exodus of migrants from Venezuela is building toward a ‘crisis moment’ comparable to events involving refugees in the Mediterranean, the United Nations migration agency said on Friday.
Growing numbers are fleeing economic meltdown and political turmoil in Venezuela, where people scrounge for food and other necessities of daily life, threatening to overwhelm neighboring countries.
Officials from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru will meet in Bogota next week to seek a way forward.
In Brazil, rioters this month drove hundreds back over the border. Peru this month tightened entry rules for Venezuelans, requiring them to carry passports instead of just national ID cards, though a judge in Ecuador on Friday rolled back a similar rule enacted there.
Describing those events as early warning signs, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Joel Millman, said funding and means of managing the outflow must be mobilized.
‘This is building to a crisis moment that we’ve seen in other parts of the world, particularly in the Mediterranean,’ he told a news briefing.
On Thursday, the IOM and U.N. refugee agency UNHCR called on Latin American countries to ease entry for Venezuelans, more than 1.6 million of whom have left since 2015.
Peru’s top immigration official, Eduardo Sevilla, said Peru will exempt some Venezuelans from the passport requirement, including parents with children seeking to join the rest of their family, pregnant women and the gravely ill.
But Sevilla said authorities would also be vigilant of attempts to evade the new rule by claiming refugee status.
‘Is UNHCR going to take responsibility if that person commits a crime?’ Sevilla said to Reuters on Friday. ‘Our priority is to contribute to security and internal order by clearly identifying people.’
UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic said on Friday that governments had made ‘commendable’ efforts even though some reception capacities and services were overwhelmed.
But he said ‘some disturbing images’ had emerged from the region in the past week that risked stigmatizing Venezuelans who had fled and complicating efforts to integrate them.
An Ecuadorean judge, Judith Naranjo, on Friday lifted an order requiring that Venezuelans hold passports to be allowed entry, in response to a lawsuit filed by Ecuador’s state ombudsman together with local human rights groups.
‘The judge accepted the request for the precautionary measures requested by the ombudsman,’ the agency wrote on Twitter.
The ruling gives the government 45 days to develop a plan to address the situation of Venezuelan migrants.

[Bezukhov]

There is a place for all those Venezuelan refugees.

Venezuela’s Economy So Terrible, Citizens Emigrating to Gaza
Satire

https://www.themideastbeast.com/vene...ating-to-gaza/

[Lenno]

[Lenno]

[Lenno]

With over one million refugees from Venezuela having fled to other countries, with dozens of people dying violently in Venezuela every day, Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro’s Socialist policies seem to drive the country further into disaster every week.
In 2017, Venezuela was producing two million barrels of oil per day (bpd). But by September of this year, output had fallen to just 1.4 bpd. According to Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, “Venezuela production is in a freefall and we expect that soon it may go to even below 1 million barrels per day.”
Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world and Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) was once one of the biggest oil producers in the world. But socialist dictator Hugo Chávez nationalized ExxonMobil’s Venezuelan assets in 2007 and turned them over to his crooked cronies who did not know anything about running an oil company. Venezuela’s oil production has been steadily declining for years. Average oil production declined dramatically over the past two years, by 12 percent in 2016 and again by 13 percent in 2017. Production in December 2017 was 27 percent lower than a year earlier. And this year it has fallen even farther.
Late last year, Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolás Maduro appointed a military man, Major General Manuel Quevedo, head of PDVSA, with a mandate to increase production and rid the company of corruption. Quevedo treated the engineers and other professions contemptuously, even calling them “thieves and saboteurs.” Tens of thousands of employees left the company, and Quevedo replaced them with soldiers who knew nothing about the oil industry.
The result has been a collapse in infrastructure, as engineers who were needed to maintain the busted valves, ripped gaskets, cracked pipes, and so forth were forced to leave. Contractors who were experts in cleaning up oil spills have gone out of business because PDVSA was not paying them.
The means that oil production is decreasing and oil spills and leaks are increasing. PDVSA is unable to clean up spills after years of neglect, scant investment, and corruption scandals. Pools of oil are polluting waterways and farmland, causing a pungent odor.
Urban areas have been hit, too. Early this year, the contents of a ruptured transport line blackened the Guarapiche River in Monagas state. A water-purification plant on the river was compromised and the authorities shut it down for more than a month. Local schools canceled classes, and government offices reduced office hours because water was so scarce.
Socialist Venezuela is in a major economic collapse, following years of mismanagement and underinvestment in the oil industry, an enormous humanitarian crisis, and a leader who is addicted to socialist policies that enrich himself and his cronies, but destroy the population, with a hyperinflation rate expected to reach one million percent by the end of the year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Reuters and Bloomberg and Reuters and Bloomberg

[grower]

My son plays video games with a group of young people from just about everywhere, and this one guy from California who says he does independent military contracting recently went to Venezuela on a preliminary visit prior to him and some other guys going in the spring to provide security for an oil company the Venezuelan government is courting. (I probably got the details off, but that's the gist of what I got from my son.)

Anyway, the guy said he doesn't think they'll end up going because "the Venezuelan government won't be there by then." Apparently, what he saw down there last week leads him to believe the country is about to collapse completely.

[Lenno]

Turkey’s Erdogan to ‘Cover Most of Venezuela’s Necessities,’ Including a Mosque

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2018/12/04/turkeys-erdogan-cover-venezuelas-necessities-including-mosque/

[Lenno]

Venezuelans regret gun ban, 'a declaration of war against an unarmed population'

https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuelans-regret-gun-prohibition-we-could-have-defended-ourselves