The Associated Press documents yet another legacy of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution — Venezuela’s military has become an organized crime ring, trafficking not drugs or illegal booze but the food that nation’s pitiable residents have been going without:
PUERTO CABELLO, Venezuela (AP) — When hunger drew tens of thousands of Venezuelans to the streets in protest last summer, President Nicolas Maduro turned to the military to manage the country’s diminished food supply, putting generals in charge of everything from butter to rice.
But instead of fighting hunger, the military is making money from it, an Associated Press investigation shows. That’s what grocer Jose Campos found when he ran out of pantry staples this year. In the middle of the night, he would travel to an illegal market run by the military to buy pallets of corn flour — at 100 times the government-set price.
“The military would be watching over whole bags of money,” Campos said. “They always had what I needed.”
This did not have to happen. Venezuela was once a relatively wealthy nation. Then Chavez nationalized its farms and “domestic production dried up” in the familiar pattern that people might recognize from the pre-war Soviet era. Years later, his successor Nicolas Maduro’s luck ran out when the price of oil collapsed in 2014, so that now Venezuela lacks the wealth even to import the basic staples of life. The government controls all food shipments, and only those willing and able to pay large bribes can get what they need.
Read more about how life for its 30 million citizens has become a desperate race to the bottom.
