Christmas came early this year in Venezuela. The season officially started on October 1, as decreed by the country’s authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro. “I’m going to announce that Christmas will be brought forward to October 1,” he said.
The absurdity would be laughable if this weren’t the perfect snapshot of Venezuela’s black-and-white, dystopian unreality, an oil-rich country so economically devastated that it can’t even keep the lights on… where life is so unlivable that a quarter of the population (almost 8 million people) has fled.
“He needed a distraction,” said former New York Times journalist William Neuman. “It’s bread and circuses.”
The title of Neuman’s book on Venezuela says it all: ‘Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.’ “Everyone knows he lost the election,” he said. “He is the emperor who has no clothes.”
St. Martin’s Press
In July, Venezuela, with a history of democracy, held elections. Maduro claimed he had been re-elected, but in a daring act of defiance, the opposition produced voting machine figures showing that Edmundo González had effectively won the presidencybetter than a 2-to-1 margin. Nonpartisan election observers agreed.
Maduro called on the military to enforce his election denial. González was told to leave the country or else. (He turned up in Spain.) In the ensuing chaos, at least two dozen people were killed and more than 2,000 arrested.
María Corina Machado, the face of the opposition, who would have run for president herself if Maduro had not excluded her, is in hiding. “I have been charged with terrorism,” she told “Sunday Morning” via Zoom. “The dictatorship has said that they are looking for me, and that they want to get me as quickly as possible.”
How can a country that has the largest oil reserves in the world end up like this? According to Neuman, “It rained money. They spent it, wasted it and stole it. It stopped raining and people went hungry. And that’s essentially in a nutshell what happened in Venezuela.”
Venezuela has been producing oil since 1914, but what is known as the “curse of resources” really began when the charismatic and controversial Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. When he took office, the price of oil was $7 a barrel, Neuman said: “Within a few years the price will rise to more than $120 a barrel, so Chávez was very lucky because he is just coming into the beginning of this great commodity boom.”
Chávez spent vast sums of oil money on social programs and borrowed even more, sending his country into debt. But ordinary Venezuelans felt rich and heard for a change.
The United States was his favorite bogeyman. At the United Nations in 2006, Chávez called President George W. Bush “the devil.”
When Chávez died of cancer in 2013, his hand-picked successor was Nicolás Maduro, who was neither as popular nor as happy. Oil prices collapsed; inflation reached an unimaginable 300,000%.
Maduro responded to public discontent with repression, and millions left the country.
Looking at the map of the Venezuelan exodus since 2014, the United States ranks fourth among destinations. Just over 750,000 people have been granted or applied for Temporary Protected Status in the US. So the crisis in Venezuela is on our doorstep, in our cities.
CBS News
Niurka Meléndez left in 2015. “We are broken,” she said. “We were broken as a country… no institutions, no freedom.”
Temporary Protected Status allows her and her husband to legally live and work in the United States. They founded VIA (Venezuelas and Immigrants Aid), a volunteer organization that helps newcomers to New York City.
Meléndez introduced us to a woman who left Venezuela with eight members of her family, including her four small children. Even here, she is afraid to reveal her name. “When an armed group called Colectivos came to my house, they took everything I had,” she said. “They even took the blender, everything, my computer, everything. And then they beat us because we didn’t have the money, the exact money – they asked for $500. I didn’t have that amount.”
So they crossed the Darién Gap, risking their lives. Since July’s disputed elections, Venezuela has resumed the human haemorrhage of its population and exported its crisis.
María Corina Machado said: “Venezuela is today the largest migration crisis in the world. Nearly 25% of the population remains in Venezuela [is] thinking about leaving. This is huge. This could be five to six million Venezuelans leaving the country.”
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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: David Bhagat.
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