Is Venezuela's present our future?

SunshineNewsTT
Apr 3, 2019
4 min read

By VASANT BHARATH

Fear. Poverty. Rage. Starvation. Murder. Gang Warfare. These linger like smog over the land. Looters pillage all that they can.

Idle and frantic youths, along with others scrounging for food and a better quality of life, often turn violent, and lawlessness is now at an unparalleled level. Killings by state and citizens are rising in tandem – murders are now equivalent to civilian casualties in 2004 Iraq. Gangs armed with AK47s rule entire areas, where police fear to tread. To live is either to experience crime here – perpetrating it or suffering from it. To truly appreciate the debasement of the land, however, you must visit a hospital. There is barely any medicine, antibiotics or even bandages. Most medical equipment is broken or was looted. A 2018 survey of 104 health facilities in Venezuela showed that 79% had no running water; a quarter of pediatric intensive care units had closed.

Children turn to prostitution

Respirators keeping babies alive shut down as electricity blackouts become more frequent. Patients, limbs blackening, lie in pools of their own blood on the floor. There is no soap, nor gloves, and few instruments for the surgeons – they do what they can in abject filth to perform operations. More babies are dying before their first birthday with infant mortality rising by 30% last year, pregnancy-related deaths by 65% and malaria 76%. Babies are found abandoned in plastic bags on the street. Children turn to prostitution. Parents give their children to the state, weeping; they cannot feed them.

Children in Venezuela turn to gangs to get enough food to eat. Social workers and police estimate that there are at least 10 different child gangs in Caracas. These child gangs fight with sticks, clubs, knives and machetes. The prize they are battling for is garbage. In order to get enough to eat, child gangs rummage through the trash for scraps, especially in affluent neighborhoods. Food shortages and inflation have caused a majority of Venezuelans to lose an average of 19 pounds each. Not long ago, Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet, was ranked as the 4th wealthiest in the world per ca-pita, behind the USA, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Chaos and corruption

Once thought a paradise, its name now summons images of chaos and corruption. A staggering 5.3 million people – one-sixth of the population – would have fled Venezuela by the end of this year, according to the United Nations. The displaced migrants and refugees are running away in the midst of the unprecedented humanitarian crisis in this part of the world. The BBC says the mass migration is “one of the largest forced displacements in the western hemisphere.” The UN says that a child in war torn Syria has a greater chance of survival than a baby born today in Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. An astounding 90 per cent of Venezuelans live under the poverty line, meaning that if they have jobs, they are paid just menial sums, which they must utilize to source the scarce available food. The jump in the cost of living is almost impossible to calculate at over 2 million per cent. The price of a cup of coffee has gone up by 300,000 per cent in the last year! More than 15,000 doctors are among the masses who have fled the crisis-afflicted country, along with nurses, lawyers, business people and others. In 2017, an average of 73 people died violently each day in Venezuela and in 2018; the country recorded 23,047 violent deaths. Each public protest sees murders, bloody wounding and widespread police arrests.

Change will come to Venezuela

More than one million families – who once enjoyed a decent lifestyle – have escaped to neighboring Colombia, and others have fled to Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Central America – and, of course, Trinidad and Tobago.

Foreign countries and international agencies are offering assistance to the starving Venezuelans, but the Maduro regime considers the aid as an example of American imperialism and an effort to topple the government, claiming that the aid is a Trojan Horse that would allow meddling by foreign leaders Maduro and his apologists do not see a domestic crisis questioning what international outrage and anxiety is all about. But change will come to Venezuela.

Rightly or wrongly, United States President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been strongly hinting about an intervention, in order to restore stability.

Both Trump and Pompeo have stated that all options are on the table, meaning that military intervention is likely. In the midst of this deepening humanitarian and political crisis next door, the Rowley Government remains weak, indifferent and lacking a rational policy.

The side-lining of T&T

President Trump’s side-lining of Trinidad and Tobago from discussions two weeks ago with selected Caribbean leaders was indicative of our current absence of diplomatic influence with a hemispheric superpower and our largest trading partner. This is the comeuppance for our vacillation on the issue, the tone and content of our diplomatic language and our earlier kowtowing to Maduro.

Indeed, the unsophisticated, guileless and intemperate remarks of the Prime Minister in our Parliament, led no doubt, to this country being given the metaphorical middle finger. As a small and emerging island State, the impact could be deep and far-reaching.

This does not advocate that Trinidad and Tobago should blindly support the US policy but, instead, that we should exercise appropriate diplomacy in a complex and impactful international crisis.

The Venezuelan crisis is yet another important and sensitive issue in which the clueless and pathetic Rowley regime has seriously bungled. The effects of our folly, incompetence and diplomatic irrationality may play out for a long time to come…...and what has brought Venezuela to its knees may very well lurk in our midst. If we are not careful, Venezuela’s present will be our future.