Venezuela Exports Its Crisis

[Bacchus4.0]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-20/venezuela-exports-its-crisis

Don’t bother looking for Pacaraima in your guide book. A pokey Brazilian town in the Amazon rainforest, it’s best known as the last trading post before the Venezuelan border. But thanks to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the disaster he’s made of South America’s fifth largest economy, some 30,000 Venezuelans have poured into Pacaraima since the beginning of the year.

Officials in Brazil’s Roraima State report that Pacaraima’s population has swelled nearly threefold. Over half of patients seeking treatment in public hospitals in Pacaraima are Venezuelans. Petty robbery, prostitution and other street crimes are on the rise, with Venezuelans as victims and perpetrators. Venezuelan families mill homeless through the town, sleeping under shop awnings, while children beg barefoot for spare change at stoplights and young men “swap day labor for a plate of food,” Edivaldo Amaral, head of Roraima civil defense, told me. “We’re already seeing this as a humanitarian crisis.”

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Venezuelans began heading for the exits under Hugo Chavez, who turned the nation inside out in the name of Bolivarian socialism, leaving the economy in disarray and his compatriots poisonously divided. Skilled professionals, political dissidents and Jews led the flight from Chavismo’s increasingly authoritarian and obscurantist rule. Oil engineers were snapped up by producers in Norway and Colombia and physicians landed good jobs in the U.S. and Canada. After Chavez threatened Caracas director Jonathan Jakubowicz with arrest for his scathing 2005 film on corruption and crime, he moved to Los Angeles and directed the acclaimed Hands of Stone, about boxing great Roberto Duran, co-starring Robert De Niro. The Central University of Venezuela estimated that by 2015, some 1.6 million of the country’s most talented professional had left home.

Under Chavez’s successor Maduro, Venezuela’s economic plight has gotten measurably worse. Gross domestic product is on track to shrink by 10 percent this year, and another 4.5 percent in 2017, according to the International Monetary Fund. With falling oil production and hard currency reserves, the government will continue to be short of dollars to import food and basic goods. Soaring inflation means that ordinary Venezuelans can’t afford the pricey goods that remain.