Today we publish the conclusion of an article from the American magazine The Atlantic about the dire economic situation in neighbouring Venezuela.
While Venezuelans were dying for lack of simple, inexpensive pills, their radical socialist government was spending tens of millions a year to keep a native son, Pastor Maldonado, competing in the Formula 1 global auto-racing circuit. You could be forgiven for not having heard of Maldonado—a mediocre driver who managed to win a single race in five years in the sport.
Still, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, spent some US$45 million each year to keep Maldonado racing under its logo. Why an oil company without a retail arm and with monopoly rights to Venezuelan oil needs to advertise in the first place was never clear.
Yet Maldonado, whose habit of crashing in race after race earned him the nickname “Crashtor,” was only forced out of the F1 circuit this year, when PDVSA, hit by the oil crash, failed to come up with the sponsorship money.
Venezuelan oil largesse has been scattered around the globe, from the US$18 million handed to the American actor Danny Glover in 2007 to produce an ideologically appropriate film (still to be delivered), to the millions of Venezuelan dollars spent financing leftist parties and movements from El Salvador to Argentina to Spain and beyond.
Stealing lunch
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government can no longer afford to provide even rudimentary law and order, making Caracas—the capital—by some calculations one of the most murderous cities in the world. Drug traffickers run large sections of the countryside. Prison gang leaders keep military-style weapons on hand, and while grenade attacks still make the news, they are nothing new. Recently, the police captured an AT4 antitank rocket launcher—basically, a bazooka—from a suspect.
The breakdown of law and order is so severe that even children are being robbed. At Nuestra Señora del Carmen school in El Cortijo, a struggling neighbourhood of Caracas, supplies for the school-lunch programme have been stolen twice this year already.
Thugs have broken into the school’s pantry late at night after fresh food is delivered. The second burglary meant the school couldn’t feed the kids for at least a week.
Elsewhere, school food programmes have simply stopped working, because the government apparently can’t keep them supplied. In poorer communities, parents often respond to this by taking their children out of school. They’re more useful standing in line outside a grocery store than sitting in a classroom. The regime has long put education at the center of its propaganda, yet the reality today is that a generation of underprivileged kids is being denied an education through straightforward hunger.
Still, some politicians seem to have found the bright side of their citizens’ hunger: The opposition-controlled National Assembly alleges that government officials or their cronies stole some US$200 billion in food-import scams alone since 2003.
Crime feeding Zika
In the midst of all this, Venezuela is facing one of the worst Zika outbreaks in South America, and it’s an epidemic the country can hardly measure, much less respond to. The Universidad Central de Venezuela’s Institute for Tropical Medicine is where the crime and public-health crises collide. The institute—ground zero in the country’s response to tropical epidemics—was burglarised a shocking 11 times in the first two months of 2016.
The last two break-ins took place within 48 hours of one another, leaving the lab without a single microscope. Burglars rampaged through the lab, scattering samples of highly dangerous viruses and toxic fungal spores into the air.
Conditions like those make it virtually impossible for institute researchers to do their work, crippling the country’s response to the Zika outbreak. And attempts to repair the damage are undercut by the same dysfunctions that afflict the rest of the economy: There’s just no money to replace the expensive imported equipment criminals have stolen.
Continued on Page B6
Other aspects of state collapse feed back on the Zika crisis as well. Venezuelan cities’ water infrastructure is crumbling after nearly two decades of neglect. That would be hard at the best of times, but this year’s El Niño has brought an acute drought to most of the country. Water utilities have responded to falling reservoir levels with harsh rationing measures.
Neighborhoods and shantytowns can go for days and even weeks with no piped water. Most people adapt by filling several buckets when service is provided, in preparation for the dry periods. Of course, storing water in buckets is precisely what you shouldn’t do when facing a mosquito-borne epidemic. The containers double as breeding grounds for the bugs that transmit the Zika virus, as well as others like Chikungunya, dengue, even malaria.
No power, no justice
The same drought that’s forcing water rationing has seen water levels at the country’s electricity-generating dams fall alarmingly. Blackouts used to at least spare the capital, but these days they’re nationwide, as the public utilities struggle to keep enough water in the reservoirs to prevent a complete collapse in the power grid.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Since 2009, hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to building new diesel and natural gas-burning power plants. The new plants were meant specifically to relieve pressure from the aging hydroelectric network. Much of the capacity never came online, though, and the money was never accounted for. Two people have been indicted over this in the US, but nobody in Venezuela appears to be investigating.
This is emblematic of the kind of impunity that reigns now at every level of the state, from the gravest crimes to the highest government offices. On March 4, 28 miners disappeared in the jungle near Brazil, and eyewitnesses alleged a massacre. At this writing, only four people have been arrested in connection with the event. They weren’t the culprits, though. They were family members of victims who dared to call for justice.
Late last year, two of the powerful first lady’s nephews—including one who grew up in the presidential household—were arrested by DEA agents in a sting operation, in which they were allegedly recorded offering to provide a large amount of cocaine to agents posing as traffickers. The first lady’s reaction was to accuse the DEA of kidnapping her nephews.
Following Venezuela closely means hearing any number of stories like these. The happy, hopeful stage of Venezuela’s experiment with Chavez’s 21st-century socialism is a fading memory. What’s been left is a visibly failing state that still leans hard on left-wing rhetoric in a doomed bid to maintain some shred of legitimacy. A country that used to attract fellow travelers and admirers in serious numbers now holds fascination for rubberneckers: stunned outsiders enthralled by the spectacle of collapse.
To the Venezuelans who live its consequences day after day, the spectacle is considerably less amusing. Our toilet-paper-seeking industrialist found very little mirth in it. After being arrested on absurd charges of hoarding, he realised that it was just a shakedown. The cops were far less interested in his toilet paper than his money.
“Their opening bid was in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. “I thought that was a bit much; we bargained.”
In the end, he said, the cops agreed to drop the criminal charges for a few tens of thousands of dollars.
That time, the regime’s appetite for theft trumped its instinct for repression. Next time, who can tell? (theatlantic.com)