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Zorro

(15,691 posts)
Sun Jun 19, 2016, 11:04 PM Jun 2016

Venezuela’s Season of Starvation

When it comes to buying food on his government-mandated day of the week, William, a 44-year-old farmer, doesn’t mess around. At sunset each Tuesday, William, a father of two, joins a line of dozens of people outside the Unicasa supermarket in central La Victoria, 34 miles west of Caracas. William and a friend spend the night taking turns sleeping on the street, with one of them standing watch at all times to guard against robbers, line-cutters, and rats. When it rains, they take shelter under a palm tree, waiting for dawn. Their weekly ritual is the only way to guarantee a good spot in line the next morning, when the supermarket begins distributing basic foodstuffs like rice and cooking oil.

When morning arrives, William and his friend stand in line under the piercing sun, enduring temperatures of up to 95 degrees. At noon, they finally pass through a cordon of police and National Guardsmen to enter the supermarket and claim their prize for 18 hours of hell: the right to purchase two kilograms of cornmeal and one kilogram of pasta. “I am doing this because I have children,” William says. In the old days, he always voted for President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. “How can this be happening? We have the world’s largest oil reserves, but we don’t have food.”

Many Venezuelans are asking those very same questions. The food shortage, precipitated by Chávez’s economic policies and a precipitous drop in oil revenue, is the worst in the country’s history. It has led the government to limit purchases of basic foodstuffs and set their prices. Nonetheless, basic goods such as coffee, sugar, rice, milk, pasta, toilet paper, hand soap, and detergent remain impossible to find. According to Datanalisis, the country’s leading polling agency, over 80 percent of regulated foodstuffs have vanished from store shelves. As a result, many Venezuelans now make do with a single meal a day, or resort to rustling through garbage bins to find food. Others have begun hunting pigeons, dogs, and cats, as Ramón Muchacho, the mayor of the Chacao borough in Caracas tweeted.

Maduro, who succeeded Chávez in March 2013 and may face a recall vote this year, seems to have no answers for the unfolding crisis. And as temperatures rise, shortages deepen, and inflation explodes, his tenure is increasingly at risk thanks to the shortsighted economic controls and state expropriations of private companies championed by his mentor, whose dreams of creating a Socialist state are now in tatters.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-season-starvation-210000119.html

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Venezuela’s Season of Starvation (Original Post) Zorro Jun 2016 OP
A man-made disaster nt Bacchus4.0 Jun 2016 #1
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