Ukraine, for many Americans is way out there – somewhere in the nowhere land of Uzbekistan or North Korea. Ukraine is very far away from our daily lives.

And yet, it may be worth our while paying a little attention to what’s going on in Ukraine right now. It might just have consequences for all of us down the line.

A friend went home to spend Christmas with family in Venezuela – a much closer geography. He tells me that the dollarization of the Venezuelan economy is to all extents and purposes done. Motorcycle delivery guys can now make change for a $20 US bill with 20 US $1 bills. The bolivar is history. The surprise was that, in addition to paying for goods and services in dollars, in Venezuela my friend could now also pay with Russian rubles.

It’s a small, but pertinent, detail.

Venezuela, along with the rest of Caribbean, Central and South America, were once unequivocally considered to be under the umbrella of US purview. Let’s not forget the Cuban Missile Crisis as an earlier attempt to disrupt that way of the world. And yet, quietly, and somewhat menacingly to a distracted US, Russia has in recent years again begun to spread its tentacles into the economic heart of one of our neighbors immediately to our south.

How many rubles go about their daily lives in Venezuela? Nobody knows.

Food is once again abundant in Caracas, at least and perhaps not only, in its better neighborhoods. There are whispers of hope in the air. The dollar is now king. If you have dollars, you can not only just get by, but also even live well. The caveat, of course, is that you have dollars. Those millions of Venezuelans who had, out of necessity, to flee Venezuela in recent years are not in that column. After you force the poor, the needy and the undesirable out, you can aspire to a thriving society, apparently. Regrettably, we’ve seen attempts at that scenario before in our history. When you muscle any segment of your population out, you are veering far away from accepted norms of decency.

Almost suddenly, after years of waste, destruction and damage to the lives of its citizens and the infrastructure of the country, Venezuela is now signaling an economic shift. By the end of December 2021, the country had doubled its petroleum output from just a year before – not back to when Venezuela was a major force in petroleum production worldwide, but a long way toward a surprising and flag-waving celebratory candle cake for the Maduro regime.

Money is once again flowing, if not into Venezuela – at least not from the known Western world, then definitively round and about within its borders. What kind of money, again we don’t entirely know. So many Venezuelans have been sanctioned by the United States that now those very same Venezuelan citizens may just have decided to keep their enormous wealth home and plow it back into their country’s economy. Sanctions are flawed, and in this case, perhaps, counter-productive to US interests. Money needs a sanctuary. And just maybe, Venezuela is now a sanctuary for its own and odd money in general.

And in this repositioning of Venezuela, the ground has shifted.

Russia and China are now firmly ensconced, along with Iran, as Venezuela’s allies, protectors and supporters.

Why is that important?

Because this is happening in the Americas, just a little less than 2,000 miles south of Key West. This is not some distant Ukraine, Belarus or Uzbekistan.

For better or worse, for decades after WW2, it was taken as a given that the Americas were within the United States general sphere of interest and influence. We had sometimes benign and at times harmful relationships with nations within that domain.

Russia, on the other hand, had all of Eastern Europe, and not coincidentally, Ukraine and the Stan countries at its southern borders, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan et al to do with whatever it wished.

East was East, and West was West.

Except that many of the countries under Russian overview weren’t happy with that division. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, those nations grabbed at the chance of change. Ukraine wanted autonomy from its overseer, Russia. Ukraine wanted to shift its essential values westward. As did Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia and many of the former Russian affiliates.

And Europe opened its bosom.

Europe said, Come on in!

Ukraine was a big fan of the EU, and Ukraine said, Let’s do it.

And all was good, for a while.

Then came Putin, a Russian ultranationalist, a man obsessed with Russian power and superiority, a man with an exaggerated ego rarely seen in history – Thump not withstanding, a man focused on a Soviet-style view of the world as a greater Russia reinvigorated, a man who feels Ukraine’s aspirations as somehow a threat to his nationalistic manhood.

Cuba means nothing to Putin. He has done nothing to alleviate Cuba’s pain. Venezuela, on the other hand, sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves -greater even than Saudi Arabia’s, means a lot.

And if Ukraine can be European, maybe Venezuela can be Russian, if you will.

Welcome to Putin’s worldview.

In Venezuela, Putin gets to mess with America like never before.

Almost overnight in the Ukraine crisis now upon us, all bets are off.

On Jan 14th, the BBC reported that …

“… a senior diplomat in the Kremlin described two recent rounds of talks with the US and NATO as “unsuccessful.” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who led negotiations with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, said he didn’t want “to confirm anything, won’t exclude anything here either”. When asked whether Russia might consider establishing a military presence in Washington’s backyard, Mr Ryabkov said it depended “on the actions of American colleagues”

Russia is not excluding a presence in Cuba or Venezuela; quite the opposite, in fact. Russia is positioning itself for a major confrontation that may just include the Americas.

Putin’s focus is far beyond Ukraine.

So we might just think about projecting ourselves a little bit (or a lot) into our near future.

Russia invades Ukraine.

The US imposes unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s banks and ways of doing business with the rest of the world.

Russia reacts. Russia sends military equipment and/or troops to Venezuela and Cuba.

Then what?

The US sends troops to Colombia?

A young Colombian friend of mine was already thinking about that possibility in a conversation with his friends at lunchtime here in Bogotá today.

Those with upcoming military service are worried, he told me.

And so, Ukraine has come home to roost.

Ukraine is not so far away at all, as it turns out. In fact, perhaps Ukraine is already here.

So now what?

The post Venezuela: Ukraine comes home to roost appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“He based his popularity on his extraordinary charisma, much discretionary   money, and a key and well-tested political message: denouncing the past and  promising a better future for all.”

The Atlantic posted the above quote in 2014, and no they weren’t referring to Trump. The Atlantic was referring to Hugo Chávez, former President of Venezuela. Chávez was a populist president nonpareil who knew just how to manipulate the longings of Venezuela’s working poor in order to recast his country as an ephemeral nirvana. He had the wealth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and at the time revenue-producing oil exports to help him realign his country’s values and interests. That realignment has cost the Venezuelan people dearly. Because of severe shortages of the very basics, food, water, electricity, gasoline and money, it’s estimated that more than five million Venezuelans have had no choice but to flee the country. Populist policies can have severe negative long-term consequences.

As we approach the 2020 Presidential election, it might be worth asking, “How did Venezuela get itself into its mess?” Well, through a confluence of historical and social events, but mainly through Venezuelan voters’ decision to elect Hugo Chávez as President in 1999. He stayed on as President until his death in 2013, and set in motion the mess that Venezuela is in today.

How did he get elected in the first place? It turns out that he had charisma.

Merriam Webster defines charisma as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure.” Charisma is a kind of magnetism that, for whatever reason, draws people in. Either you’ve got it, or you don’t. Mitch McConnell has zero charisma. Obama has charisma in abundance, Hillary Clinton not so much. Biden not a lot either. Kamala Harris does, and how! Pence zilch.

Charisma, it seems, is essential to being a populist leader, though not all charismatic leaders have the desire or mindset to be populists. Even though it wasn’t always so, these days, populism connotes despotic and authoritarian politics. We have or have had populist leaders on the left, Castro in Cuba and Chávez in Venezuela among them, and those on the right, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Duterte in the Philippines, and our very own authoritarian media-celebrity Trump. And populism is nothing new. Argentina had Perón for a long period of time. Argentina is still reeling in economic havoc from Perón’s populist input in the 1950’s.

Thump, to his followers, is charismatic. No matter that his popularity stems from people’s scattershot knowledge of him as a TV personality, a sort of Kardashian presence in our collective consciousness, he has presence when he speaks in public. He has the ability to embody the charisma of himself as a self-styled outsider. It turns out that that was enough to get him elected. And that was enough to make him the poster boy of the Republican Party. To be a populist leader, you need to be able to convince and impress your followers with preposterous promises. “We will build a wall! We will replace Obamacare! We will make America great again!” Four years in, and what do you know; we still have Obamacare, there is no wall, and Thump’s promise to remake America and upgrade its crumbling infrastructure mess of highways, bridges and airports are just Trumpian words blowing about in the winds of a pandemic.

Populist leaders set themselves up as representing the people versus a vague ill-defined elite. The populist leader is always there at just the right moment to pick up the slack and connect the dots to take advantage of people’s longings for true change. Populist leaders get themselves elected by penciling themselves in as representatives of the disenfranchised. You have to be able to pretend to be able to change the world if you ever want to be a populist leader. Populist followers get caught up in the excitement of the pretend moment. And Trump does pretend really well. Until he doesn’t. Put on the spot, Trump is always eager to place the blame, all blame, any blame, elsewhere. He swallows baseless off-the-wall shadow-world ideas and right-wing theories as if they were nectar of the gods. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it has shown us that our Emperor-in-Chief has no clothes.

Frighten, belittle, and ridicule are essential Trump attributes. To attack your opponents is a given in politics. But much as Chávez in Venezuela, Trump has gone way beyond attack to try to frighten, belittle, and ridicule his opponents. Trump is the king of belittling, calling his opponents, and most especially women, by one word pejoratives, Crazy Hillary, Sneaky Dianne (Feinstein,) Goofy Elizabeth (Warren) and now Phony Kamala. His tactics are already tired, documented, and shameless.

But Trump has something that his populist antecedents never had. Trump has Twitter. The app didn’t exist before 2006. Trump is the king of Twitter attack politics. Trump has almost single-handedly rebranded every news story unflattering to him as fake news. It’s an incredible achievement. It turns out that micro blogging suits Trump’s id to a tee. Micro blogging, the compression of ideas into 140 characters, which doubled in 2017 to 280 characters, is something that somehow fits the Trump worldview perfectly. More than 280 characters, which most ideas and points of view demand, doesn’t seem to work for this President. Trump is, after all, a man of small Twitter thoughts.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take his rants seriously. Other tyrannical despots with bare-bone ideas have done very well for themselves and reduced their countries to shadows and ghosts of their former selves. Look no further than Venezuela, a country just a hop, step and jump to our south, where pensioners now receive less than a dollar per month government assistance to subsist on.

The post Populist bedfellows: Donald Trump and Hugo Chavez appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I don’t want to leave, but I have to.

When I left, I didn’t want to go. But in Venezuela, there was nothing more I could do. After a year and a half of soul-sapping mental and emotional questioning and re-questioning, late in 2017 I packed my life into two suitcases and a bag. Every day the crisis was worse than the day before; there were shortages of food and basic products, and in order to stretch what little money there was, it was necessary at times to wait in line for up to three days.

At my last lunch at my mother’s house right before leaving, my Mom as always busied herself in the kitchen. I couldn’t look at her face. I didn’t want to register her pain and to have that image with me as I left Venezuela. And I didn’t want her to see my face then either, a face reflecting a disenfranchised life so far from her dreams. Then in the bustling bus terminal, it seemed like years had passed since I said goodbye to my family less than an hour ago. How could that be? I had at that moment the sensation of waking up from a drunken stupor, of leaving a country disintegrating from its core, of having made the right decision. And so, as I disappeared and reappeared, the night journey to Colombia gave me an inscrutable landscape of shadows and sounds drowned out by the roar of a bus engine.

I don’t want to go back, but I have to.

March 2019. I live in Bogotá, Colombia. I eke out a life very different from my previous one as an editor in Venezuela. Here, I make ends meet cleaning buildings and selling homemade jams and marmalades. The news from Venezuela is not good. As is the case with most medicines in Venezuela, my Mom’s hypertension medicine has run out. She doesn’t want to stress her children with this development. I had already sent pills from Colombia in the past. Finally, she admits to me via Whatsapp that she’s feeling very dizzy. The information alarms me. Her admission of dizziness means to me that she is really unwell. She hasn’t taken her medicine in 10 days. This sets off a series of communications between Colombia and Venezuela in a frantic search for high blood pressure medicine. An alternative is finally found, but the determination of the dosage requires a doctor’s visit. The reality of present day life in Venezuela immediately makes itself known. There is a blackout. There is no electricity. There is no more Whatsapp. A weekend looms. When my mother is able to get Whatsapp back, she tells me that she has a doctor’s visit scheduled for the upcoming Monday. But then another national blackout takes place in Venezuela. My Mom’s medical consultation never takes place.

By the time some power is restored and communication comes haltingly back, my mother has suffered a stroke. The news comes to me early on Monday through a message from my sister. Several days go by before my brothers tell me that my Mom’s death is now imminent.

I want to go back to Venezuela before it’s too late. A friend lends me the money for the trip, and I fly to Cúcuta, Colombia to get to Venezuela. The border is closed. The only way to get through is by the so-called trails, trochas, irregular pathways where people venture from one side of the border to the other. The heat here is immediately unbearable. Hundreds of people, like ants, are moving with gigantic and overweight bags along the bed of the Táchira River.

A trochero, an experienced denizen of the trails, offers me his services to help me enter Venezuela. We negotiate a price. In addition to carrying my luggage, he will help me navigate checkpoints controlled not by Colombian or Venezuelan border agents but by armed irregular groups. My trochero tells me that anyone carrying a computer or tablet will have it taken away. Here, the law of the guerrilla and the mafia prevails amid the chaos that the lack of control imposes. We cross the rocky bed of the river. Colombia, my refuge, is left behind.

We are stopped at a checkpoint. They check my bag and I make a payment to continue. Once in Venezuela and past that initial welcome, my odyssey to return home continues. The driver of a buseta, larger than a van, smaller than a bus, exercises his share of power over his passengers. The verbal abuse reflects the debasement that has taken hold of the country. The departure of the buseta is delayed by more than four hours. We finally start to travel through Venezuela in the dark.

The passageway of the buseta bus is congested with bags and packages; food and household items both for the passengers’ own consumption and for resale. The sacrifice and difficulty of the trip to Colombia is worth it in order to be able to buy something rather than having money in hand in Venezuela and not be able to do anything with it. As the bus progresses, a reality emerges to outrage basic human decency. Not more than thirty minutes into our trip, the Bolivarian National Guard stops us on the road. As passengers we must collect the equivalent of 50 thousand pesos, about $15, in order to be able to continue and not have our bags and merchandise seized or destroyed. This stoppage by the National Guard is repeated four more times on our journey. Thus the night passes.

With the sunrise, there are other images and perceptions. I don’t consider myself chauvinistic; however, I cannot help feeling love for my country. I experience a sense of belonging and rootedness in the place where I forged my character and my dreams, a place where I built a life with a purpose towards a better world. But the memories are overshadowed by the bright colors of day that reveal the ruin. What a shame. What used to be fleets of modern buses now look ramshackle and old, with plastic in the windows as a substitute for glass.

There is something strange in the environment. At a stop to rest, few sit at the tables to eat. The majority stretch a little to alleviate the tedium of the trip. Perhaps remembering past moments when they were able to enjoy a good piece of meat or cachapas stuffed with a generous supply of cheese, the passengers stand to one side. With sweaty faces and languid glances, we get back on the buseta. We all want to reach our destination, nothing more.

In daylight, the sun oppresses; it oppresses and crushes not only people, it suffocates the air itself. The visible drought is unusual. Everything seems burned and destroyed. What was once a prosperous place is now ruined, sad and backward. A former expropriated sugar cane plantation, once luxuriant and prosperous, where the best Venezuelan rums were made, now looks dry, unkempt, abandoned and signposted, paradoxically, with a discolored government billboard announcing food sovereignty for the country.

Finally in the bus terminal, the feeling of acute transformation is overwhelming. The terminal is empty. There are few buses. The stalls, stands and stores that were once bustling are now deserted. People have a previously unknown aspect: a look of extreme poverty. Some people look famished, dirty and sad, while others simply look lost, a result perhaps of so much barbarism, so much impotence and frustration. All these images are heightened by the terrible silence of a once noisy place, crowded with vehicles and smiling people, many returning from Choroní or Cata, the emblematic beaches of Aragua, the most visited in the country.

My sister is there to meet me. On the way to the hospital, the streets and avenues are empty of traffic. The absence of public transport has given way to improvised means of transportation called kennels, pick-up trucks, which transport people of all ages under the inclement sun. Children, women and the elderly travel long distances to stand in line to get water. Water rarely comes through the pipes anymore. It’s necessary to provision oneself with containers, any size serves.

My mother is in bed number 9. She is unconscious; she is in a coma. Even so, her skin is smooth and soft, her hands strong, almost ready to continue giving love through her cooking just as she did with my brothers the night before her stroke. It is not easy for me to see her diminished, helpless, defeated. But there is nothing left to do, just pray for an end to her suffering. On Sunday, after six in the morning, I am talking to my sister while we prepare breakfast. The phone rings. It’s my brother who has spent the night at my mother’s side. My mom has stopped breathing. I feel empty.

 I can no longer stay here. This is not healthy.

During my stay I see and feel the most awful consequences of this regime. There are complete days without electricity, or at times electricity for only three or four hours a day; there are days without water, with the need to share a small bucketful of water to bathe. Even the most human and intimate act of going to the bathroom becomes unbearable. Perishable foods have to be cooked, and then reheated the following morning and again the following evening simply to avoid losing them completely. Underwear has to be reused, as there is no way to wash clothes. The sharp deterioration in the quality of daily life since my original departure is shocking.

I have to leave, to get back my new life, the one that I had to begin in Bogotá just 16 months earlier. I leave my siblings and nieces and nephews deep in thoughts of their own immediate need to escape while there is still time. The scene of November of 2017 is repeated; hugs, kisses, tears, and the promise of seeing each other again, only this time without the image of my mother clinging to the railings of the house as I left. Pain and anger accompany me on my trip back to Colombia. I am dogged by the uncertainty of not knowing if my mother would still be alive if her medicine had been available. The question goes round and round in my mind; was my mother’s a natural death or the collateral damage of a crime against humanity?

But it’s the image of my mother clinging to the railings of the house, the last memory that I have of her before her stroke, that accompanies me back to Bogotá. And it’s that image that still accompanies me today.

[Editor’s note: Eduardo Ponce shared this article with his friend, Christopher Burke, a longtime contributor to Occasional Planet. Burke translated it from Spanish and sent it to Occasional Planet for publication.]

The post A country in ruins: A mother’s death in Venezuela appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Two years ago, the  Guardian described how Venezuela’s devastating economic downturn was ravaging its hospitals. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Much worse.

The New York Times reported at the end of last year that in Venezuela today,  hunger is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate. The Times team tracked 21 public hospitals in Venezuela. The paper reported that doctors were seeing record numbers of children with severe malnutrition. More alarmingly, in the same piece, the Times reported that hundreds of children had already died. And children continue to die.

The most needed medicines have disappeared in Venezuela. Millions of Venezuelan citizens have had to flee their country, and as the diaspora widens, Venezuelans in their thousands continue to exit Venezuela daily. Venezuelans are walking to cities and towns in Colombia, journeys of hundreds of miles, wearing nothing more than flip-flops on their feet.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Maduro was videotaped and photographed last week living high on the hog in Istanbul, Turkey, smoking a cigar, enjoying $400 beef and chitchatting with and cozying up to the executive chef Salt Bae at one of the most expensive restaurants in the world. The video went viral, and immediately, not just in Venezuela, but around the world garnered the indignation that it deserved.

Just in August of this year, Maduro – and economist he is not – announced an unprecedented increase in the minimum wage to 180 of his newly invented currency, Bolívares soberanos (Sovereign Bolivars). In his attempt to keep pace with the hyperinflation that he himself has created (this is his 23rd or 24th – it’s hard to keep track – increase in the minimum wage over the past 6 years), Maduro announced that from September 1st of this year the minimum wage in Venezuela would now be the equivalent of $18 US per month.

Maduro is pegging his new currency to something called the Petro – a crypto currency tied to Venezuela’s oil reserves in the marketplace going forward, a complete unknown. On the introduction of the Petro, Maduro on national television described his new initiatives as “a really impressive, magic formula that we discovered while studying with our own, Venezuelan, Latin American-rooted thinking.”

Forget Venezuelan, Latin American-rooted thinking in the above sentence for just a minute. Magic formula is the pivotal key concept in his pronouncement.

The President of a 30 million+ population is trying to sell his citizens on the miracle of snake oil, on a medicine show that was commonplace centuries ago and whose overenthusiastic misstatements have been disgraced thousands of times since. Maduro wants no more and no less than that his citizens buy into a false cure of what ails Venezuela.

$18 per month is a 35-fold increase from the 50¢ conversion-rate adjusted minimum monthly wage that Venezuelans were guaranteed in just August of this year. It sounds like a huge increment, until you realize that the International Monetary Fund is predicting a 1,000,000 percent increase in the inflation rate in Venezuela by December. And a one-million percent inflation rate applied to $18 is such an infinitesimal amount that it won’t even show up on your calculator. Rest assured that there will be a 25th and a 26th, and perhaps even a 27th and 28th increase in the minimum wage before the end of this year. If it happens, it means nothing. And if it doesn’t happen, $18 per month is still just $18 per month for life’s necessities.

Unable to pay a 35-time increase in the minimum wage for their employees, business owners across Venezuela have reacted to Maduro’s latest proposal by letting longtime employees go, and by closing down their stores or businesses completely.

The result of this new Maduro policy is that there are now many more Venezuelans out of work and without the basic resources for daily life in Venezuela than there were just 30 or so days ago. With Maduro’s latest initiatives, the number of Venezuelans needing to leave Venezuela and take their chances in a completely unknown life abroad has increased exponentially.

How to help

Those of us who live outside Venezuela are observers of a situation that is inhumane and cruel beyond belief. We are witnessing a humanitarian crisis unfold in the Americas like none before. And we have to ask ourselves What can be done? How can we help?

Here are some suggestions as to how we can help our neighbors just south of Key West right now.

The Venezuelan Society of Palliative Medicine collects medicines to help those in Venezuela without resources. The specific goal is to help in the treatment of patients with chronic diseases.

Programa de Ayuda Humanitaria para Venezuela accepts financial donations via PayPal, and also accepts donations of medicines and food in Florida and Puerto Rico. You can see a complete list of drop-off locations or contact numbers here – and scrolling down the page you will find a useful list of hard-to-find medicines in Venezuela.

Cuatro por Venezuela works to provide help in the areas of health, nutrition and education. The organization partners with 74 hospitals and institutions in more than 14 Venezuelan states to help provide food to senior citizens and children facing hunger.

Chamos is a UK-based non-profit focused on the needs of Venezuelan children through education and healthcare programs going forward.

In July 2018, WPLG in Miami ran a piece on how to be more immediately involved with the Catholic organizations offering assistance to those arriving in Cúcuta, Colombia daily. Cúcuta, Colombia is the gateway to the world for the vast majority of Venezuelans leaving Venezuela. Among WPLG’s suggestions are these:

The Casa de Paso Divina Providencia provides healthcare and food to Venezuelan refugees. Rev. José David Cañas, 57, has distributed some 500,000 lunches since the house opened June 14, 2017.

The Scalabrini International Migration Network runs a center, or “casa del migrante,” in Cúcuta. They manage several programs including a kitchen responsible for a regular distribution of breakfasts and lunches and a school. For more information, call 011-57-7-573-5533 or email scalabrinicucuta@gmail.com.

The post Venezuela’s sick economy is killing its citizens. Here’s how to help them. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Something monumental, and not in a good way, is going on in Venezuela. You might need to get out a map of South America for this one. Suffice it to say that we have never had a refugee crisis of this magnitude in the Americas before.

Just imagine for a minute that you are living in Venezuela right now, a country where the International Monetary Fund Is estimating a 1,000,000% inflation rate by  December. Is that even possible to imagine? A loaf of bread that today might cost 50 cents, if you’re lucky enough to find bread, will by the end of this year cost $5,000.

Cash has disappeared, doctors have fled, medicines are scant, children are dying, poverty and malnutrition are skyrocketing, crime is spiraling, electricity is intermittent (just last week residents of some neighborhoods in Caracas went 36 to 40 hours without power) and the ability of citizens to obtain a Venezuelan passport – the most essential document increasingly required to enter a neighboring country – has evaporated. By the end of the year, how on earth will you come up with $5,000 to buy a loaf of bread?

You can’t. And you won’t.

And now just for another minute, imagine that you also have aging parents who need medicines that are more and more difficult to find. You decide to cross the border with the meager pay that you have scraped together working two or three makeshift jobs, driving a taxi, working a lunch shift at a restaurant where basic ingredients are hard to come by, or standing in endless lines just to be able to buy something as basic as rice as proxy for someone who is somehow better off than you, someone who can pay you something minimal, and we are talking about cents not dollars – money most likely wired home from family abroad.

You cross the border to Cúcuta in Colombia only to find that your money has no value. Zero.

30 pills of the generic version of a common hypertension drug, Losartan, are available in Colombia for $15,500 Colombian Pesos, approximately $5 US, or for about a $1 if you have the most basic Colombian health care coverage. Arriving in Colombia last month and attempting to buy this drug for your Venezuelan parents and paying with the Colombian exchange rate for your hard-earned Venezuelan Bolivars, you would have found that 30 Losartan pills would cost you the equivalent of 15,500,000 Bolivars, or 1,085 times the average monthly salary in Venezuela, an untenable amount of money that you just don’t have.

The situation is unconscionable.

Unable to buy 30 pills of Losartan, only one among various other medications that you were hoping to purchase in Colombia, you give up. You head home to Venezuela to the expectant hopes and needs of your mother and father with not one pill to offer.

You are beginning to think that President Maduro, the former bus driver leader-in-chief now in charge of your country, might just be in charge of the genocide of his own people. And after a pause to let that sink in, you might just begin to believe that you are right.

Wikipedia defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

Venezuelans as a national group fall within this definition, and Venezuelans are being systematically decimated by the policies of Maduro and his cohorts. There is a deliberate and systematic destruction of the Venezuelan people afoot at the behest of Maduro. And remember that Venezuela is a country just over 1,600 miles south of Key West, well within the historic umbrella of US interest and responsibility.

Venezuela is our neighbor just as Canada is.

In this unfathomable fall from grace for Venezuela, a fall from what was once the richest country in Latin America and a country still sitting on the largest petroleum reserves on the planet to 1,000,000% inflation by December, what makes sense? Damn little.

Despite US sanctions on Maduro’s honchos, and despite reports that Trump was gung-ho to invade Venezuela last August, the United States continues to import oil from Venezuela and thus still provides the money that keeps Maduro’s regime afloat.

Even now when the UN is estimating that more than 2.5 million Venezuelans will decide to, have to or need to leave their country by the end of this year. Colombia is already home to well more than 1 million fleeing Venezuelans. Right now, on pretty much every Bogotá articulated bus of its extensive Transmilenio system of transport, you are going to hear Venezuelans singing, begging, soliciting and asking for humanitarian help. Every day. On every bus.

Up to now, just this year, Ecuador has admitted more than 500,000 Venezuelans. And the situation just got more complex, with both Peru and Ecuador now admitting only those Venezuelans entering their countries holding the Holy Grail, a Venezuelan passport. A passport is a luxury item in Venezuela. Because of corruption and a so-called paper shortage within SAIME, the Venezuelan entity in charge of issuing passports, your passport may cost you, through pay-offs of up to $2,000 – money that you absolutely don’t have – and may take up to 2 or 3 years to process, and ultimately may never arrive. This is money and years to survive that you as a Venezuelan don’t have at your disposal.

And just as a matter of interest, how many Venezuelan refugees has the US admitted this year? Zero.

No passport. No money. No medicine. No food. No pretty much nada. Imagining yourself as a Venezuela citizen right now, how are you feeling about yourself, your prospects and your future? Pretty much screwed, I think.

As a Venezuelan, you are perfectly within your rights to think of doing whatever you can to leave this corrupt, disgraced, inhumane dictatorship that you live under. But what about your incapacitated parents? What’s to happen to them? Can you leave them and just go? Of course not.

What to do? Keep that map out. Many Venezuelans are now walking the length of Colombia and Ecuador to reach Peru, where they feel their prospects might be better. The journey can take months on foot. Venezuelans are camped out in parks and football fields in towns and cities along the way causing increasing xenophobic tensions in all of the countries affected by the Venezuelan exodus. Just last week, in Pacaraima, a Brazilian border town, makeshift Venezuelan encampments were attacked and destroyed. Venezuelans were chased back across the border. Days later, the numbers of Venezuelans arriving had increased three-fold.

Hunger will make you do terrible things. Hunger will make you take your chances – even where you are not wanted. But with aging dependents in Venezuela, you can’t even attempt the arduous journey to Peru, and then possibly on to Chile, where you might be able to sell Chiclets on street corners to send money home to your family. Chiclet money is real money in Venezuela.

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Mark Weisbrot, co-director of DC based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), says mainstream reporting on Venezuela’s economy is way off the mark. He blames Venezuelan rightwing media opposition to Chavez, and a United States public relations campaign designed to denigrate Venezuela’s achievements. He says: “If you want a perfect illustration of media toeing the official line, look no further than the forecasts of Venezuela’s economic doom.”

According to Weisbrot, the “all bad news, all the time” reporting was overwhelmingly dominant even during Venezuela’s record economic expansion, from 2003 to 2008. Here are some of the achievements during that time that were ignored by U.S. and international media.

• Venezuela’s economy grew more than it ever had before.
• Poverty was cut by more than half.
• There were large gains in employment.
• Real social spending per person more than tripled,
• Free healthcare was expanded to millions of people.

The international media has yet to report on these accomplishments. Yet, if they want proof, economists at international organizations corroborate the figures. For example, the UN Commission on Latin America (ECLAC) found that Venezuela had reduced income inequality more than any other country in Latin America from 2002 to 2008.

In 2009 Venezuela went into recession, but it appears to have emerged from its recession in the second quarter of this year. On a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, the economy grew by 5.2% in the second quarter of 2010. Reporting by Morgan Stanley projected Venezuela’s economy would shrink by 6.2%.

Weisbrot says the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is projecting negative per capita GDP growth for Venezuela over the next five years. He notes that the IMF was repeatedly and wildly off the mark on its underestimates of the Venezuelan economy during the expansion between 2003 and 2008. Right now, Venezuela has a sluggish economy as does the United States, Canada and Europe. But the IMF may again be ignoring Venezuela’s strengths:

[Venezuela] has adequate foreign exchange reserves, is running a trade and current account surplus, has low levels of foreign public debt, and quite a bit of foreign borrowing capacity, if needed. This was demonstrated most recently in April with a $20bn (about 6% of Venezuela’s GDP) credit from China. As such, it is extremely unlikely to run up against a foreign exchange shortage. It can therefore use public spending and investment as much as necessary to make sure that the economy grows sufficiently to increase employment and living standards, as it did before the 2009 recession. (Our government in the United States could do the same, even more easily – but that does not appear to be in the cards right now.) This can go on for many years.

Weisbrot advises that:

…whatever happens, we can expect complete coverage of one side of the story from the media. So keep it in mind: even when you are reading the New York Times or listening to NPR on Venezuela, you are getting Fox News. If you want something more balanced, you will have to look for it on the web.

A recent update by CEPR on Venezuela’s economy can be downloaded here.

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