The Ebb of the Pink Tide by Mike Gonzalez

Author:Mike Gonzalez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

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Venezuela: Decline and Fall

Dancing While Rome Burns

19 May 2018. On the eve of the postponed presidential elections, Venezuela teeters on the brink of a crisis of gargantuan proportions. It is impossible to deny that that the Bolivarian revolution inaugurated by Hugo Chávez Frias on his election to the presidency in 1998 has collapsed. The facts and figures are devastating. Yet there are those both within and outside Venezuela who persist in their denials, and still refer to the government of Nicolas Maduro as socialist. It makes a mockery of the very word.

In 2018 Venezuela, the world’s second largest oil producer, is confronting the world’s highest inflation figures: 4250 per cent annualised for 2017, and 5065 per cent for the cost of food. It has occupied this unenviable spot for four years.1 Hyperinflation barely begins to describe its social and economic consequences. Translated into real lives, it signals a collapse in living standards for a rising proportion of the population – declining meat consumption, an average weight loss of 12 kilos as a result of a lack of carbohydrates and vitamins. Though official figures are absent, the most basic medicines are unobtainable – including anti-convulsants, aspirin, birth control pills, retroviral drugs and diabetes medication. There is a rise in infant mortality, and diseases that had disappeared – diphtheria, malaria, measles – have returned. The health system, meanwhile – both hospitals and local emergency and clinical services – has virtually collapsed. You are more likely to find armed men in the corridors than surgeons, and the most basic equipment has either been stolen or simply deteriorated beyond use.

The minimum wage, to which are added food vouchers (cestatickets) whose value is not included in the calculation of social benefits, pensions etc., is now increased almost daily yet never coincides with the rate of inflation. It is currently set at a little over 2 million bolivars; that will buy you two packets of disposable nappies, or two dozen eggs, or a kilo of pork. Meat consumption, which is basic for Venezuelans, has declined in the last three years by 22 per cent.

At the level of the national economy, GDP has fallen to a deficit of 15 per cent from a high point in 2004–5 of over 15 per cent growth. For the sixth year running there is a fiscal deficit – since 1990 Venezuelan fiscal receipts have fallen by 4.5 per cent per annum (as compared, say, with Bolivia, where they have risen by around 20 per cent annually).

All the available data – though the Central Bank has failed to provide regular updates on the economy since 2011 – simply confirm the economic disaster. The anecdotal evidence offers no respite. The pictures of the poor scrabbling among the rubbish in search of food are not fabricated; the regular incidents of looting of shops and supermarkets across the country are so commonplace that they are rarely reported.

And yet, as the lacklustre presidential campaign of 2018 proceeds to its probably inevitable outcome, Maduro and his wife

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