HT to Fausta - the essential blog on VZ, and most of Latin AmericaWhat is going on in Venezuela? In a country that earned $800 billion during the oil boom, people in the capital queue for hours in the street for essentials like toilet paper. Inflation is above 60%, but capital controls prevent citizens from taking out their money and leaving. Meanwhile the regime restricts independent televisions stations and newspapers, and people have been jailed posting anti-government statements on twitter. The Bloomberg Quick Take on the country begins "Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia and more poverty than Brazil", and as CapX writer Gerald Warner notes, "[under Chavez] oil-rich Venezuela became the only country in the world to boast a Minister for Electricity Shortages".
All this is well known in the West, to the point that even the openly left-leaning New Statesman admitted in March that "Venezuela has gone from the Left's great hope to a scene of despair. We must speak out, or be discredited." The tragedies facing the people of this corrupt, exploitative country are no longer news to us.
They especially weren't news last week, when every media outlet and newspaper reader in Britain was focussed 100% on the election. So when the Guardian published a short piece early on Friday morning about Venezuelan motorcyclists being killed, it was quickly submerged in a sea of election coverage.