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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Venezuela Collapses, Colombia Rises |
| 2016-05-28 |
| Michael Totten [WorldAffairsJournal] Venezuela and Colombia have swapped places. When the Cold War ended, Colombia was a crime-infested war zone while Venezuela, its neighbor to the east, was an island of sanity and stability. Colombia is now one of the world's hottest new tourist destinations while Venezuela is on the brink of collapse. For more than a half-century, Colombia suffered a bewildering multisided conflict that killed more than 200,000 people - the vast majority of them civilians - and displaced roughly five million. It was a no-go zone fractured by a communist insurgency that kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands, right-wing death squads that butchered people with chainsaws, and murderous drug cartels that often wielded more power than the government. Meanwhile, during most of that period, Venezuela held democratic elections and experienced considerable, if uneven, economic growth. Throughout Latin America, Soviet-backed insurgencies battled it out with military regimes sponsored by the United States, but Cuba's attempt to foment communist revolution in Venezuela fizzled. After the Berlin Wall fell, pro-Soviet forces all but evaporated everywhere except in Colombia where the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) swapped Moscow's largesse with drug money. If one had to choose where to invest at the time, the smart money would have been on Venezuela. It had a small middle class and a great deal of poverty, but that was hardly unique in South and Central America. What set it apart was its vast oil reserves‐more than any other country on earth‐and its relative political stability. The current United Socialist Party government led by Nicolas Maduro, and formerly Hugo Chavez, could have done amazing things for the country with that vast oil wealth. Instead, the party has done its damndest to import Fidel Castro's Cuban model of socialism‐ Chavez called Castro his mentor‐and turn Venezuela into a totalitarian anthill. They never quite pulled it off, never quite managed to create a state powerful enough to smother every human being under its weight. Rather than molding Venezuelan society into a Stalinist Borg-hive, both‐but Maduro especially‐presided over a near-total collapse into anarchy, squalor and crime. Last week the Washington Post called Venezuela a failed state. "The government has tried to control the economy to the point of killing it ‐ all, of course, in the name of 'socialism'...Venezuela has gotten something worse than death. It has gotten hell. Its stores are empty, its hospitals don't have essential medicines, and it can't afford to keep the lights on." The inflation rate is almost 500 percent this year and is expected to exceed 1,500 percent next year. A hamburger costs 170 dollars. Everything is in short supply. "Venezuela reaches the final stages of socialism," David Boaz writes. "No toilet paper." Even hotels are asking guests to bring their own, which is almost impossible unless they're coming in from abroad. Violent crime has spread throughout the country, even to rural areas. Police officers don't even attempt to suppress or solve crime, partly because they're too busy protecting the crooked and oppressive government from its furious subjects, but also because crime is as ubiquitous in Venezuela right now as the heat and humidity. Last week, a fed up mob doused a man with gasoline and burned him alive for mugging another man and stealing the equivalent of five dollars. Hellish Colombia, meanwhile, has improved so dramatically over the same period of time that it's hardly even recognizable anymore. |
| Posted by:Frank G |
| #2 All you Venezuelan boat-people/refugees, please, go to Cuba. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2016-05-28 11:41 |
| #1 Colombia is now one of the world's hottest new tourist destinations while Venezuela is on the brink of collapse. Narco-Tourism? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2016-05-28 06:33 |