Crisis in Venezuela – CBS News

Christmas came early this year in Venezuela. The season officially started on October 1, as ordered by the country's authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro. “I will announce the continuation of Christmas until the beginning of October,” he said.

The stupidity would be laughable if this wasn't a perfect summary of Venezuela's black-and-white, dystopian reality, an oil-rich country so economically devastated that it can't even keep the lights on … where life is so lifeless that a quarter of its population (about 8 million people ) has escaped.

“He needed a distraction,” said former New York Times reporter William Neuman. “Bread and circuses.”

The title of Neuman's book on Venezuela is: “Things Have Never Been So Bad That They Couldn't Be So Bad.” “Everyone knows that he failed in the election,” he said. “He is the Emperor without clothes.”

In July, Venezuela, which has a long history of democracy as well, held elections. Maduro said he had been re-elected, but in a bold act of defiance, the opposition produced voting machine figures to prove it. Edmundo González had actually won the presidencybetter than a 2 to 1 margin. Nonpartisan election observers agreed.

Maduro has called in the military to enforce his refusal to vote. González was told to leave the country, or else. (He arrived in Spain.) In the riots that followed, at least a dozen people were killed, and more than 2,000 were arrested.

María Corina Machado, the face of the opposition parties, who would have run for president if Maduro had not prevented her, is in hiding. “I'm accused of terrorism,” he told Sunday Morning via Zoom. “The dictatorship said they want me, they want to find me quickly.”

So, how could a country that sits on the world's largest oil reserves end up like this? According to Neuman, “It was draining money. They wasted it, wasted it, and stole it. It stopped raining, and people went hungry. And that's what happened in Venezuela in a nutshell.”

Venezuela has been producing oil since 1914, but what is known as the “resource curse” really began when the charismatic and controversial Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. When he took office, the price of oil was $7 a barrel, Neuman said: “Within a few years, it reaches more than $120 a barrel, so Chávez was very lucky, because he is entering at the very beginning of this commodity boom.”

Chávez spent large sums of oil money on public projects, and borrowed even more, plunging his country into debt. But ordinary Venezuelans are feeling rich and feeling the change.

The United States was his favorite bogeyman. At the United Nations in 2006, Chávez called President George W. Bush “the devil.”

When Chávez died of cancer in 2013, his successor was Nicolás Maduro, who was less popular, if less fortunate. Oil prices are down; inflation reached an unimaginable 300,000%.

Maduro met public discontent with the repression, and millions left the country.

If you look at the map of Venezuelan migration from 2014, the United States is the fourth among the destinations. Just over 750,000 have been granted temporary protection status in the US, or have applied for it. So, the problem of Venezuela is here, at our door, in our cities.

Niurka Meléndez left in 2015. “We're broke,” he said. “We are broken as a country … no institutions, no freedom.”

With temporary protected status, she and her husband can live and work in the United States legally. They founded VIA (Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid), a volunteer organization that helps immigrants in New York City.

Meléndez introduced us to a woman who came from Venezuela with 8 members of her family, including her four young children. He is afraid, even here, to reveal his name. “When an armed group called Colectivos came to my house, they took everything I had,” he said. “They even took the blender, everything, my computer, everything. Then they beat us because we didn't have money, the exact money – they were asking for $500. I didn't have that money.”

So, they crossed the Darién Gap, risking their lives. Since its disputed election in July, Venezuela has resumed the bleeding of its own people – it has once again begun to export its crisis.

María Corina Machado said, “Venezuela today is the biggest disaster in the world. About 25% of the people left in Venezuela. [is] thinking of leaving. This is great. This could be five, six million Venezuelans leaving the country. “

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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: David Bhagat.

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