….. is the title of a New York Times article that chronicles the socialist nightmare taking place in the world’s most oil-rich country — Venezuela — its crude oil reserves (~300 billion barrels, worth about $14 trillion at today’s oil price) are 12% larger than No. 2 Saudi Arabia’s (268 billion barrels) and more than 7 times greater than oil reserves in the US (40 billion barrels). Life under a socialist regime has become so miserable in recent years that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have fled their homeland, some recently in small boats reminiscent of the perilous journeys to escape Cuba or Haiti in the past — but not oil-rich Venezuela until now. The photo above shows Venezuelan migrants leaving on a smuggler’s small boat at the start of a 50-mile treacherous journey by sea, hoping to reach the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao and start a new life (see my comments below about the caption above).
Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article (emphasis added):
The dark outlines of land had just come into view when the smuggler forced everyone into the sea. Roymar Bello screamed. She was one of 17 passengers who had climbed onto the overloaded fishing boat with aging motors in July, hoping to escape Venezuela’s economic disaster for a new life on the Caribbean island of Curaçao.
Afraid of the authorities, the smuggler refused to land. Ms. Bello said he gruffly ordered her and the others into the water, pointing toward the distant shore. In the panic, she was tossed overboard, tumbling into the predawn blackness. But Ms. Bello could not swim.
As she began to sink under the waves, a fellow migrant grabbed her by the hair and towed her toward the island. They washed up on a rocky cliff battered by waves. Bruised and bleeding, they climbed, praying for a lifeline: jobs, money, something to eat. “It was worth the risk,” said Ms. Bello, 30, adding that Venezuelans like her “are going after one thing: food.”
Venezuela was once one of Latin America’s richest countries, flush with oil wealth that attracted immigrants from places as varied as Europe and the Middle East. But after President Hugo Chávez vowed to break the country’s economic elite and redistribute wealth to the poor, the rich and middle class fled to more welcoming countries in droves, creating what demographers describe as Venezuela’s first diaspora. Now a second diaspora is underway — much less wealthy and not nearly as welcome. Well over 150,000 Venezuelans have fled the country in the last year alone, the highest in more than a decade, according to scholars studying the exodus.
Desperate Venezuelans are streaming across the Amazon Basin by the tens of thousands to reach Brazil. They are concocting elaborate scams to sneak through airports in Caribbean nations that once accepted them freely. When Venezuela opened its border with Colombia for just two days in July, 120,000 people poured across, simply to buy food, officials said. An untold number stayed. But perhaps most startling are the Venezuelans now fleeing by sea, an image so symbolic of the perilous journeys to escape Cuba or Haiti— but not oil-rich Venezuela (see photo above).
Via Mark J. Perry