Starving Venezuelans Flee Socialist Nightmare By Boat

Starving Venezuelans Flee Socialist Nightmare By Boat

We’ve been covering the massive failure of socialism in Venezuela, and now, starving Venezuelans are fleeing in boats to try to find food and a new home.  Mostly food.  Apparently, Maduro’s plan to ease price controls has been another failure.

The New York Times reports:

And as Mr. Chávez’s Socialist-inspired revolution collapses into economic ruin, as food and medicine slip further out of reach, the new migrants include the same impoverished people that Venezuela’s policies were supposed to help.

“We have seen a great acceleration,” said Tomás Páez, a professor who studies immigration at the Central University of Venezuela. He says that as many as 200,000 Venezuelans have left in the past 18 months, driven by how much harder it is to get food, work and medicine — not to mention the crime that such scarcities have fueled.

“Parents will say, ‘I would rather say goodbye to my son in the airport than in the cemetery,’ ” he said.

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.

A once-great, once-wealthy nation reduced to famine and poverty, its people starving and in despair, by the fantasy of socialism.  It’s a great tragedy from which, sadly, socialists won’t learn a thing.

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