How Venezuela Was Driven To The Abyss By 'Savage Populism'

Listening to the passionate speech by Antonio Ledezma, the former mayor of Caracas who recently fled arrest and prison from Venezuela, at the Geneva Human Rights and Democracy Summit, was enough for me and many others present to realize how deep the tragedy of that great country had now become. Ledezma was delivering the ultimate outcry for the world to act, to save the country from its destroyers.

Venezuela is now the scene for massive deprivation and despair: an unprecedented example of disastrous political mismanagement. It is the people, the majority, who are left to suffer, and the current conditions tell an irreversible path to farther disaster. The world faces now a humanitarian crisis of tremendous proportions.

Between 2013 and 2017 the country’s national and per capita GDPs contracted more severely than those of the US did during the Great Depression and more than those of Russia, Cuba, and Albania did after the fall of communism ... 74 percent of the population had lost on average nineteen pounds in 2016. Infant mortality in hospitals has risen by 100 percent. Diseases nearly eradicated in many countries, like malaria and diphtheria, have flourished; illnesses largely new to the area, like Chikungunya, Zika, and dengue, have spread. Caracas is now the most dangerous city on the planet. All this is happening in a country that has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

It all began with Chavez, backed by the global revolutionary left as the real hope. It continued when he grabbed power bit by bit, as the DNA of the country was deformed, and the economy started to serve the interests of the new breed of parasites who flocked around the 'great leader' who knew how to hypnotize the masses.

Here is the whole story, which tells of a populist treachery and paternalist deceit. And it is the story of how proud people of Venezuela are left with nothing but a need for urgent international help.