I live in Trinidad&Tobago, tiny island nation off the coast of Venezuela. This isn’t a place I’d call exceptional by any means, but to Venezuelans it is an amazing paradise. Not even going by mainstream media articles just…
There are some areas Carenage and Chaguramas with private boat docks and some quiet unpatrolled coastline and two supermarkets, Venezuelans will illegally come ashore in a boat and meet up with a local contact who provides a car and they…go grocery shopping for basic goods which they take back to their boat and return to Venezuela with. They pay with USD which most local retailers will accept along with TTD at a shitty exchange rate.
Just the trouble they have to go through to get USD on the black market in Ven. is amazing and well documented in articles. All that effort and trouble and illegal border hopping all to buy some rice and even toilet paper and other basic goods. Or a local contact will purchase them and take them out to sea where they meet the purchaser from Ven. and they are paid in USD. USD is also in heavy demand inside Ven. and this country is a source, no clue how it is paid for though and Ven. currency is not in demand.
A lot of local prostitutes are Venezuelan women brought here illegally and controlled by human traffickers, there are usually higher income areas where you can see them waiting to be picked up and dropped off by clients at night. They are often kept forcibly by their “pimps” in houses maintained for that purpose, occasionally a bust makes the media.
These women are eager to come because they are desperate for the money and connections they can make outside Ven.
All this has been going on for years,it isn’t a recent development.
With conditions being that bad for the average person it is hard to believe foreign media that paints Ven. as any kind of threat or danger. I’m shocked more people don’t just decide to stay here illegally,I’m sure when the country implodes there will be a mass of migrants.
Mainly, the current regime’s zealous belief that a centrally-planned economy will actually work. And combine that with mismanagement of the nation’s oil reserves, and ludicrous overspending. The Venezuelan government was running deficits BEFORE the price of oil recently tanked.
Pretty clear it is the “socialist” government created by Hugo Chavez.
I used to go there for business in the mid 1990s. It was pretty bad, but not that bad. The economy was almost OK and I was brought in by a Venezuelan company that wanted to compete in the United States. Labor rates were low enough that they could almost ship their goods to the US and sell them cheaper than the US manufactured goods. I was in the aluminum can industry back then, and their 2 piece lines were running about ~300 cans per minute compared to the ~2000-3000 cans per minute run in most US can plants. We boosted up this plant in Barquisimeto from the 300/min they were running to ~900/min and they were working on shipping to the US when we stopped doing business with them. I talked to one of the engineers a couple years later, maybe in 2000 or so. He said the whole country had gone to shit. Everybody who could, everybody with a college degree or a bit of money, had fled the country for anywhere they could get to. The country turned into a populist rentier state depending on oil money.
This is, obviously, just an anecdote, but the stories this guy told were pretty stark. When Chavez took power he threw the entire intelligentsia under the bus in much the same way the Chinese did during the cultural revolution. It fucks things up pretty bad when you do that.
Crime. Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and Venezuelan criminals are particularly enamored with kidnapping - more people are kidnapped for ransom in Venezuela than anywhere else, with an average of 5 people kidnapped each day; some estimates put that number much higher, as the vast majority of kidnappings are not reported to the police.
Thanks for the observations, grude (and others). This is the sort of stuff I should know for my own job, but I haven’t taken the time to keep up.
I consider myself a progressive US Democrat (I favor a single-payer health care system, for example), yet I’ve always found the Chávez regime and its aftereffects today to be despicable populism. Oliver Stone made a fawning documentary on Chávez a decade ago, and it made me sick – he couldn’t even pronounce his idol’s name correctly!
I truly believe that Chavez was ever-so-slightly out of his mind. Yeah, he played to his base, but I think he also believed the idiocy that he spouted. Venezuela has a long, hard road back to normalcy.
To be slightly fair to chavismo, venezuela was shitty venal petrocracy before chavez, he just replaced one network of patrons and clients with another.
I believe there were some benefits to the poor, in the form of improved social services under Chavez. That is how he won their loyalty, after all. But on the whole, it’s still a terrible place to live.
Of course, a Chavista would say that if they had ever managed to achieve complete control of the political and economic system, they could have fixed all the problems. They would point to Cuba as their ideal, I imagine.
I’m sure the oil price crash, albeit temporary, has been a disaster for most of the exporting countries.
To be fair about government-owned enterprises, I bitterly miss the People’s Electricity And Water Utility, otherwise known as the Los Angeles DWP. Since we’ve moved to North County, we’ve been paying about investor-owned SDG&E three times as much, yet the apartment is just about the same as the old one–electric everything and two AC units. Even allowing for the fact that it’s considerably hotter where we live now, we never dreamed that our electricity rates could be so much higher than in L.A.
They do stay illegally, or try to get papers. But it is somewhat difficult, as the immigration authorities in Trinidad are as efficient as other branches of their government. :rolleyes:
There is also in some areas a lot of resentment against Venezuelans, and by association, Colombians and other Spanish-speakers. And if not resentment, stereotyping. Young-ish somewhat pretty Spanish speaking woman? Guess what’s the stereotype? :smack:
But Trinidadians and Venezuelans do have some sort of love-hate relationship. Many Venezuelans from regions close to Trinidad claim Trinidadian ancestors, and likewise, many locals also have Venezuelan ancestors.
Hey Grude, Trinidad and Tobago look like such a nice place to live. When I lived in Queens, NYC, I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of Guyanese people and some Trinidadians. Also at my boxing gym.I loved Guyanese food, beef tip and rice and vegetables and spices… what is Trinidadian food like? I know some Caribbean Islands have big waves for surfing and some do not. What is it like in Trinidad?
The downside is the horrible suffering undergone by the Venezuelan people. The upside is that the rest of the world gets another vivid, indisputable demonstration of the fact that communism just doesn’t work, which ought to guarantee that no other country will ever try it. (But sadly, I fear that some will.)
It can be done. Look at Russia or easten Europe. They just need a leader who realizes that Communism doesn’t work.
I suspect – pretty strongly, in fact – that Raul Castro knows this, and is basically waiting for Fidel to die before he announces “La mierda esta mierda!” and normalizes Cuba’s economy.
