Free Republic

Venezuelans grumbling over the scarcity of food and toilet paper may soon face another shortage, beer produced by Empresas Polar SA., the country’s largest private company and biggest beer maker. Polar said on Thursday that it will be forced to stop producing beer next week because it cannot get the U.S. dollars, which are controlled by the government, to import the malted barley needed to brew. Under Venezuela’s stringent currency exchange system, only the government can legally control dollars, which companies need to import raw materials, food, machine parts and other supplies.

Private gun ownership was banned in Venezuela in June 2012, but their homicide rate went from 73 per 100,000 people in 2012 to 82 per 100,000 people in 2015. The BBC seriously repeats the Venezuelan government’s claim that the ban is an “attempt by the government to improve security and cut crime.” The ban was preceded by an amnesty to get people to turn in their guns. The video gives some idea of what life is like in Venezuela these days. As the homicide rate was already rising before the gun ban and Venezuela is such a mess of a...

Venezuela sent $1.3 billion worth of gold bars to Switzerland in mid-January, according to data from the Swiss Federal Customs Administration. That gold was shipped out just weeks before two big debt payments due this month, totaling $2.3 billion. On Friday alone, Venezuela has to pay bondholders $1.5 billion. Venezuela is running out of cash and many experts believe there's a high chance it will default by this fall when a string of big debt payments are due. "It's a question of when Venezuela will default, not if," says Russ Dallen, managing partner at LatInvest, a firm that invests in...

Venezuelan opposition legislator José Manuel Olivares claims the country has under-reported cases of the Zika virus and the country lacks necessary medical supplies to properly combat the outbreak sweeping the region. “I hope that President Nicolas Maduro will not continue putting policy and ideology before the health and life of Venezuelans,” he declared.

Oh, and the power's out, so they can't preserve what little is sitting around. I’m sure the Bernie lovers will come up with a reason this is different and not the same, but every policy the Chavistas have put in place in Venezuela since the revolution has more or less tracked to what Bernie Sanders would do here - with one exception. At least Hugo Chavez and his hapless successor Nicolas Maduro believed in exploiting the country’s oil resources. It’s just that they used them to grease their own palms rather than meet the needs of their people, which is...

Venezuela's economy is collapsing. The country has topped Bloomberg's "Economic Misery Index," which takes into account several economic measures, for two years. Runaway inflation and high unemployment are plaguing the country. Socialism is what produces bread lines in an oil-rich country. In developed countries, economic debates often focus on narrow questions, such as raising the minimum wage, where it's possible for reasonable people to disagree. This leads to an impression that the relative merits of free enterprise and big government policies can be in the eye of the beholder. To a certain extent this is true. Or, at any rate,...

Socialism: Like a skyscraper crane about to topple in high winds, Venezuela is teetering on the brink of a horrific economic collapse. It was brought on by one thing: socialism, taken to the hilt. Yet incredibly, neither Bernie Sanders nor his voters make this connection. It’s worrisome that so many Americans see socialism in a favorable light these days. A May 2015 YouGov poll showed that socialism was viewed favored favorably by 43% of Democrats, while a June 2015 Gallup poll showed that 47% of Americans would vote for a socialist. It points to a collective loss of memory. After...

Socialism: Like a skyscraper crane about to topple in high winds, Venezuela is teetering on the brink of a horrific economic collapse. It was brought on by one thing: socialism, taken to the hilt. Yet incredibly, neither Bernie Sanders nor his voters make this connection. It's worrisome that so many Americans see socialism in a favorable light these days. A May 2015 YouGov poll showed that socialism was viewed favored favorably by 43% of Democrats, while a June 2015 Gallup poll showed that 47% of Americans would vote for a socialist. It points to a collective loss of memory. After...

Venezuela has more oil than any other country on the planet. But it just bought a bunch of American crude. A ship carrying half a million barrels of oil that was pumped in the U.S. docked at a terminal owned by Venezuela last week, according to oil data research firm ClipperData. The shipment was sent to a facility located on the Dutch island of Curacao in the Caribbean. The fact that Venezuela is importing American oil is raising eyebrows because Venezuela has 298 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. That's more than Saudi Arabia,...

Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com. Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on...

The daughter of Hugo Chavez, the former president who once declared 'being rich is bad,' may be the wealthiest woman in Venezuela, according to evidence reportedly in the hands of Venezuelan media outlets. Maria Gabriela Chavez, 35, the late president's second-oldest daughter, holds assets in American and Andorran banks totaling almost $4.2billion, Diario las Americas reports. The figure would make Gabriela Chavez wealthier than media mogul Gustavo Cisneros, whom Forbes named the wealthiest Venezuelan earlier this year with $3. 6 billion in assets. Others close to Chavez managed to build up great personal wealth that was kept outside the petrostate....

U.S. intelligence analysts are increasingly convinced that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is likely to be pushed aside by members of his own socialist movement before finishing his term. Senior American intelligence officials said Friday that as Venezuela’s economy spins out of control, Maduro’s grip on power is more fragile. They briefed reporters on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss their assessments by name. […] The officials said the main concern for the Obama administration is that the deep political divisions and mounting economic hardships could trigger mayhem of the sort that Caracas experienced in 1989, when at...

With dire shortages of basic goods, a looming foreign debt payment, horrific street crime and intransigent political divisions, Venezuela is in danger of collapsing into waves of deadly violence, U.S. intelligence officials warned Friday. Venezuela, which controls the world's largest reserves of crude oil, is in the throes of a potentially explosive political stalemate after opposition parties gained a majority in the national congress in elections late last year. President Nicolas Maduro, a leftist, faces a possible recall vote sponsored by the opposition that he is maneuvering to block.

If nations could have biographies, Venezuela's would read something like this: After a rocky adolescence, Vennie got his life straightened out, got an education, a good job, and lived a fairly comfortable life. However, in his dotage, he was suckered by a succession of con artists and blew through all his savings, ending his days penniless and bitter. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much what Hugo Chavez and his socialist caudillo successors have done to the country. By Latin American standards, Venezuela used to a prosperous and stable nation. Venezuela possesses one of the largest petroleum reserves in the...

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro declared a 60-day state of emergency on Friday due to what he called plots from within the OPEC country and the United States to topple his leftist government. Maduro did not provide details of the measure. A previous state of emergency, implemented in states near the Colombian border last year, suspended constitutional guarantees in those areas, except for guarantees relating to human rights.

As for March, there was an increase in yearly prices due to inflation — a 582.9 percent increase for food,

Citizens turned out in massive crowds to add their signatures to the recall referendum against Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro. And for good reason. The country is in a state of paralysis: frequent blackouts; food, medicine and vaccine scarcities; closed-down factories and frequent looting. Chaos and anarchy hang over the nation that not so long ago was the most rich and advanced in Latin America. Without a doubt the fault of the country's dire situation is on the late president Hugo Chávez. His socialist policies devastated Venezuela's flourishing economy. But in a less obvious way, Venezuelan citizens are also to blame....

The situation in Venezuela has become so bad that even soldiers are struggling to support themselves. Over the weekend, six members of the Venezuelan military were detained by local authorities for stealing goats, the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional reported Sunday. It said the soldiers confessed to stealing the goats and said they did it to feed themselves, since they had no food left in their barracks.

Venezuela's largest privately-owned beer company has stopped producing beer after running out of malted barley (or, more specifically, running out of foreign currency with which to buy malted barley). The company, Empresas Polar, stopped production yesterday—it warned last week that it would run out of malted barley by then. Polar is putting "your drunk uncle's favorite political forecast to the test," Francisco Toro of the Caracas Chronicles wrote. "You know the one I'm talking about, right? That one uncle of yours who gets drunk at every family gathering and starts to rant about how the only way we're going to...

It's come to this: The country with the largest oil reserves in the world can't afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week. Venezuela, in other words, is well past the point of worrying that its economy might collapse. It already has. That's the only way to describe an economy that the International Monetary Fund thinks is going to shrink 8 percent and have 720 percent inflation this year. And that's not even the worst of it. No, that's the...