Free Republic

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...

see what happens when they run out of beer: Venezuela's opposition said it delivered 1.85 million signatures to the country's elections authority on Monday as part of the process of seeking a recall referendum against President Nicolas Maduro. Food and medicine shortages, triple-digit inflation, rampant violent crime and increasingly frequent water and power cuts have stoked anger against Maduro. The Democratic Unity coalition (MUD) gathered far more than the required 1 percent of voters' signatures, or nearly 200,000, needed to trigger the next phase of a recall referendum. "With this successful strategy the MUD has progressed in achieving urgent political...

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...

CARACAS, Venezuela—The largest private Venezuelan company and producer of 80% of the beer consumed here began to shut down its last beer plant on Friday, the latest deprivation in a country crippled by shortages. After Empresas Polar SA closed its three other beer plants over the past several days, the shutting of the San Joaquin plant, near Valencia, will leave just a week’s supply of beer, the company said. Like many other firms here, Polar blames the government, which hasn’t allocated the dollars the company needs to pay for imported raw materials such as malted barley. President Nicolás Maduro’s government...

Cities across Venezuela are increasingly agitated, as government offices closed their doors for the rest of the week in the face of a worsening energy crisis that is causing daily blackouts. Venezuela is among the world's most violent countries, and crime generally spikes here when the lights go out. Looting and fiery protests starting spreading Wednesday in Caracas, as hundreds of angry voters lined up to sign a petition beginning the process of recalling the deeply unpopular President Nicolas Maduro. The socialist administration began imposing a four-hour daily blackout around the country this week to save electricity. Then, Maduro announced...

Food Producers Alert They Have Only 15 Days Left of Inventory amid Rampant Inflation. Despair and violence is taking over Venezuela. The economic crisis sweeping the nation means people have to withstand widespread shortages of staple products, medicine, and food. So when the Maduro administration began rationing electricity this week, leaving entire cities in the dark for up to 4 hours every day, discontent gave way to social unrest. On April 26, people took to the streets in three Venezuelan states, looting stores to find food. Maracaibo, in the western state of Zulia, is the epicenter of thefts: on Tuesday...

Back in February, when we commented on the unprecedented hyperinflation about the be unleashed in the Latin American country whose president just announced that he would expand the "weekend" for public workers to 5 days...... we joked that it is unclear just where the country will find all the paper banknotes it needs for all its new physical currency. After all, central-bank data shows Venezuela more than doubled the supply of 100-, 50- and 2-bolivar notes in 2015 as it doubled monetary liquidity including bank deposits. Supply has grown even as Venezuela has fewer U.S. dollars to support new...

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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Venezuelan cities cleaned up from a night of looting and fiery protests Wednesday as government offices closed their doors for the rest of the week in the face of a worsening energy crisis that is causing daily blackouts. The socialist administration began imposing a four-hour daily blackout around the country this week to save power. Then on Tuesday, President Nicolas Maduro announced that millions of officials will now work only Monday and Tuesday.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's socialist government ordered public workers on Tuesday to work a two-day week as an energy-saving measure in the crisis-hit South American OPEC country. President Nicolas Maduro had already given most of Venezuela's 2.8 million state employees Fridays off during April and May to cut down on electricity consumption. Water shortages and electricity cuts have added to the hardships of Venezuela's 30 million people, already enduring a brutal recession, shortages of basics from milk to medicines, soaring prices, and long lines at shops.

A disturbing video of a crowd physically beating each other to get at a select few bags of onions outside a supermarket in Venezuela highlights the struggle the average Venezuelan must endure to keep his or her family fed in the increasingly impoverished socialist nation.

Caracas (AFP) - Fridges zapped off in kitchens across Venezuela as the government turned off the electricity supply to help ease a power shortage that is worsening the country's economic crisis.It is the latest drastic measure by the government in a crisis that already has Venezuelans queuing for hours to buy scarce supplies in shops.The government imposed a four-hour blackout in eight states starting Monday and said the measure will last 40 days. The states of Caracas and Vargas had also been on the list for blackouts but were spared at the last minute.The timing of the switch-off caught Pedro...

DO YOU remember when Donald Trump crudely mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter, and then lied about having done so? No? That’s just as the Republican candidate might hope. Now that he is nearing the Republican nomination, he says he will become more “presidential.” After winning the New York primary, he referred to “Senator Cruz” instead of “Lyin’ Ted.” You can expect multitudes of office-seekers and sycophants to follow Chris Christie’s craven path to believing, or pretending to believe, in a presidential Trump. So it is important to remember. Remember that Mr. Trump said that Mexicans crossing...

Sanders, he says, is a "false prophet" who could be as dangerous as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.With Donald Trump putting Mexico at the center of the Republican presidential conversation, the country's former president, Vicente Fox, has gone hard at the GOP front-runner, saying, "He reminds me of Hitler." But Fox, who served as president from 2000 to 2006, has some comparisons for Bernie Sanders that are not much more flattering. "In Latin America, we have a century of experience of suffering from messianic, populist leaders that have broken our economies, that have brought poverty into all of Latin America,"...

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.

Venezuela's government has said it will turn off electricity supply in its 10 most populous states for four hours a day for at least 40 days to deal with a severe power shortage.(Snip)Recently, the country's main brewery Polar, which is part of Venezuela's largest cooperative Empresas Polar, announced that it would stop production as a result of financial difficulties. The company, which produces 80 percent of the country's beer, says thousands of workers will lose their jobs as a result of the stoppage.

Living for nearly half a century in the United States offers no guarantee that one can stay. That is the reality facing Cuban exile activist Ramon Saul Sanchez, leader of the Democracy Movement, who received a letter Thursday from the federal government....

On a busy Thursday that included meeting with Cuban-American leaders and encouraging Miami Dade College students to embrace diversity, Secretary of State John Kerry waded into the Carnival Corp. controversy, criticizing enforcement of a Cuban decree that prevents those born on the island from traveling to and from Cuba by sea. “The United States government will never support, never condone discrimination. And the Cuban government should not have the right to enforce on us a policy of discrimination against people who have the right to travel,” Kerry said during an interview with the Miami Herald and CNN en Español in...

“The Bay of Pigs took place the year that I was born. The next year, the entire world held its breath, watching our two countries, as humanity came as close as we ever have to the horror of nuclear war.” (President Barack Obama, Havana, Cuba, March, 22, 2016.) Moral equivalence, anyone? Was this threat “humanity’s” fault? America’s fault? Are—just maybe, who knows?--were the Soviet satraps in Cuba at fault for this threat of nuclear war? You’d never know it from Obama. Here’s a little background on an event dated exactly 55 years ago this week that could have easily strangled...

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...