Posted on 12/17/2017 2:08:49 PM PST by EdnaMode
Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death.
His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.
Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation. They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven — a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela.
When Kenyerber’s body was finally ready for viewing, his father, Carlos Aquino, a 37-year-old construction worker, began to weep uncontrollably. “How can this be?” he cried, hugging the coffin and speaking softly, as if to comfort his son in death. “Your papá will never see you again.”
Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say.
Venezuela has been shuddering since its economy began to collapse in 2014. Riots and protests over the lack of affordable food, excruciating long lines for basic provisions, soldiers posted outside bakeries and angry crowds ransacking grocery stores have rattled cities, providing a telling, public display of the depths of the crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Apart from the Communism part...I’ve read that Venezuela’s oil reserves are of some kind of inferior quality that’s not in high demand. IIRC is was something about high sulfur content.
I think high sulfur oil is called “sour crude”. Yup, it has a low value and will only be pumped when there is a shortage. We live on a formation full of it. Had the Bakken not been discovered, we’d be rich, filthy stinken rich.
“Venezuela’s oil reserves are of some kind of inferior quality that’s not in high demand”
it is ironic that the left has pushed to bring down demand and emissions requirements to the point where the market can be picky about the quality of the oil to refine thereby crippling their precious socialist country’s economy.
It is more the producers not properly preparing the oil for refineries than the quality of the oil in the ground.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Quality-Issues-Could-Break-Venezuela.html
Having a wealth of natural resources is quite meaningless to a millennial as it means opportunities for business and employment.
Our current culture has socially engineered these deadbeats to hate business and be too lazy to work.
Was thinking the same thing.
How can this be when Sean Penn assured us that “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Nicolas Maduro,”
Isn’t socialism wonderful!
This is what the socialist democrats and RINOs in the US aspire to. Total top down command and control.
Because starvation is for the little people. The elite are exempt.
Regardless of what troubles we native born Americans may grouse about..., just be thankful you were born here!!!
https://www.strategypage.com/qnd/colombi/articles/20171213.aspx
The production decline is continuing not so much because the government refuses to clean up the mess in the national oil company and the oil production facilities, but because it cannot figure out how to do it. To make matters worse the Venezuelan oil is exceptionally expensive to get process for local or export use because it is “sour” and tar-like. That makes it more expensive to refine and Venezuela must blend its sour crude with imported “light” crude or other diluent (like naphtha) to make their crude oil suitable for foreign refineries. Venezuela is so short of cash that it is not paying for these diluent imports and suppliers are refusing to ship anymore unless they get paid. Same with many other essential services for the oil industry.
This has become critical in 2017 because the Venezuelan refineries, also state owned, have suffered more accidents and received less adequate maintenance over the last decade. As a result domestic refining capability is now about a quarter of normal and getting worse. Shipping sub-standard crude is a violation of the sale agreement and customers are running out of patience. At the moment the largest source of cash sales for Venezuelan crude are Americans. Those buyers have invested heavily in U.S. based refineries modified to handle Venezuelan crude. If the U.S. customers give up on Venezuela they will reconfigure their equipment, at great expense, to handle crude from other sources and Venezuela will have to find new buyers and that will mean selling their sour crude at an even larger discount to more distant and less reliable customers. Currently most of the oil exports go to barter customers (like China) that made large loans that are repaid with oil. These customers are also not getting their oil on time or to the specified quality. No foreign investors are willing to commit the billions need to update and revive the Venezuelan oil operations, mainly because of the massive corruption and the sense that the government is not rational nor dependable. The collapse of the Venezuelan oil industry is doing long-term damage to the ability of Venezuela to process and sell its sour crude.
They Want it...
They Gits It!
Yeah, the can’t let their readers know the dangers of socialism.
The communist leaders are doing just fine.
Hungry people are easier to control.
I’ve confronted Leftist with Venezuela as the natural end state of Socialism. They poo-pah it, say it can’t happen here.
You are correct. Their oil is difficult to crack. We are pretty much the only country who can efficiently crack their crude.
the stuff is crap, and one of the biggest refineries for their sludge was on St.Croix USVI ~10 years ago the EPA came in and told HOVENSA (the refiner) that they needed to make almost a billion dollars in plant upgrades, HESS told them to go pound sand and closed the plant
that put three thousand workers on STX out of a job and drove a stake through the heart of Venz gas income
A bank manager, lawyer, and teacher can’t find equivalent work in the US? What aren’t you telling us?
they have money enough to embalm but not enough to feed the kid?
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