Posted on 12/18/2017 1:53:51 PM PST by Brilliant
Venezuela — 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...
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.
But deaths from malnutrition have remained a closely guarded secret by the Venezuelan government. In a five-month investigation by The New York Times, doctors at 21 public hospitals in 17 states across the country said that their emergency rooms were being overwhelmed by children with severe malnutrition...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Notice the tone of the NY Time’s title. It’s written in a detached way, as if starving children were nothing more than stray dogs.
Oh NOW the NYT is concerned about starving children.
Where was this concern from the NYT, when it was Ukrainian children starving in the 1930s?
Forget Chicago, the UN troops need to land there. Kids starving to death?
Don’t we have room in the US for every last person in Venezuela?
the Slimes article sluffs over WHY this is happening, casually mentioning “mismanagement” and “bad timing” for oil prices falling, you know, like all of this horrific misery is being causes more or less by bad luck ...
I wonder how many starving Venezuelans are unable to see that they have caused their own demise.
Still, there are tens of millions of unofficial communists within the USA, as Nikita S. Khrushchev eventually predicted there would be.
Venezuelans don't need food. Any food sent would just be confiscated by the government and apportioned to their supporters.
Venezuelans need guns and ammo.
“Does anyone know of an organization that can get food thru to the starving ib Venezuela? Watching is heartbreaking.”
they voted this guy into office, as well as his predecessor who had the same policies. why should we bail them out for making such bad decisions? will bailing them out change anything, or will they simply vote in this guy, or someone like him, who again promise something for nothing with the same results of disaster? And besides, what are the chances that the starving poor will get the food aid instead of it going to the military, the police, the government, their corrupt politician allies, and the already-rich oligarchs, who are already keeping for themselves what little food there already is?
and how about the Norks? should we bail them out to, sending free food there too, so the government can do the same thing, namely directing the free food to themselves, their political allies and their military?
Mismanagement and bad timing are fundamental characteristics of socialism. It builds up over time too. But I gotta hand it to the Venezuelans. They they have perfected the art of mismanagement. And they destroyed their country in a very few years. They did in 4 or 5 years what took the Soviets 70 years to do.
“They they have perfected the art of mismanagement.”
what is happening in Venezuela is WAY more than simple “mismanagement”.
The government abrogated the rule of law, stealing billions of dollars of private property, both foreign and local, including farms, factories and retail chains, and doling them out to their kleptocratic military buddies, to be stripped bare of anything of value and never to function again.
Printing money until the inflation rate exceeds 2,300% per year goes far beyond “mismanagement”.
Using the military to keep starving citizens isn’t “mismanagement”.
Holding fake elections to overturn the constitution and federal legislature isn’t “mismanagement”.
These and dozens of other similarly rapacious actions are nothing more than national pillaging by military strongmen who care for nothing except their own power and well-being.
What’s happening in Venezuela has nothing to do with “mismanagement”: everything being done there by the military dictatorship is being done on purpose and with deliberate intent.
Yes but at its core the concept of socialism is the theory that bureaucrats are better at making economic decisions than markets. Venezuela has disproved that.
Yes, but I think his prediction best came through for China as we bought/sold the rope to hang us with.
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