Huge unseasonable rainfall has triggered disastrous flooding and mudslides in several parts of Venezuela, at a cost of about 80 lives now, and rising. Tens of thousands of people remain homeless, their homes washed away by mud and rocks that thunder down from high, steep mountains sliding down oil-rich soil. The country's government has known about this hazard for years, since the gargantuan mudslides devastated Vargas province in 1999, at a cost of 30,000 lives. Supposedly the regime has spent a billion dollars in aid to reinforce the hillsides and re-channel rain-laden waterways. And as surely as nature's force, it's...