Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, has been experiencing what is probably the most severe economic crisis in history, ever since President Maduro took over after the passing away of President Chavez in 2013. Although elections have been held twice since Mr. Maduro’s rise in power, endemic corruption and suppression of civil liberties, have made it almost impossible for him to be removed.
However, since January 2019, President Maduro is facing the greatest threat ever to his presidency, when Mr. Guaido, the head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, declared himself interim President.
While the standoff between the two men has been escalating, increasingly long blackouts (for which Guaido and Maduro accuse each other) have started plaguing the country. Although blackouts in Venezuela are not something new, they have never been lasting for so long. (Nowadays they can last for up to a week.) Such long periods without electricity mean that what little food and medicine people have, go bad much faster than originally anticipated, patients in intensive care units cannot have the necessary support, communications networks don’t work (and even if they did, there’s no power to charge phones, or connect routers) and at night, Caracas resembles a city pulled straight out of a zombie apocalypse movie – massive fires everywhere, helping people to see, cook and stay warm.
Of course, Venezuela’s problems didn’t start with Maduro, but rather, with his predecessor, Hugo Chavez: While Mr. Chavez was hosting TV shows and giving away appliances, the country’s once booming oil industry started to crumble, as the economic underpinnings on which he had built his policies, weren’t viable in the long-term.
And as if the unviability of Mr. Chavez’s general economic policies wasn’t enough, he exacerbated the problem by firing the entire BOD, as well as almost half (18k out of 40k) employees of the state oil company (PDVSA) replacing them with government loyalists that knew next to nothing about oil production. Nowadays, PDVSA employs three times as many people as it did before the crisis (120k vs 40k) but produces only 1/3rd of its original output. It pains me to no end to see the people of the country starving to death from poverty, while lake Maracaibo still has an estimated 30b barrels of oil left, much of which is actually on its surface, turning it black.
In what seems to be turning into another cold-war-like conflict, most “western” countries have declared their support to Mr. Guaido, whereas countries traditionally associated with the “eastern bloc” as well as countries with semi, or fully autocratic governments, have largely declared their support to Mr. Maduro. This means that Mr. Maduro, who still has control over the armed forces, has denied his people the much-needed humanitarian aid sent by the world’s richest nations (which generally recognize Mr. Guaido as the President of the country) because he sees the aid convoys as a form of a veiled invasion. On the bright side, Mr. Maduro allowed the arrival of aid from China (one of his backers) and just two days ago, also gave permission to the Red Cross to send more aid within 15 days.
The problem of course is, that no matter how many convoys make it into Venezuela, they can just tackle the consequences, but not the root of the problem: That Venezuela hasn’t had genuinely free elections in the last six years, which fills peoples’ hearts with hopelessness.