The endgame in Venezuela
The country is on the brink of a social explosion that only a negotiated transition can prevent
AT 9.30am on a Thursday six Venezuelans wait for a guided tour of the former military museum that is now the mausoleum of Hugo Chávez, the country’s populist president of 1999-2013. Across the road around 120 people are queuing for food at government-controlled prices from a state-run supermarket. The food queue starts at 3am. “Sometimes there’s food and sometimes there isn’t,” one would-be shopper says.
In this district of Caracas, once a Chávez stronghold, his aura is fading amid the struggle for daily survival. Long gone are the days when he used a massive oil windfall triumphantly to impose his “Bolivarian revolution”, a mishmash of indiscriminate subsidies, price and exchange controls, social programmes, expropriations and grand larceny by officials. The collapse in the oil price has exposed the revolution as a monumental swindle.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The endgame in Venezuela"
From the February 6th 2016 edition
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