By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — As U.S. voters prepared to set their nation on course for the next four years and even beyond, a few Venezuelan expatriates in the metropolitan Phoenix area spoke about what had become of their South American homeland under strong-arm socialist rule.
Venezuela’s descent into widespread poverty, hunger, and violence is a warning of where the United States could be headed under a continuation of meddling radical Barack Obama’s disastrous left-wing agenda, many U.S. conservatives, independents, and even Democrats fear.
Those misgivings were increased by current “Project Veritas” videos (projectveritas
action.com) exposing U.S. Democratic Party operatives bragging about inciting violence and vote fraud as ways to help their party succeed. Looking to the south, they might be inspired by some left-wing Latino dictatorships.
The U.S.’s island neighbor Cuba collapsed into general poverty and despair after Communist radicals led by Fidel Castro took over in 1959. Forty years later in Venezuela, elections put socialist Hugo Chavez in control in 1999, ruling until his death from cancer in 2013. He was succeeded by his socialist vice president, Nicolas Maduro, who continues clinging to dictatorial power.
Time after time, Obama craftily has sought to increase federal government control over Americans, including their very health care after his aggressive crusade of lies, threats, and bribes to pass Obamacare.
Obama even began to dictate what religious beliefs and moral foundations Catholics and other Americans can have, while his aggressive bureaucrats kept subjugating the nation’s economy.
The Democratic presidential nominee seeking to succeed him, radical Alinskyite Hillary Clinton, vowed to appoint left-wing Supreme Court justices to lock in massive permissive abortion and “gay marriage” as part of her proclaimed agenda to change the way Americans think about these core issues.
This hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press on November 3, a few days before nationwide elections on November 8.
In mid-July, a suburban Phoenix biweekly, Wrangler News, ran an article about three local expatriates worried about conditions in their Venezuelan homeland, headlined, “Local families fear the worst for their starving loved ones.”
In an October 28 telephone interview, The Wanderer followed up by speaking with a U.S.-born relative of two of these people.
They didn’t want their true names used due to fear of reprisals being taken against their relatives back home.
Venezuela was crippled by factors including government high spending, overregulation, mismanagement, and cronyism.
“People are desperate” in Venezuela, the U.S.-born relative told The Wanderer. “…People are dying from hunger. That never used to be the case in Venezuela. A solid middle class has been destroyed. . . .
“My heart really just grieves for my relatives…because I wish we could help them,” she added later in the interview. “. . .They had such a really good life, but it’s been squandered away” by socialist rule.
She started to say she wished she could bring them here to live, then corrected herself and said the answer is to restore the life they had there.
Venezuela’s infant-mortality rate is higher than Syria’s now, she said, and Afghanistan is safer.
The Wrangler News article quoted one of the Arizona residents, going by the pseudonym Javier Cortez:
“Cortez said he blames Venezuela’s socialist government for ruining the country and shutting down opposition. A referendum to recall the president garnered more than a million signatures, but the Maduro regime claims thousands of them were fraudulent. Meanwhile, state workers who signed the referendum have been fired from their jobs.”
The article also said: “Basic necessities like food, medicine, water, and electricity are scarce or nonexistent, all three former Venezuelans said. The oil-rich nation — a founding member of OPEC — has descended into chaos with 750 percent inflation, food riots, and the second-highest murder rate in the world.”
An article posted at National Review on October 27 by José Cardenas, “Venezuela on the brink,” said: “Venezuela under the late socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez and his successors has been this century’s longest national train wreck — and the situation only continues to get worse.
“Colossal economic mismanagement, corruption, and political repression have led to the country’s across-the-board ruin. Indeed, the situation has grown so dire that international organizations are now raising alarm bells about a profound humanitarian crisis,” wrote Cardenas, who had served in senior foreign-policy positions in the George W. Bush administration.
However, Cardenas said, Obama’s government reacted to this crisis by tepidly asking for “dialogue” between the Venezuelan government and the beleaguered opposition.
This means, Cardenas said, “recommending a dialogue between the opposition and a government that has jailed opposition leaders, deprived the opposition-controlled National Assembly of its constitutional powers, postponed gubernatorial elections in which the opposition was set to make major gains, and suppressed the only independent media outlets that gave the opposition a voice.”
The Arizona relative told The Wanderer that when “Cortez’s” sister died prematurely young recently, it didn’t even occur to him to go home for her funeral because of the violence there, with rape, mugging, and thefts occurring “in broad daylight.”
The sister probably wouldn’t have died “if she’d been receiving medical care” now unobtainable, the woman said, adding later that when the man went home for his mother’s death a few years ago, “It was shocking. . . . You can’t leave the house at night.”
“Cortez” is “like a lot of other Venezuelans that came here. . . . They don’t have stars in their eyes when it comes to socialism,” she said.
The Wrangler News article said that because of hyperinflation, people have to carry large bags of cash even to make minor purchases, while hoping they’re not robbed.
In mid-July, international news articles reported that hordes of Venezuelans briefly were allowed to cross into neighboring Colombia to buy desperately needed food and medicine unavailable at home.
BBC News quoted one woman shopper who crossed into Colombia, Gloria Archila, as being “all smiles. ‘They had everything,’ she said, comparing the situation . . . with the empty shelves in markets back home.”
Everyday situations that people in many countries take for granted have become “literally impossible” in Venezuela, the Wrangler News article said. Even if a person manages to have both soap and electricity at the same time in order to wash clothes, “often there is no water.”
The article told of a woman who had only two cans of formula for her baby, but when she learned of another baby who had none, she gave one of her cans for that baby.
The Arizona woman told The Wanderer that a patient in a hospital couldn’t even get bandages, so “we were buying bandages off Amazon” for her.
“When your kids are crying from hunger,” she said later, “people can do things that are desperate.”
She told of a Venezuelan who used to have a “very successful” business, but it’s gone. Since Chavez came to power, followed by Maduro, she said, “They have basically bled the country” into deprivation.
Church agencies can do a better job of helping people than governments, she said, warning against what could happen in elections here. “Change our system and go socialist? It would be a big mistake.”
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