UNITED NATIONS ― In a stunningly stark report on the political and economic conditions in Venezuela, the U.N.’s Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet outlined a troubling litany of continuing human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, and economic privations characterizing the besieged Latin American country.

In a groundbreaking report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a U.N. human rights team visited Venezuela and conducted over 500 interviews from President Nicolas Maduro to civil and political figures in the democratic opposition such as interim President Juan Guaido. The conclusions were deeply troubling.

According to the U.N., “while previous reports have highlighted arbitrary detentions, ill-treatment, and torture.” The latest publication warns that “if the situation does not improve, the unprecedented outflow of Venezuelan migrants and refugees will continue, and the living conditions of those who remain will worsen.”

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stated that some 4 million people are believed to have fled the country in the last four years, largely due to food and health care shortages. That’s from a population of 30 million! Venezuelan refugees are pouring into neighboring Colombia and equally going to Peru, Argentina, and Ecuador.

Ms. Bachelet, a former president of Chile stated, “During my visit to Venezuela, I was able to hear the first-hand account of victims of state violence and their demands for justice.”

The 16-page report delivered during Human Rights Council deliberations in Geneva outlines how state institutions have been “steadily militarized” over the past decade and adds that civil and military forces have been “allegedly responsible for arbitrary detentions, ill-treatment, and torture.” It adds, “Successive laws and reforms have facilitated the criminalization of the opposition and of anyone critical of the government.”

Consider the record. Until the end of May this year, 66 people were killed during anti-government protests and another 793 remained in arbitrary detention. Allegations of extrajudicial killings by regime “Special Action Forces” have been “shockingly high.”

In 2018, the government registered 5,287 killings purportedly for “resistance to authority.” Between January and May 19 this year, another 1,569 people were killed according to the government. The most recent case involves the death of retired Navy Captain Rafael Acosta Arevalo who died in government detention after torture.

Regarding the plight of ordinary Venezuelans to get food the report advises, “large sections of the population have no access to food distribution.” Women are particularly hard hit “amid a progressive scarcity and unaffordability of food.” Health care is “dire, with hospitals lacking staff, medicines, and electricity.”

Ironically today’s food shortages and poor health care are mirror opposites of what middle-class Venezuela experienced until the steady privations of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro’s socialist rule.

Venezuela’s oil-rich economy and democratic political system had secured a middle-class life for most citizens until into the early years of Chavez’s rule. But corruption, hyperinflation and now endemic shortages define a once prosperous country.

Escaped Venezuelan MP Miguel Pizarro addressed the Human Rights Council and made a plea for his persecuted countrymen. “According to figures published by the United Nations itself, seven million Venezuelans today need humanitarian aid. More than four million have migrated because of the humanitarian emergency, and at least 630 political prisoners have been documented.”

Pizarro went into hiding after the Maduro regime accused him and other lawmakers of “treason” and stripped them of parliamentary immunity. The European Union later called the Venezuelan action “part of a pattern of blatant violations of due process,” amounting to “clear measures of intimidation.”

Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch who invited MP Pizarro to the hearings added, “Sadly despite our repeated appeals, the U.N. Human Rights Council has refused to establish a commission of inquiry to hold Maduro to account for gross and widespread violations that many experts believe amount to war crimes.”

Cuban security police and military advisors remain Maduro’s enforcers and act as a check upon his own military. Interim President Juan Guaido, despite his democratic credentials, is still barred from office.

Nonetheless, most Latin American countries, the European Union, the U.S., and Canada have diplomatically recognized him as the legitimate government.

In another bid to defuse the dangerous political impasse, Guaido will enter into talks with representatives of the Maduro dictatorship in Barbados to seek a “constitutional solution” to the percolating political crisis.

Venezuela’s cruel misadventure continues as the ruling Maduro regime has turned the once prosperous Latin American land into a socialist dystopia corkscrewing into free fall. Can Venezuela somehow be saved?

John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of “Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China.”

Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2019/07/197_272047.html

The post State violence in Venezuela first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

For the last five years, Venezuelans have been struggling to live with an increasing shortage of food, medicine, electricity and water.

An unprecedented economic crisis and, more recently, the severe US economic sanctions aimed at forcing out President Nicolas Maduro have paralyzed public service.

With hyperinflation running at over one million percent and counting, feeding a family on an average salary has become almost impossible.

One of the very few things that Venezuelans could afford was petrol because it literally cost nothing. A litre of petrol cost $0.000001. But now, even filling one’s car with the fuel has suddenly become an uphill battle for millions of Venezuelans.

Just two hours northwest of the capital, Caracas, you get the first glimpse of a crisis that is spreading.

In the state of Aragua, thousands of car owners spent Sunday in queues that were kilometres long.

“I was in the line yesterday for four hours and did not get a drop. I hope I’ll be luckier today,” said Leonardo Lopez as he waited in the heat for the queue to inch forward.

He pulled out his mobile phone to show that he and his friends had a group chat called ‘Aragua Where Is The Gasoline’ so they let each other know which petrol station still had fuel to sell.

‘Collective catastrophe’

Further west, the shortages are more acute, especially in the states of Carabobo and even Zulia, which is supposed to be Venezuela‘s oil capital.

And in the border state of Tachira, where for months residents have been queueing for days to fill up their car tanks.

“The shortages are now collective catastrophe,” according to State Governor Laidy Gomez.

“The losses are incalculable to the agriculture sector; paralyzed and the limitations for mobilizing health emergencies are generating crimes against humanity,” she said on Twitter on Saturday.

Venezuela’s oil industry accounts for more than 90 percent of its exports [Isaac Urrutia/Reuters]

Carabobo Governor Rafael Lacava appealed to motorists to remain calm and not let “media chaos laboratories” make them nervous.

Harsh US economic sanctions that have specifically targeted Venezuela’s vital oil industry are punishing the already decrepit state-owned petroleum and natural petrol company, PDVSA.

“We are refining at only 20 percent of our installed capacity. In other words, our maximum capacity is 1.3 million barrels a day, but we are only managing to refine 260,000 barrels,” said Alfredo Quiroz, an oil industry expert.

“That is not enough for Venezuela’s five million vehicles. So that means we are having to import gasoline [petrol] to make up for the shortfall.”

‘Bigger problem’

Until now, Venezuela had been buying petrol from the US. But as of April 28, US government sanctions forbidding fuel sales to PDVSA kicked in.

According to Quiroz, the government has signed a 90-day contract to buy petrol from Spain’s oil company REPSOL, in exchange for oil, which for now is being provided by Russia’s energy giant ROSNEFT.

“But we have another bigger problem,” said Quiroz. “The US will no longer sell Venezuela the additives needed to make gasoline at home and they are much harder to find on the world market.

“Mexico’s PEMEX does not have any for sale. Most other companies have already committed their additives too.”

The additives are chemical derivatives of oil, which Venezuela used to produce in abundance. But while the country boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, its state-owned industry is in decay. Most of the plants that used to make the components are paralyzed.

The shortages are more acute in the states of Carabobo and Zulia [Carlos Eduardo Ramirez/Reuters]

The refineries need constant maintenance and some have not received it for years, according to industry insiders.

Venezuela’s lifeline is its oil industry, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the country’s export earnings.

For the last 20 years, PDVSA’s production has been steadily declining from 3.36 million barrels a day in 1998 to approximately 727,000 barrels now.

While the price of its heavy crude was at nearly $100 a barrel, the effect was not so easily perceived. But when it fell to less than $50 a barrel in 2013, Venezuela’s economy quickly began to crash.

Maduro claims that the subsequent hyperinflation, widespread shortages of basic goods and general collapse of the economy are the fallout from an economic war waged by his domestic and foreign enemies, mainly the US.

Opinion polls suggest the majority of Venezuelans blame his government for incompetence and widespread corruption.

The reasons may be the subject of heated debate, but what no one can question is that the current fuel shortage adds yet another layer to the already heavy burden of living in Venezuela.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucia Newman

Latin America Editor

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Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/americas/2019/05/venezuela-petrol-190521061949164.html

The post Venezuela: Where’s the petrol? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Reports in from Venezuela that starving people in that country, the beneficiaries of those glories of Bolivarian socialism, are now breaking into the zoos and butchering the animals in order to be able to eat them. We have seen this before of course, but when the Parisians did it they did actually have the excuse that the Germans had been besieging the city for 99 days. The Venezuelan equivalent stems from nothing but ghastly, silly and incompetent economic policy–but then such is Bolivarian socialism.

One report here:

Zoo animals are being stolen from parks in western Venezuela and police believe they are being snatched to be eaten by the starving local population.
A wave of animal thefts in city of Maracaibo near the Colombian border – including tapirs and a buffalo – have been linked to the chronic food shortages in Venezuela
Most recently, two collared peccaries, similar in appearance to boars, were stolen over the weekend, local police say.

I’d actually be quite interested in trying peccary bacon to be honest, but I do indeed hope never to be riven to stealing one from a zoo as a result of Jeremy Corbyn gaining power.

“What we presume is that they (were taken) with the intention of eating them,” Luis Morales, an official for the Zulia division of the National Police, told reporters on Tuesday.

The chaotic collapse of the country’s socialist economic model has created chronic food shortages that have fuelled malnutrition and left millions seeking food anywhere they can find it, including in trash cans and dumpsters.

That’s what bad economic management can do for you, reduce the country with the world’s largest oil reserves to a nation of dumpster divers. Well done there, well done.

Do note, as I continually do, that this isn’t about socialism per se. There’s nothing wrong with the idea that the poor should get a fairer shake of the stick for example, no problem at all with–voluntary of course–workers’ cooperatives and the like. We have them in our own economies, they work just fine. It’s the method by which they tried to bring this all about which was the error, a gross one of course. For they decided that what Venezuela didn’t need was a market system nor the prices that guide such. So, they just fixed prices at what they thought were fun numbers and then stood by as the entire productive and distributive capacity of the nation collapsed. Because that’s what the price system does, coordinates the productive and distributive capacity of the nation. We have no other method, as Hayek pointed out we cannot even calculate, let alone manage, the economy without using market mechanisms.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/08/17/venezuelas-starving-people-are-now-eating-the-zoo-animals-the-parisians-had-the-german-excuse/#3bf7f877d2cc

The post Venezuela’s Starving People Are Now Eating The Zoo Animals – The Parisians Had The German Excuse first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.