Venezuela’s socialist dictator, President Nicolás Maduro, “has intensified his crackdown on independent economists and consultants, detaining at least eight people in what critics call a bid to control data exposing Venezuela’s decline,” reports Bloomberg News:
Detentions began last week, with some released after a few hours and others still being held by the government, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified to avoid reprisals. Only one of those detained has been publicly identified — Rodrigo Cabezas, a finance minister under former President Hugo Chávez. The 68-year-old was picked up by authorities on June 12 in Maracaibo, according to the Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners. His family says they still don’t know where he’s being held.
The moves mark Maduro’s most aggressive attempt yet to silence alternative voices tracking the country’s economic decline. Venezuelans have long relied on unofficial estimates for inflation, gross domestic product and export revenue as the government has been accused of suppressing or manipulating official statistics….
Earlier this month, authorities arrested nearly two dozen people linked to Monitor Dólar, a popular exchange-rate aggregator that for years posted the black-market dollar price on social media. The site, which last published on May 27, had become a crucial tool for citizens and businesses to navigate Venezuela’s dual-currency system.
Monitor Dólar’s last posted parallel rate was nearly 139 bolivars per dollar. The official exchange rate, meanwhile, stood at 104 as of Thursday….Inflation…surged to a 28-month high of 26% in May…the economy contracted 2.7% in the first quarter — its first decline in two years.
Former U.S. President Joe Biden paid ransoms for Americans detained by Venezuela, which encouraged socialist Venezuela to take even more hostages.
Venezuela was once South America’s richest country. Now, it is the poorest country in South America, due to years of socialist policies.
In 2018, a large minimum wage increase in Venezuela dealt a “fatal blow to 40% of Venezuelan stores,” reported the Miami Herald. After stores closed, employees were left jobless, and some elderly people had difficulty obtaining food.
Dictator Maduro also signed a forced labor law, “informing able-bodied, working-age Venezuelans that they would be forced into agricultural labor in order to boost national production” because some store shelves were “empty” and people couldn’t “find enough to eat.”
Over the past decade, poverty has declined in Latin America, except in socialist dictatorships like Venezuela and Cuba.
The healthcare system in communist Cuba has deteriorated. For most Cubans, health care takes place in crumbling hospitals that lack basic drugs readily available in the U.S.
The Cuban healthcare system has been bad for years. A 2014 news report noted that “hospitals in the island’s capital are literally falling apart.” Sometimes, patients “have to bring everything with them, because the hospital provides nothing. Pillows, sheets, medicine: everything.”
Before the communist takeover, Cubans lived longer than people in virtually all other Latin American nations. But that changed under the communist regime that took over in 1959. Back in 1960, Chileans had a life span seven years shorter than Cubans, and Costa Ricans lived more than two years less than Cubans on average. But Cuba lost that advantage in life expectancy by 2012, according to the World Almanac. By 2017, Costa Ricans lived five years longer than Cubans, and Chileans lived three years longer than Cubans. In 1960, Mexicans lived seven years shorter than Cubans; by 2017, the gap had virtually disappeared, shrinking to just four months.
