Et par gode venner har de seneste (snart mange) år i ny og næ sent forskellige artikler om udviklingen i Venezuela. Det var dystopisk læsning om et landet regeret af en mand og en socialistisk bevægelse, der havde sat sig for at opfylde deres løfter om en socialistisk samfund på overfladen gennemført ved demokratiske midler. ‘Det går galt’ tænkte man når man læste de forskellige eksperter, de fleste bekymrede, men også en håndfuld skadefro, forklare om det ene og det andet regeringstiltag, mens nøgletal blev hevet frem som dokumentation på at Venezuela blev styret ind i en ond spiral. Og det gik galt, som ekspertisen, der mest var baseret i USA, fortalte.

Atlantic har en fremragende beskrivelse

The news coming from Venezuela—including shortages as well as, most recently, riots over blackouts; the imposition of a two-day workweek for government employees, supposedly aimed at saving electricity; and an accelerating drive to recall the president—is dire, but also easy to dismiss as representing just one more of these recurrent episodes.

That would be a mistake. What our country is going through is monstrously unique: It’s nothing less than the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States.

In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.

But why? It’s not that the country lacked money. Sitting atop the world’s largest reserves of oil at the tail end of a frenzied oil boom, the government led first by Chavez and, since 2013, by Maduro, received over a trillion dollars in oil revenues over the last 17 years. It faced virtually no institutional constraints on how to spend that unprecedented bonanza. It’s true that oil prices have since fallen—a risk many people foresaw, and one that the government made no provision for—but that can hardly explain what’s happened: Venezuela’s garish implosion began well before the price of oil plummeted. Back in 2014, when oil was still trading north of $100 per barrel, Venezuelans were already facing acute shortages of basic things like bread or toiletries.

The real culprit is chavismo, the ruling philosophy named for Chavez and carried forward by Maduro, and its truly breathtaking propensity for mismanagement (the government plowed state money arbitrarily into foolish investments); institutional destruction (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions); nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families).

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In the midst of all this, Venezuela is facing one of the worst Zika outbreaks in South America, and it’s an epidemic the country can hardly measure, much less respond to. The Universidad Central de Venezuela’s Institute for Tropical Medicine is where the crime and public-health crises collide. The institute—ground zero in the country’s response to tropical epidemics—was burglarized a shocking 11 times in the first two months of 2016. The last two break-ins took place within 48 hours of one another, leaving the lab without a single microscope. Burglars rampaged through the lab, scattering samples of highly dangerous viruses and toxic fungal spores into the air.

Conditions like those make it virtually impossible for institute researchers to do their work, crippling the country’s response to the Zika outbreak. And attempts to repair the damage are undercut by the same dysfunctions that afflict the rest of the economy: There’s just no money to replace the expensive imported equipment criminals have stolen.

I april kunne man se denne rapportage (der tages forbehold for lidt søvlpapirshat til slut) fra Venezuela på Youtube

In this video Luke Rudkowski and Jeff Berwick travel down to Caracas Venezuela to give you a report on how people live in socialism. We not only give you a detailed update on life in Caracas but a complete social and economic breakdown of the situation on the ground.

En detalje i rapportagen, som jeg med stigende bekymring lægger mærke til andre steder, er hvorledes våbenforbud og totalitarisme ser ud til at gå hånd i hånd. Som dansker er man ikke vandt til denne afstand mellem folk og magthavere fordi mindelig uenighed er indgroet i vores traditionelt tætte nationale sammenhold. Men med den stigende befolkningsudskiftning trues dette sammenhold samtidig med at magthavere bryder kontrakten om at sikre den lov og orden, som vi ellers selv skulle sikre med våben i hånd.

En anden god ven rapporterer meget om Sverige, et andet tidligere velstående land, der føres ind i en ond progressiv spiral af et på overfladen demokratisk system.