'We loot or we die of hunger': food shortages fuel unrest in Venezuela

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

'We loot or we die of hunger': food shortages fuel unrest in Venezuela

As the country’s economic problems mount, towns and cities have been hit by an outbreak of looting and violence

John Otis in Bogotá
Sun 21 Jan 2018 06.16 GMT

Amid desperate food shortages Venezuelans are picking up new survival skills.

On the night of 9 January, for example, a hungry mob took just 30 minutes to pick clean a grocery store in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz. By the time owner Luis Felipe Anatael arrived at the bodega he’d opened five months earlier, the looters had hauled away everything from cold cuts to ketchup to the cash registers.

“It makes you want to cry,” said Anatael in a telephone interview. “I think we are headed for chaos.”

Evidence for his prediction can be found in towns and cities across Venezuela that have been hit by an outbreak of looting and mob violence. Angry about empty supermarket shelves and skyrocketing prices, some people are breaking into warehouses, ransacking food trucks and invading outlying farms.

During the first 11 days of January the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict, a Caracas rights group, recorded 107 episodes of looting and several deaths in 19 of Venezuela’s 23 states.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/21/venezuela-looting-violence-food-shortages

[Irish_Dem]

1. Heartbreaking. My Irish ancestors were systematically starved by the British.

Wide spread and long term starvation devastates a population and the damage goes down the generations.

It is heart breaking to see Venezuela do this to its own people.

[DetlefK]

2. What happens, when there is nothing left to pillage?

[GatoGordo]

3. They are at that point. The merchants have refused to reorder merchandise.

My wife (VZ expat) and I spent last week in Aruba on holiday, talking to Venezuelans and VZ expats from her girlhood days. There is NOTHING to eat in the stores that can be purchased by El Pueblo. They are dependent upon CLAP boxes that are becoming more infrequent; and when they DO arrive, are already pilfered by CLAP agents.

Of course, these boxes aren't just given to anyone. You have to have a Maduro mandated "Chavismo Loyalty Card", and your name has to show up on the list of people who have recently voted for PSUV in the recent sham elections.

Because that's how Chavismo rolls...