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The USA had very little negative influence during the years 1974–2014 in Venezuela.Venezuela’s had cycles with the assertion of control over the oil industry (1943-1974), the oil boom and nationalization of the oil industry (1974-1998), and the government’s attempt to regain control over an increasingly independent oil industry (1999-2003). Nothing has worked….Heterodox stabilization (1985-1988), shock therapy (1989-1992), gradualism (1996-1998), reforms by executive "special powers" (early 1980s, 1993-1994, 1998), reforms by negotiations with opposition parties (1996-1998), stabilization through price controls (1994-1996), deep trade liberalization (1990-1993), concessions to economic losers from trade liberalization (1994-1998), and direct subsidies to vulnerable sectors (1990-1992).Major regional governments appear ready to do more to confront Nicolas Maduro’s lawless regime and to provide relief to Venezuelans — including millions of refugees — who are suffering because of cruel repression and a ravaged economy. But, some regional leaders believe, other than targeted sanctions and strong statements, there is no comprehensive U.S. strategy.Maduro and his cabal have no moral or legal authority to manage the country or dictate its future. Under the energized leadership of President Trump’s appointees — Kim Breier at the State Department and Mauricio Claver-Carone on National Security Council staff — U.S. diplomats should work with a coalition of willing governments to defeat the narcostate in Venezuela.The Trump team also should expose, sanction, indict and prosecute Cuban officials in Venezuela for their involvement in corruption, narcotrafficking and aiding and abetting Colombian terrorists. To address the latter challenge, a formal security arrangement with Colombia makes sense. In addition, senior U.S. officials must warn Russia and China that continued support for the illegal regime threatens to impact their international standing.One urgent task is instructing the U.S. military to prepare for likely contingencies, in coordination with our allies, to protect human life and restore order. Retired career diplomat William Brownfield, who served as the State Department’s anti-narcotics chief and as ambassador to Caracas, is a logical candidate for that role.Since Nicola Maduro is in power (2013) the various indirect and direct sanctions where required as the government had shifted to a socialism format regime very close to Cuba suspending all open transparent avenues allowing any real democracy. This is a hands-off dictatorship at this point. Only a military coup within Venezuela military or any International Military option are left on the table to implement to reset the complete and total government mismanagement. Venezuela has all the models of oil success that have failed due to many incontrollable factors: Corruption, destruction of the state of police. destruction or nationalisation of most private industry…and the list goes on extensively as in any third world country.Venezuela experienced the highest rate of inflation in the world. During the year to the end of February 2018, prices in Venezuela jumped by more than 6,000%, according to the National Assembly's estimates, which are dominated by opposition groups.Sadly, the Venezuela socialist style countries also don’t produce any advances in technology…or entrepreneurship nor manufacturing. They destroyed this sector of the economy. When there is no way to make a profit, there is nobody who will spend time or money researching and creating new technology to improve the products. Even though it’s uncomfortable to think that a pharmaceutical company is profiting from sick people, the alternative is that no medical companies exist and drug research stops completely. the systematic failures in society won’t be permanently fixed by donations or campaigns hoping that people want to make the moral decision. If a morally questionable opportunity exists, people will exploit it as long as they can make money. If you want to end homelessness, you’re going to need to find a way to put the Venezuela people to work. Simply begging for donations or spreading awareness of a cause isn’t good enough. Until there is a better alternative, people will continue to act in the status quo. There is no real opposition, real police and legal system,….no real government and no real work force. Educated Venezuelans have emigrated outside Venezuela. (4,3 million) . The ones that have not left cannot work in the Venezuela highly technical oil structure and oil production is down to under one million barrel per day excluding the Chavez Orinoco belt of heavy oil. Maracaibo oil wells are not capable to produce and oil is everywhere leaking in the Maracaibo lake thru the hudreds of corroded pipelines.As Chavez's socialist-inspired revolution most industry now have collapsed into economic ruin, as food and medicine slip further out of reach, oil cannot be pumped and the new migrants include the same impoverished people that Venezuela's policies were supposed to help.Desperate Venezuelans are streaming across the Amazon Basin by the tens of thousands to reach Brazil. They are concocting elaborate scams to sneak through airports in Caribbean nations that once accepted them freely. When Venezuela opened its border with Colombia in october, 120,000 people poured across, simply to buy food, officials said. An untold number stayed.But, perhaps, most startling reality the Venezuelans are now fleeing by sea, an image so symbolic of the perilous journeys to escape Cuba or Haiti — but not oil-rich Venezuela.Inflation will hit nearly 4,500 per cent this year and a mind-boggling 6,600 per cent next year, the International Monetary Fund estimates, shrivelling salaries and creating a new class of poor Venezuelans who have abandoned professional careers for precarious lives abroad.The exodus is unfolding so quickly that since 2015 about 50,000 + Venezuelans have moved to the border region that includes the Brazilian state of Roraima, officials say. Now the Brazilian army is boosting patrols along highways and rivers, bracing for even more arrivals. to control…"We're at the start of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in this part of the Amazon," said Col. Edvaldo Amaral, the state's civil defence chief. "We're already seeing Venezuelan lawyers working as supermarket cashiers, Venezuelan women resorting to prostitution, indigenous Venezuelans begging at traffic intersections."The Venezuela crisis originated in 1974 during the first OPEC oil embargo. Thru the 1980 crisis after crisis , government after government ,Venezuela's Ax-Relax-Collapse Reform Cycle , every new President has come to office hoping to introduce economic correctives, to the point where almost every policy approach has been tried: heterodox stabilization (1985-1988), shock therapy (1989-1992), gradualism (1996-1998), reforms by executive "special powers" (early 1980s, 1993-1994, 1998), reforms by negotiations with opposition parties (1996-1998), stabilization through price controls (1994-1996), deep trade liberalization (1990-1993), concessions to economic losers from trade liberalization (1994-1998), and direct subsidies to vulnerable sectors (1990-1992). Nothing has worked. These policies failed either to deliver a lasting solution or to last long enough to achieve results: Failure.Essentially, Venezuela has been stuck in an ax-relax-collapse cycle of reform. Each cycle begins with the eruption of an economic crisis, to which the government responds by implementing harsh cutbacks and adjustments-the "ax." After some initially positive results, the reforms soon lose momentum, becoming either haphazardly implemented or prematurely abandoned-the "relax" stage. This culminates in yet another economic crisis-the "collapse." With the launch of "Agenda Venezuela" in 1996, Venezuela embarked on its fourth such reform cycle since 1979, succumbing shortly after to the same pattern of relaxation and collapse. The main difference was that, this time, the economic collapse (in 1998) was the worst ever and extended my Nicolas Maduro dictatorship and management.Venezuela is thus neither a case of reform avoidance nor of neoliberal transition, but rather of reform non-consolidation. It is the prototype of a "reform-lagging" country. Reform-lagging countries develop special political problems that complicate the capacity of the corupt political system to manage the economy.Another problem of repeated reform failures is that reform opponents gain ground. Reform opponents argue, groundlessly but convincingly, that ailments are caused by the attempted reforms, conveniently avoiding the real diagnostic-that ailments are the result of not completing the reform process. Venezuela's two most recent presidents (Rafael Caldera, 1994-1999 and Chávez, 1999-present) came to office by invoking this fallacy. Repeated reform failures also make common citizens equate adjustment, a word that they had been hearing for the past twenty years, as wasted sacrifice, as one more scam by which traditional, corrupt politicians pass on the costs of adjustment to the citizenry, only to squander the resulting savings. Confidence in the state and professional politicians tends to evaporate in this reform-lagging -failure state of Venezuela.This distinguished Venezuela's major parties from the leading party in Mexico, the PRI, which, although less democratic, always underwent rotation of leaders with every new administration. In 1993 Caldera capitalized on the anti-party sentiment of the population by cobbling together an alliance between a small, leftist party (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS) and a last-minute coalition of independent leftist-nationalist forces (Convergencia).Once in office, this coalition proved to be fragmentation-prone and reform-adverse. Caldera had no option but to court the very same parties that he had campaigned against-AD and Copei. These parties, however, sold their support at a very high price, consenting only to tepid reform in return for populist concessions.The electoral results of 1998-1999 demonstrated, not so much the popularity of the new president, which is unquestionably high, but rather the repudiation of traditional parties, which was overwhelming. Chávez has won elections comfortably, but 42.6 percent of voters still voted against him. In the Constitutional assembly, his candidates obtained 61 percent of the total popular vote, with an abstention rate of 54%.Chávez could still be encumbered by the same political constraints that fettered previous presidents.One constraint is the propensity of the ruling coalition to fragment, especially if market reforms are ever announced. Chávez's ruling coalition, Polo Patriótico, is almost identical to Caldera's- an ad hoc, last-minute mélange of small, marginal parties of the left and the military sector, with support from defecting factions of some traditional parties. This coalition is also susceptible to the same structural instability as the preceding one. None of the parties in the Polo Patriótico has developed a strong political machine, which might compel Polo's leaders to use state resources to build political machineries. This is tantamount to pressures for populism from within.In 1993, the old left came to power almost by accident-by cleverly aligning themselves with the most probable victor, Rafael Caldera. And despite their disastrous performance in office during 1994-1998, they still managed to retain power, again by conveniently bandwagoning with the most likely winner, Hugo Chávez.The old left has always been on the fringe of political competition, and hence, insulated from mechanisms that would penalize, and possibly expunge, political vices. It is, therefore, unclear that the old left has freed itself of the same excesses that doomed the politicians of traditional parties-a propensity to privilege populism over real solutions to economic predicaments, to arrive at decisions through closed-doors deliberation, to create impediments for the entry of new talent and ideas, to be disdainful of dissent. These are the same vices that precluded Venezuela's old political leadership from responding responsibly to continued economic crises.Much has changed in Venezuela in the last years. But one of the country's most pernicious political scourges-the capacity of political elites to retain leadership position regardless of electoral contests- still lingers. As long as this democratic deficit endures, don't expect Venezuela's fiscal deficits to go away that easily. Where is he elite educated opposition at this moment ?Chávez’s VenezuelaWhen he became president, Chávez claimed that PDVSA had become “a state within the state”—an enterprise disconnected from the nation pursuing its own interests. Now critics claim that PDVSA has become a“meta-state”: a powerful instrument of the state unaccountable to society. According to some analysts, April 11–14, 2002, marked a shift in Chávez’s oil policy. After being overthrown, it is claimed that Chávez “negotiated” the oil industry: decided to take a more conservative course so as not to alienate foreign powers.Chávez has presented as a nationalist triumph his policy of repudiating old service contracts and forcing oil companies to become joint ventures. Some of his critics (from the left as well as from the corporate oil sector) claim that this policy, far from being nationalist, has entailed the privatization and de-nationalization of the oil industry. Can the state in a dependent country like Venezuela define an independent energy policy, or is the state already constrained by structures and rules established by dominant actors?There is common agreement that oil is the foundation of Venezuela as a modern nation. Do you think that oil policies have been given central place in public discussions in Venezuela, at any time or particularly now, as part of this participative democracy? Do you think that the political system in Venezuela has made it possible for ordinary Venezuelans to understand what happens to their common patrimonyIn a revolution that has taken as its declared mandate a preferential option for the poor, the question remains to be answered about how much difference the Chávez government has made in their lives. Here, several experts give their perspectives on poverty reduction and equity. The revolutionary cry for “popular dignity” is limited to mere symbolism. The “absolute subordination to the power of the people” is more of a rhetorical rationale for violence than a demand for participatory democracy.The Social Policy of the Bolivarian RevolutionThe formula for social missions was a similar one. Each identified a specific need and sowed the hope of solving the problems of poor people through government actions, whether a health clinic or a night school.Venezuela acts politically as a radical gadfly, while in fact remaining a reliable provider of oil for the United States. Hugo Chávez is an authoritarian populist shaped by both right and left extremism, with growing preference for the latter. However, his drive for international revolutionary leadership is hampered by his erratic governance.Our democracy, obsessed with offering us infrastructure, failed to offer us an imaginary, a vision. Collective consensual narratives should substitute for force.Venezuela's worst economic crisis: What went wrong?Venezuela is experiencing the worst economic crisis in its history, with an inflation rate of over 1400 percent and a volatile exchange rate.Heavily in debt and with inflation soaring, its people continue to take to the streets in protest.President Nicolas Maduro announced the highest increase in the minimum wage ordered by him - 65 percent of the monthly income, and recently announced the creation of a new popular assembly with the ability to re-write the constitution.International concern raised, with Chile and Argentina among the countries expressing worry. The Venezuelan opposition says the move further weakens the chances of holding a vote to remove Maduro.But backing has come from regional leftist allies including Cuba. Bolivia's President Evo Morales said Venezuela had the right to "decide its future... without external intervention."The country sits on the world's largest oil reserves, but, over the past decade, it has been the region's poorest performer in terms of growth of GDP per capita.Since 2014 the government has not made any economic data available making it difficult to track.Oil revenue has sustained Venezuela's economy for years. During the presidency of Hugo Chavez, the price of oil reached a historic high of $100 a barrel.The billions of dollars in revenue were used to finance social programmes and food subsidies.But when the price of oil fell, those programmes and subsidies became unsustainable.The government is also running out of cash. According to the Central Bank of Venezuela, the country has $10.4bn in foreign reserves left, and it is estimated to have a debt of $7.2bn.According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures, in 2016, the country had a negative growth rate of minus 8 percent, an inflation rate of 481 percent and an unemployment rate of 17 percent that is expected to climb to 20 percent this year.Currency controls have limited imports, putting a strain on supply.The government controls the price of basic goods, this has led to a black market that has a strong influence on prices too.The most recent report by CENDAS (Centre for Documentation and Social Analysis) indicates that in March 2017 a family of five needed to collect 1.06 million bolivars to pay for the basic basket of goods for one month, that includes food and hygiene items, as well as spending on housing, education, health and basic services.The cost of that basket rosed by 15.8 percent that is an increase of 424 percent compared to 2016.2) Shortages of food and medicinesDuring the rule of Hugo Chavez, the price of key items, food and medicines were reduced. Products became more affordable but they were below the cost of production.Private companies were expropriated, and to stop people from changing the national currency into dollars, Chavez restricted the access to dollars and fixed the rate.The inability to pay for imports with bolivares coupled with the decline in oil revenues has led to a shortage of goods.The state has tried to ration food and set their prices, but the consequence is that products have disappeared from shops and ended up in the black market, overpriced.As many as 85 of every 100 medicines are missing in the country. Shortages are so extreme that patients sometimes take medicines ill-suited for their conditions, doctors warn.Given the long litany of woes, some analysts think there are two options before Maduro's government: to default on its debt or to stop importing food."For those of us who work with a normal wage, we can barely eat, it's like a war situation [we eat what we can get and what we can find] because the price of food is astronomical," Leonardo Bruzal, a Venezuelan citizen, told Al Jazeera.Many Venezuelans search for food, occasionally opting to eat wild fruit or rubbish. "We are facing a food crisis," analyst Jose Guerra explained to Al Jazeera.3) HyperinflationVenezuela has established different exchange rate systems for its national currency, the bolivar.One rate was established for what the government determines to be "essential goods", other for "non-essential goods" and another one for people.The two primary rates overvalue the bolivar, but the black market values the bolivar at near worthless.This has generated a situation in which Venezuelans are opting for dollars instead of bolivares.The government maintains a trade around 710 bolivares per US dollar.At 10 under Venezuela's other official rateBut the black-market rate has risen to 4,283 bolivars for one dollar.The government has also increased the number of bolivares available in the streets, as the money in circulation has not been enough to pay for basic goods that today cost a lot more. This has stoked fears of hyperinflation.On April 30, Maduro announced a 34.42 percent increase in the total salary.Faced with this new wage increase - the 15 during Maduro's mandate - economists reacted saying that this measure is insufficient to deal with inflation, which they warn is going to worsen with this setting.The one relative bright spot in Venezuela’s oil industry today is the superheavy Orinoco fields, jointly operated with foreign firms since the 1990s-era opening of the sector. Crude production in the Orinoco actually grew during the first half of this decade, and even now production declines have been modest. That’s a sharp contrast to steep output declines at traditional oil fields solely operated by PDVSA. But even the superheavy fields are struggling to keep production levels close to steady. Before it can export the heavy bitumen, PDVSA needs to blend it with light oil, and since at least 2010,Venezuela’s own light oil production in Zulia & Maracaibo has been falling. That forces the state energy company to spend much-needed cash importing light oil. Venezuela also imports lots of gasoline for the Venezuelans inside the country….which it gives away to consumers for a paltry 4 cents a gallon. And it loses money when purchasers reject its cargoes of crude oil for their poor quality, an increasingly common problem. In other cases, it doesn’t even get paid: While the country now sends China 400,000-odd barrels a day, for example, Beijing considers them repayment for Caracas’s debts. Meanwhile, despite the collapse of its oil industry, Venezuela continues to buy foreign oil to ship, at a loss, to the regime’s ideological cousins in Cuba — a bitter legacy of Chávez’s plan to use Venezuela’s oil riches to buy friends in the Caribbean neighborhood as the 19 country Perto-Caribe oil supply agreement[Guyana just discovered it owns enough oil to solve all its problems — and cause even bigger ones.]All these problems cost PDVSA — and Venezuela — huge amounts of cash. Selling oil at a discount, shipping it off to China (and Russia) to pay off the national debt, and subsidizing Venezuelan drivers cost the company, and the country, more than $20 billion a year, Monaldi estimated. Among other things, this massive shortfall has made it increasingly difficult for PDVSA to pay service companies such as Halliburton and Schlumberger, which help it drill for oil. Last year, the two companies wrote off more than $1.5 billion in unpaid bills owed by PDVSA. And since they’re not getting paid, they’ve slowed their work on the mature oil fields that were once Venezuela’s livelihood. That means even less light oil — which makes all the industry’s other problems even harder to solve.That toxic mix collided last year, when production suddenly collapsed by 50 percent, marking a net decline of 2 million barrels a day since Chávez launched his plan to use Venezuela’s huge oil endowment to build a socialist paradise. The oil ministry now is reportedly bracing for a further fall during the rest of this year, to as low as 1.2 million barrels a day.The only way Venezuela, which is broke and stripped of talent, can possibly fix its oil industry today is by relying more on foreign companies. Even if they were given a free hand, however, it’s not clear that international firms could turn things around anytime soon; the lack of investment in recent years hasn’t helped the health of Venezuela’s oil fields. “If you messed up the reservoir by overproducing or underinvesting, then you just can’t pick up where you left off,” the international oil company executive said. “They’ve probably done some long-term damage to the reservoirs.”But Caracas seems unwilling to even test the proposition and continues doing everything it can to alienate the very businesses it needs so badly. In April, for example, government agents arrested two Chevron executives who reportedly refused to cooperate in overbilling for oil supplies. The two were held for months while facing possible treason charges, which carry a prison sentence of up to 30 years.[Encouraging a coup in Caracas will give Russia and China a foothold in the United States’ backyard.]Real reform would require a wholesale change in the country’s economic management: getting hyperinflation under control, establishing a stable and realistic exchange rate, and building an enforceable legal framework that could offer foreign investors some semblance of predictability and protection. Of course, it’s impossible to imagine Maduro doing any of those things, especially after recently winning (or stealing) another term. And his re-election carries additional short-term risks for the tottering Venezuelan oil sector. The United States is considering additional sanctions that could limit exports of U.S. crude and refined products to Venezuela or even ban the purchase of Venezuelan crude by U.S. refineries. Either move, or both, would deal yet another body blow to an industry already on its knees. What likely can’t be put back together again is the state oil company. “There is no money in the world that can bring that back,” Burelli said. “You might be able to rebuild an oil sector full of private players but not PDVSA.”Ultimately, Caracas’s bid to nationalize the oil industry and assert its sovereign rights to the country’s black gold has all but ensured that less and less of that wealth will be left for Venezuelans. With no other vibrant economic sector, the only way to fund the government is by increasing oil production — which would require investing up to $10 billion a year for a decade, Burelli suggested — and the only way to attract that kind of investment is by offering international companies favorable terms. That means a bigger cut for them and a smaller cut for the state.As Burelli put it, “To resurrect the oil sector, somebody will have to invest in it on their terms, not our terms, and that will not generate revenue. So, what will we live off?”This article originally appeared in the July 2018 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.Keith Johnson is Foreign Policy’s global geoeconomics correspondent. @KFJ_FPVenezuela’s increasingly authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro knows people are going hungry in his country, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He keeps announcing new stopgap measures, but his words don’t carry a lot of nutritional weight.One of the latest programs was the so-called plan conejo (rabbit plan), a failed attempt to start rabbit farms all over the capital in order to substitute the proteins that come from unaffordable chicken and even more unaffordable beef.“We want people to stop seeing these [rabbits] as pets and start seeing them as what they really are, two kilograms of meat full of protein,” declared Minister of Urban Agriculture Freddy Bernal.But, indeed, Venezuelans traditionally do see rabbits as pets and not food, so in areas where the government brought rabbits to start farms people started adopting them, giving them funny nicknames, and even embellishing their long ears with colorful bows. No question of eating the little dears after that.“What we really need is a solution, not those crazy measures the government is inventing,” says Natalí, whose life is a daily grind to find the food to feed herself and her children.Natalí takes a four-wheel-drive car, then a bus, and then the train from Antímano to municipal Coche Market in south Caracas where, for the last three and a half months, she has made her pilgrimage to dig through the garbage left by the vendors—trying to find a half-rotted vegetable, a piece of fruit, or, if luck is on her side, chicken skin to take back home and feed her children.Five years ago in Venezuela, the charismatic Commander Hugo Chávez, president and leader of the so-called socialist revolution of the 21st century, distributed widely the abundant revenues produced by Venezuela’s oil production. With the prices of the barrel of oil hovering around $100 back then, no Venezuelan could have predicted the hard times yet to come.That was when, together with her husband and five kids, Natalí decided to move to the capital looking for some of those riches the socialist leader spread among the poorest. But when he died in 2013 things took an unexpected and for her a very unfortunate turn.With the arrival to power of Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s successor, Venezuela’s situation deteriorated quickly. Out of control inflation and severe food shortages led to 120 days of protests and general unrest in the nation.It was in this atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty, precisely, that Natalí’s family was about to receive a new member and lose an old one.She was pregnant again. Her husband, an unemployed builder, could not withstand the pressure of feeding six kids, so he decided to abandon them.Now, with six kids and unable to work, Natalí had to make what she recalls was the hardest choice ever: to send her older son to work at the landfill in west Caracas.“This is something that breaks my soul,” she says through tears. “I want my boy to go to school, to have a different future, but I cannot afford it. How can I buy a notebook? The oldest, he’s a good kid, he helps me a lot. It’s very painful to send him to dig in the garbage just to be able to eat.”Sadly this story is not unusual in today’s Venezuela. The high inflation rates and food shortages that followed Chavez’s death have made many basic products unaffordable for 80 percent of the nation that has been plunged into poverty.In the capital, it is common to bump into individuals or even families that, like Natalí’s, live on the garbage. Around Sabana Grande Boulevard many families with kids watch avidly over the piles of garbage outside the restaurants, waiting for the leftovers. Some of these families are not homeless, some of them even have jobs, but their incomes are not enough to eat.Right next to a dumpster outside a shopping mall, four families wait for in the afternoon for the moment when the restaurant owners take out the leftovers. Three mothers, seven kids and 28-year-old Luis Miguel, the only man, eagerly search the container every day hoping to find something good to eat or to sell.When Luis Miguel talks, you can see the shame his condition causes him, but at the same time the stoicism he has assumed in his determination to feed his children.“I used to work in the metrocable in San Agustín [a cable car service]. With my salary I was able to buy enough food for my family and I even dreamed about building a proper house for us. But then it seems like things went crazy. I got fired and the little money I earned doing small jobs was not enough to feed my family, so I started doing this.“In the beginning, it was just two days a week, but lately things have gotten so rough that I decided to stay here the whole time. If I move, someone else will take over my spot. I have even seen people fighting with knives for a dumpster like mine. At least here I can find something to feed my children.”According to a recent study by Cáritas, a catholic NGO that helps the poorest sectors of society, five to six children die in Venezuela from malnutrition every day, and the toll may reach as high as 280,000 in coming years if these trends continue.Meanwhile, the secretary of the union of workers in zoos and national parks, Marlene Sifontes, says the situation in the zoos is far worse than the headlines have suggested. It’s not just a question of animals being eaten, it’s the question of whether the animals themselves will be able to eat at all. Some animals are dying from malnutrition and some others are dying because of the lack of medicines for the treatments they require.The most emblematic case: Ruperta the Elephant. She is one of the oldest animals in the zoo of Caricuao, but here emeritus status could not prevent hunger. Much like Natalí and Luis Miguel and their families, and indeed like most Venezuelans, Ruperta the Elephant is going hungry.Venezuela's worst economic crisis: What went wrong?Venezuela in the 1980s, the 1990s and beyondHow Hugo Chávez Blew Up Venezuela’s Oil PatchPets on the Menu as Venezuelans StarvePromo steem, Food crisis and drugs in venezuela country — SteemkrHungry Venezuelans flee in boats to escape economic collapseU.S., region can get tougher on the lawless Maduro regime