Venezuela is hell on earth for the country’s poor. While the poor have long been forced into complacency thanks to welfare benefits provided by a state once wealthy off of oil revenues, the country’s coffers have dried up and now the poor are rebelling.
“For most of Venezuela’s two-decade socialist experiment, the city’s wealthier, whiter east has been the hotbed of anti-government sentiment,” reports Bloomberg. “Now, noisy protests are erupting in poorer-but-calmer western neighborhoods that were strongholds for embattled President Nicolas Maduro as crime explodes and medicine and food are scarce and expensive.”
La Candelaria, a neighborhood a few blocks away from corrupt dictator Nicolas Maduro’s lavish Miraflores Palace, is ground zero for what is beginning to look a lot like a rebellion or a civilian uprising. But overall, Caracas has become a hotbed of dissent, as disenchanted Venezuelans begin to emerge out of decades of complacency and see the regime for what it really is without all of its oil wealth, just another socialist dystopian experiment. Banging kitchenware and erecting makeshift barricades, Venezuelans are no longer satisfied with the status quo; they want change and if it means disturbing the peace and sacrificing life and limb in the face of armed guards with live rounds and riot gear, so be it.
For three months now, civilians from all walks of life, young and old, rich and poor have littered the streets to protest for freedom and economic liberty. Unlike the protests in 2014, when the middle and upper classes focused their ire against the regime’s confiscation of private property and other tyrannical moves designed to artificially sustain an unsustainable socialist dream, this year, the poor are lending their voices to the collective battle cry.
“This time, the opposition has gained significant international support,” notes Bloomberg. “And inside the nation, key defections from the ruling party and the west-side unrest show that Maduro may be losing elements of the base that has sustained the socialist ideology in the face of poverty and condemnation.”
But even as people starve, breaking into zoos and slaughtering horses for their meat, socialist champions in the West remain silent, refusing to comment on the tragic plight of Venezuela’s poor. From the U.K.’s Jeremy Corbyn to Bernie Sanders, old socialist white men who have praised the impish architect of Venezuelan socialism, Hugo Chavez, cower behind abstract rhetoric about “income inequality” without accounting for the human cost of forceful government redistribution schemes.
As The Daily Wire’s Aaron Bandler reported, Sanders was asked point-blank about the suffering of the Venezuelan people by a Spanish-language television station during the 2016 presidential election.
“Sanders dodged the question by saying his focus was on running for president of the United States of America,” noted Bandler at the time. “When pressed further Sanders said, ‘Of course I have an opinion, but as I said, I’m focused on my campaign.’ ”