LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Once-rich Venezuelans live as beggars in Colombia, but they don’t want to go back.

“Venezuela… I wouldn’t wish it on even my worst enemy,” a teary-eyed Luis Alfredo Rivas, 32, told el Nuevo Herald at a bus terminal in Bogotá, where he had just arrived from the neighboring country.

Rivas explained how he made the decision to leave. “Venezuela’s minimum wage is only 190,000 bolivars per week, when a kilogram of rice costs 210,000 bolivars. What can I do there?” he asked.

“My plan is to be here, to work and to move ahead and if I can, to bring my family over, too, to get them out of that hell,” he said.

As Venezuela’s economy continues to crumble, thousands of its citizens are trekking into Colombia every day — sometimes by walking hundreds of miles on foot through the Andes — to escape chronic shortages of food and medicine, frequent looting and rampant crime.

Related: Blackout hits parts of Venezuelan capital: witnesses, subway authorities.

The country sitting on top of the world’s largest oil reserves can’t keep its capital city fully lit.