LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: To eat in Venezuela, children work and beg on the streets – to feed their families.

Miguel González, a 10-year old indigenous boy, walks barefoot through the crowded corridors of Maracaibo’s flea market in northwestern Venezuela. He holds a little plastic bag filled with a few pounds of beef skin while a nauseating smell of kept-in-the-open fish, meat and cheese fills the air below a rusty metallic ceiling.

“Please, give me some bones,” he asks, both hands extended to a woman selling meat, who refuses to hand him the leftovers and demands that he leave the premises.

Hunger triggers Miguel’s daily trips to beg for any food or money he can carry home to Carrasquero, a poor town located in the indigenous Wayuu district next to the Colombian border.

“I ask and ask until someone gives me something to prepare a soup at least. We have no food at all at home,” the child tells a reporter. His clothes are torn. His face, hair and feet are stained.

Even an inept and corrupt military junta is preferable to energetic socialists.