LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s imploding economy sparks refugee crisis.
Many wore threadbare clothes. Their sunken cheeks and wiry limbs suggested this was the first decent meal they had eaten in days. Children were barefoot. One man hobbled in on crutches, his right leg amputated below the knee. Another pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
These are the weary, often desperate victims of the worst migration crisis in recent Latin American history. Some had arrived from Venezuela that morning, escaping food shortages, hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, disease and violence. Others had been in Colombia for days or weeks, looking for work, scavenging for food, sleeping in the streets and avoiding deportation.
While the eyes of the world have been on the Syrian refugee crisis and the exodus of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, Venezuela’s humanitarian disaster has gone relatively unnoticed.
Sad, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed — or unpredicted — around here.