Alek Boyd has been doing some fantastic reporting on the state of poor society in Venezuela, actually talking to people and seeing what it’s like in their often ignored world.
Are you aware that Venezuela’s poor are poorer than any other western hemispheric nation’s poor? I mean places like Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil and Bolivia?
I sure wasn’t. But apparently, it’s true. And it’s not surprising. Take a huge oil economy that drives out all other trade. Couple it with unchecked illegal immigration, rendering millions of people without legal papers. Add onto it layers of socialism which preceded Chavez, which taxes businesses to death, employs only bureaucrats, and crushes the private sector. Add on top of that, an oil boom, a massive crime rate that kills 40 Venezuelans a day, a government that chases out all foreign investment and a Marxist dictator who messianically promised to cure the whole layered dynamic of poverty through even more socialism.
Net result, the poorest, the least-endowed, the most deprived people in the entire hemisphere. I can’t tell you how moving this new piece, with tons of photos that tell the whole story, really is.
Chavez has promised to end poverty. His only accomplishment has been to bring more of it. Now, the poorest of the poor – I am not kidding, these people are Calcutta-poor! – are beginning to reject Chavez. They are not stupid. They live in zinc-sheet hovels (these aren’t the classy slums, the ones made of red brick cinderblocks, these are Tijuana-style slums, circa 1975, real horrors.)
What does this have to do with democratic revolution? Everything.
Hugo Chavez shovels money at these communities, and amid their want, money is an extremely powerful weapon, more powerful than it would be in other places. That in itself is holding back Venezuela’s democratic revolution and bringing the chains of dictatorship. Now, with Chavez reneging on his campaign promises, thinking the poor are just garbage who can be ignored, the poor are beginning to turn against him, a key move that may not just oust a thug, it may bring democratic revolution to the entire country of Venezuela.
Read the whole thing – on Venezuela’s least-understood people – in this brilliant photoessay by Alek Boyd here.