If you want to know what Britain could turn into if Corbyn moves into No. 10 next week, read on...
ROBERT HARDMAN reports from Venezuela — the socialist country Labour’s leader calls ‘an inspiration’ — where, despite vast oil wealth, millions go hungry and inflation’s set to hit 2,500pc
EYES streaming and gasping for air, a group of protesters struggle to escape a cloud of tear gas.
The men and women — totalling more than 20,000 — are all doctors. As such, they are not the normal type of protester. But then, this is not a normal country.
Indeed, this is not just another South American tin-pot dictatorship teetering on the brink. Tragically, this is day-to-day life in Venezuela — a country where neighbouring governments say ‘democracy has failed’ and yet which Jeremy Corbyn has for a long time regarded as a socialist utopia.
In a nutshell, Venezuela is a monstrous example of how blinkered socialist dogma can wreck the healthiest economy.
Despite sitting on some of the world’s greatest oil reserves, this nation of 30 million is bankrupt and starving.
Inflation is expected to hit a rate of 2,500 per cent by next year. A car’s petrol tank can be filled for less than 5p. Yet it cost me ten times as much to buy a small bottle of water. A bag of rice costs a week’s minimum wage. The currency, the bolivar, is now so devalued that many people carry it around in carrier bags rather than wallets. You could fill a rucksack with the bolivars required to buy a dozen eggs.
The country is one of the most dangerous places on earth, with nearly 29,000 murders last year — around 79 every day — one of the highest rates. The British Foreign Office has warned against all but essential travel. The infant death rate rose 30 per cent and maternal mortality by 65 per cent in the past year. The health minister’s publication of the figures led to her being sacked.
Tropical diseases are resurgent but pharmacies don’t have any medicines to deal with them. I couldn’t find mosquito spray in a country where cases of malaria, dengue fever and the Zika virus are soaring.
For the last two months, there have been marches every day, plus huge weekend rallies drawing more than a million people.
The demonstrators are from all sections of society — professors, dentists, grandmothers, gangs from slums. What they have in common is a desperate hope their country can rescue itself from catastrophe with fresh elections and a new government.
Yet this is the benighted country of which Corbyn has said ‘the Bolivarian revolution… is providing inspiration across a whole continent’. Britain, take note.
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neo-Marxist regime’s brutal police and the military deal with any sign of protest — using armoured cars. Most demonstrators make a run for it, rather than risk being seized by National Guard snatch squads. I follow suit, having joined the doctors’ march, as any foreign journalist found in Venezuela without official permits is usually jailed and then deported.
The Mafia-style government running Venezuela calls protesters ‘terrorists’ and ‘ rightwing subversives’. So does its dwindling band of supporters around the world.
The disgraceful fact is there is still a deluded wing of the farLeft — whom Lenin called ‘useful idiots’ — who see Venezuela as an extension of that glorious communist experiment in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Chief among them are Corbyn and his acolytes on the hard-Left.
Although forced to squirm repeatedly during the election campaign when confronted with reminders of his longstanding support for organisations such as the IRA and Hamas, there has been no change of heart when it comes to backing the repressive gangster regime in Venezuela.
And that should worry us all. Because if you want to see what Britain could be like within a few years of the Corbynistas moving into No 10, then come to Caracas.
I am not exaggerating — although I will be denounced, like all Western media critics of Venezuela, as an ‘imperialist capitalist lapdog’.
Consider Corbyn’s glowing praise for President Nicolas Maduro at a rally a mere two years ago — at the same time he was taking control of the Labour Party. He said: ‘It is a cause for celebration — the achievements of Venezuela, in jobs, in housing, in health, in education, but above all its role in the whole world as a completely different place. We recognise [this].’
Heaven help us all. Because this ‘ cause for celebration’ completely rewrites the definition of ‘basket case’.
As out- of-work former civil servants are forced to follow rubbish lorries in a desperate search for scraps, a shortage of toilet paper means people have to use the black market or go without. In the course of a week here, I could not find a single roll in the shops.
Ridiculously, supermarket managers are punished if their stores look empty, so they line shelves with whatever they have in stock to convey the impression of plenty. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. I found an aisle in a once- upmarket store lined with bottles of tomato ketchup, shelf after shelf, just one bottle deep. I was about to take a photograph when my guide grabbed my arm and warned that this would risk arrest.
Last year, a French journalist was imprisoned for interviewing Venezuelans about food shortages. Still celebrating, Mr Corbyn?
In the Chacao district, I found three huge queues round the block outside a mid-market store. Yet no one was going in. They were waiting for the shop’s delivery of statecontrolled goods. Even the price of spaghetti is dictated by the regime.
Queues were divided into the old, young and people from the immediate vicinity. And people may queue only on certain dates. On this particular day, only those with social security numbers ending in -0 or -1 were permitted to shop. The next day would be those with -2 and -3.
Can you imagine your trip to Tesco being governed by the last digit of your National Insurance number? I’d love to see Corbynistas selling that to the British public.
I met Carmen Garcia, 62, who had arrived at 8am and was expecting to queue until 2pm. She wasn’t sure what she might end up with but had high hopes of flour, milk and oil.
There are shortages, too, at Caricuao Zoo, which is running out of animals. Some have been eaten by other animals; some, including a rare horse, have been eaten by locals.
Last year, international news agencies reported that 50 animals had starved to death. When my photographer tried to take a picture of Ruperta, the resident elephant — a pitiful specimen with a festering open sore the size of a frying pan — two guards threatened to confiscate the camera.
With vast mineral wealth, the longest coastline in the Caribbean, a legendary youth orchestra and the record for winning Miss World, Venezuela should be the envy of Latin America.
SATURDAY DISPATCH from Robert Hardman IN CARACAS
Instead, it’s a failed state run by an ex-bus driver and former union negotiator who has spent all the money, and is trying to snuff out what remains of parliamentary democracy by replacing parliament with a puppet assembly.
PresIdent Maduro has allowed the military to take control of the lucrative drug and food trades, as well as gold mining. Unable to afford welfare programmes, the government has printed more money — driving up inflation and making basic goods unaffordable.
With the currency exchange rate fixed, imports became prohibitively expensive and businesses shut down. the country’s financial reserves are so depleted the government is struggling to pay its debts and fund basic services.
All the while, Maduro rails against capitalism and ‘ U.s. imperialism’ — having compared the jail at Guantanamo to atrocities committed in Hitler’s time — yet, this week, he finds himself in bed with Goldman sachs, the embodiment of ruthless capitalism likened to ‘a vampire squid’ for its capacity to extract money from anything. Operating like a loan shark on a council estate, Goldman sachs paid £700 million for a £2.25 billion slice of Venezuelan debt, which must be repaid by its hungry people. Happy with that, Mr Corbyn?
At the same time, Maduro’s cronies siphon vast sums out of the country and send their children to expensive schools and universities overseas while the children of the
barrios — the slums — forage for plants and the odd banana.
Maduro’s rallying cry is that he is the true heir of the late Hugo Chavez, who came to power in 1999 as oil prices were soaring.
there’s no disputing Chavez, a chum of late Labour minister tony Benn, was fairly elected and previous right-wing governments had created a deplorable gap between rich and poor. replicating his friend, Fidel Castro, Chavez painted himself as the brave bulwark against the evil, predatory U.s.
Yet instead of investing the proceeds of his nation’s oil wealth, he blew it on grandiose social projects and non-jobs for supporters.
As a result, he is still lionised as a people’s hero by the likes of London’s ex-mayor Ken Livingstone and dopey armchair revolutionaries, just like Castro and Che Guevara. the Chavez creed of muscular socialism, known as ‘ Chavismo’, still remains the official mantra.
though he died in 2013, his face — and more specifically, his eyes — are everywhere, painted creepily all over public buildings and billboards. shades of north Korea.
Before his death, Chavez anointed Maduro as his successor and he was narrowly elected president.
But he has failed to keep the show on the road, largely as a result of the collapse in oil prices and mismanagement of the economy. devoid of Chavez’s charisma, he insists he is the only thing protecting his nation from U.s. invasion.
the result is a disaster. think Cuba without the charm or cigars.
every district is monitored by a local ‘collective’ — a network of pro- government armed thugs posing as community workers — who look out for dissenting voices.
Maduro still has his fans. I met some at a pro-government rally in Caracas. Most were state workers given the day off and bussed in to show support. ‘ these right-wing demonstrators are just terrorists paid by a few very powerful families and the U. s. to wage war against Maduro,’ says roger sambrano, 44, who works at a ‘cultural education centre’ in Carabobo.
‘Chavismo’ still has a few fans overseas, too. Britain’s Venezuela solidarity Campaign (VsC) still clings to the faith. Its publications contain support from Left-wingers and Corbyn fans. the Unite union and its leader Len McCluskey (who bankroll Corbyn’s Labour Party) are particularly effusive with their revolutionary greetings — ‘ no Pasaran!’ [‘they shall not pass’] and ‘International solidarity’.
I wonder how many British firemen and women, teachers, nurses and nHs workers know that their subscriptions are used to endorse this brutal gangster regime.
‘north West Unison declares our solidarity with President Maduro and the Venezuelan People,’ says an advert placed by the public services union. ‘Congratulations,’ says a Fire Brigades Union ad. ‘no to U.s. right-wing interference!’
Of course, Corbyn has shown huge enthusiasm. A particular gem was his appearance on a phone-in on President Maduro’s state-run tV station, reminiscing about the time Comrade Chavez came to London. Corbyn said that ‘on the Left of British politics there was a great deal of warmth and affection towards Chavez’ and that ‘history would be very kind’ to him.
One issue of the VsC’s magazine reports on a ‘fantastic’ London conference — ‘defending Venezuela Against U.s. Intervention And right-Wing destabilisation’ — at which the star turn was seumas Milne, now Corbyn’s spin doctor.
Without success, I attempt to contact the Venezuela solidarity Campaign so as to see if they can explain the depressing spectacle on the streets of Caracas today — thousands of doctors and nurses, in their hospital clothes, lining up alongside the ‘resistance’, hardcore protesters bearing body armour, shields and gas masks. dozens have died in recent weeks.
Here, too, I meet marketing manager daniella Marquez, 27, who is with her mother Consuelo and her daughter Betzabeth, nine. ‘I want my daughter to see what is really happening,’ says daniella.
A popular regular on these marches — often throwing stones at the police — is Caterina Ciarcelluti, 44, a former athlete nicknamed ‘Wonder Woman’. ‘If only I had her powers,’ she jokes.
near the front, I meet three doctors from the country’s only kidney unit for children. dr elizabeth Montoya, 44, is close to tears as she tells me about a 16-year- old who died after picking up an infection from the city’s only dialysis machine. Antibiotics would have sorted him out but there weren’t any. ‘We need a change of government or more will die,’ she says.
I also meet dr Maria taborda, 33, who works in intensive care at Padre Machado Hospital. Five years ago, the mortality rate in her unit was under 50 per cent. now it is above 80 per cent. ‘the most common outcome for my patients is death,’ she says, blaming a lack of antibiotics and lab services.
during the protest march, I meet Julio Borges, president of the parliament which President Maduro is trying to usurp. this week, he led criticism of Goldman sachs for making ‘a quick buck off the suffering of the Venezuelan people’.
WHAt does he think of those, like Mr Corbyn, who say what is happening in this country is a ‘cause for celebration’? ‘It’s very easy for the caviar Left in europe to be pro-Left-wing dictators like Maduro and Castro. they have a very naive opinion about what is happening here — and would never allow this in their own country.’
the march is heading for the ministerial quarter but everyone knows they won’t get there. Police have erected steel fences across the two roads leading towards the centre.
the marchers are forced to veer off to a nearby ring-road. But after about a mile, police and military confront them on a flyover. Whereupon, the first tear gas grenades start landing in front of us and we pull on our gas masks.
the first Molotov cocktails start flying in the opposite direction. Battle commences and drags on for the rest of the day, a game of cat and mouse all over the city.
the doctors eventually retreat and go back to their job of tending patients. Finally, I head for one of the poorest parts of town, the
barrio of Mamera, clinging to the side of a steep hill. the poorer you are, the higher up your home.
At the top, in a breeze-block shack, I meet Isgleidy delgado, 27, who lives in a single room with her three young daughters and unemployed husband. does she think, like Corbyn, that her problems are down to a right-wing U.s. plot?
‘Of course not. these are our problems and we have to sort them out ourselves,’ she says. the solution? ‘A change of government.’
If Chavismo’s socialist model, so admired by Mr Corbyn as a blueprint for ‘ 21st- century socialism’, cannot work for Venezuela, how on earth might a Corbyn-led government following similar principles work in Britain? Let’s pray that we never have to find out.