Venezuelan crises spilling across nation’s borders

The following editorial appeared in Saturday's Washington Post:

The long-running crisis in Venezuela, which has undergone a catastrophic economic collapse even as its authoritarian regime has consolidated power, has now spread across its borders. The president of neighboring Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, said this week that his country's most serious problem could be the mass influx of desperate Venezuelan refugees: More than 600,000 are now in the country, and thousands more are arriving every day. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have swamped the Brazilian Amazon city of Boa Vista, 140 miles from the border. More than 60,000 have asylum appeals pending in the United States.

This human outflow, which the United Nations says amounts to more than 1.1 million people, is the largest displacement of people in Latin American history. But Venezuela's refugees are attracting far less attention or international aid than those fleeing Burma or Syria. That needs to change.

The reason for the exodus is simple: Once proud citizens of the richest nation in Latin America, Venezuelans now are starving. A social survey released this week showed that more than 90 percent say they do not have the means to buy sufficient food, and 61 percent say they go to bed hungry. Though it controls the world's largest oil reserves, the regime founded by Hugo Chávez has wrecked not just oil production but the economy as a whole, leaving stores empty of food and hospitals deprived even of common medi- cines. Inflation is skyrocketing above the 2017 rate of 2,600 percent, and rampant homicide has made Caracas one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

Compounding the crisis is the refusal of the Chavista government, now headed by Nicolás Maduro, to accept humanitarian aid, which it describes as a means for foreign invasion. Rather than take basic steps to feed people or stabilize the economy, Maduro, steered by Cuban advisers, is preparing to stage a rigged election for every office in the country in April, which would allow for the elimination of all formal political opposition. The regime already put down a pro-democracy uprising last year with mass repression that led to more than 120 deaths.