Caracas
Oil-price agony: The collapse of global oil prices has shattered what remained of Venezuela’s economy, already battered by years of mismanagement and U.S. economic sanctions. With oil at around $30 a barrel, it is no longer profitable for Venezuela to extract its crude, which it normally trades for gasoline on the black market. That has caused the price of gas to shoot to $15 a gallon—more than twice the monthly minimum wage in Venezuela—and the military is guarding gas stations to reserve fuel for officials and emergency services. Farmers can’t run their tractors, so the crops are rotting in the fields even as 50 percent of Venezuelans go hungry. “We’ve never been worse off in our lives,” rancher Ivan Herrera told The New York Times. “We’re paralyzed.”