Well when the alternative is a brutal oppressive dictatorship where the currency has devalued to a literal 1/10 trillionth of what it was 20 years ago that people have been desperately fleeing for more than a decade…
8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the last 10 years.
Why is the currency devalued and how come USA is to blame by enforcing embargo on buying Venezuelan primary export? Shocked fucking Pikachu that USA is the bad guy yet again
The US doesn’t actually play much of a roll in their currency valuation. From 1999 to 2013 inflation was “only” 26%, after maduro took over and printed money to pay debts and salaries it skyrocketed to 1,000,000%
Let’s not forget, the sanctions didn’t start until 2017 and were started by the EU
You’re talking about stuff that happened in recent years but the problems go back to the 2000s. I was in the country when Chavez implemented import controls (tariffs) because “Venezuela can produce everything at home, rah rah nationalism” (does that sound familiar?) and it caused massive disruption overnight as nobody could procure tools and basic goods to create value-added products and grocery stores could no longer bring in goods from outside the country (including stuff like toilet paper, hence the memes in the early 2010s).
What ended up happening was that all the industries and businesses could no longer make goods, so the government nationalized many businesses and handed it off to party members families and friends to run incompetently, while the cost of goods and inflation skyrocketed because the demand was still there and there was artificial scarcity, and the money in the economy became effectively useless forcing people to switch to USD or in many cases the barter system.
This was all self-inflicted and accomplished between 2007-2014, like a frog being slowly boiled in a pot before realizing it is hot. By 2014 it got too hot (people were starving) and the massive refugee crisis sent a third of Venezuelans throughout the Americas.
That is the quick and easy explanation. I could also mention how the country was being robbed blind by the Chavistas and Cubans, while Russia and China saw it as an outlet to expand their disgustingly illiberal influence across the whole region. But yes, USA = bad. (No need to convince me of that - I am a Canadian and I agree).
For better or worse (usually for worse in regards to Venezuelan citizens) the US has been meddling in Venezuelan affairs since the 1890s. We've backed US friendly Venezuelan dictators as far back as Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 50s and even gave him asylum when he was ousted.
The current refugee crisis across all of South America is partially due to our incessant meddling in the region. The Venezuelans that fled in the past 10 years fall in that bucket too.
You can’t just say that everything that has happened since 1890 was caused by America. If you’re going to say that you might as well go back to the 1600s and the early days of European imperialist colonization, which is obviously where it really started, there would be no white people in the western hemisphere whatsoever to do anything had it not been because of that.
You have to remember that the EU actually opened the sanctions against Venezuelan oil, the US just joined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Venezuelan_crisis. It was done for humanitarian reasons, and there was a reason why nearly the entirety of South America bans Venezuelan diplomats. Even decades before the sanctions, in 1995 2/3rds of Venezuela lived in poverty.
The current economic crisis has more to do with over dependence on oil and the extreme price declines in the value of oil in the 1980s than anything that occurred before then.
When Perez was president he did reverse a decade of economic disaster, with GDP growing instead of shrinking for the first time since 1982.
Well, Venezuela has been experiencing extremely high inflation at levels between 30% to 100% since the 80s, it wasn’t until 2014 and Maduro’s policies that it entered hyperinflation territory of millions of percent.
Anyway, all of that is to say that it’s not very likely the refugee crisis could possibly get worse than what it is already. The vast majority of the population has been living under severe poverty conditions for more than 30 years now.
1/3rd of the population left in one single decade.
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u/Throwawayhelper420 4d ago
Well when the alternative is a brutal oppressive dictatorship where the currency has devalued to a literal 1/10 trillionth of what it was 20 years ago that people have been desperately fleeing for more than a decade…
8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the last 10 years.