Source picture taken by: LUIS ROBAYO
Any person who watches international news from time to time, has probably seen pictures from Venezuela of people with little more than a single backpack, walking on some road looking to arrive at another country and starting a new life. It can be something quite hard to see given the precarious situation in which some of them are doing this “trip”.
There might be people that when seeing the state of some of the migrants, don’t understand why they don’t decided to stay in Venezuela and save themselves the difficult journey they are currently facing, but something similar could be asked about the Cubans who for decades have been embarking themselves on the sea and literally risking their lives to arrive at Florida.
Both cases, especially the Cubans risking their lives in the sea, can sound a little bit extreme, and indeed they are, these are extreme measures that people were forced to take due to extremely negative circumstances they were suffering in their native country.
In the case of Venezuela, the general impoverishment that people have been subjected to, especially in the last few years, can become something unbearable for many, because after reaching a certain point in the reduction of their purchasing power, a lot of people find themselves in a situation where for the first time in their lives, they don’t feel like they can provide for their families, so if they don’t do something to change their finances, eventually the day will come when they open their fridge and there will be nothing there and when going to the grocery store to buy something, it would be either empty or with prices so high that most people cannot afford to buy anything.
When people find themselves in this path of unavoidable and increasing poverty that they cannot stop, it is just a matter of time for them to take the decision to leave the country, even if they have to walk mile after mile to reach their desired destination.
However, poverty is not the only factor making Venezuelans leave their country en masse, there are other negative and important factors that make it very difficult to have a comfortable life in today’s Venezuela.
But there are also a lot of cases of criminals stealing things from cars, like their batteries. It is very common to hear stories about people having their batteries stolen from their cars, there are even videos on Youtube showing some of these criminals committing these crimes, and since the police in Venezuela is completely corrupted and probably some of them are criminals themselves, then these type of unlawful acts go unpunished, resulting in a crime epidemic where the good people end up having their lives disturbed.
There are a few people who can manage to keep a business alive, and have a better life than the majority of the people because they don’t depend on devalued salaries, they depend on their product sales and as long as there are people buying their products, they can continue with their life. Nevertheless, as you can imagine, business owners are, by definition, never a majority, there are very few business owners in Venezuela, and each passing week there are less and less. Keeping a business alive in Venezuela is a total challenge, not only because given the ideology of the government, they are against private property and free trade, but also because since the whole country is in an accelerated process of impoverishment, selling products can become more difficult than before because the people have less purchasing power than in previous years. So if having available products is already something complicated under the current government and their war against economic freedom, then finding customers is also challenging because in order to buy something you first need to have enough money to spare, poor people never buy anything, and in a country full of poor people, finding customers can be like finding a needle in a haystack.
All of these aspects can make live very difficult in Venezuela, there are some other topics like constant blackouts leaving entire cities or communities without electricity for hours, and sometimes for several days like what happened a month ago in the state called Zulia, common services like running water sometimes stop working, and they remain like that for several days, and something as basic as cooking gas can also be really scarce, so people are forced to cook their food with electrical grills or electric kitchens, unless they find themselves with no electricity, in which case they will be in a serious problem.
Nevertheless, things might change soon, as of now there are some countries in the region that cannot handle the incredibly high numbers of Venezuela crossing their borders every day, so perhaps a solution to the Venezuela problem might happen in the coming months.
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