Earlier this week, a report by the High Commissioner of the United Nations on Human Rights shed light on the catastrophic situation in Venezuela, a country located at the north of the South American continent that borders with the Caribbean sea to the north, with Colombia to the west, and Brazil and Guiana to the south and east. The nation has been under a tyrannical rule for the past 22 years when a democratically elected government turned against its citizens in the most horrendous ways. The report presented by Michelle Bachelet, a 477-page long book, details the brutal realities that Venezuelan citizens have to endure: From lack of due process, mass surveillance, espionage, break-ins, rape, murder, and forced disappearances.
The comprehensive report condemns the Caracas regime and sends shocks of awe: The police command in Venezuela requested a daily body count in the violent raids that special forces held in the South American nation’s poorest slums. Armed men with fully automatic weapons in urban military gear knocking down wooden doors and dragging pregnant women by the hair from their beds into the streets.
Venezuela is home to the largest oil, gold, diamond, coltan, and uranium deposits in the world. Its energy industry was once compared to Exxon Mobile, all that changed in 20 years of systematic ransacking corruption, and the geopolitical realignment of the government with the worst causes of humanity: In no time, the Caracas administration rubbed elbows with Fidel and Raul Castro’s Cuba, allowed them to infiltrate the military, gave energy contracts to corrupt Chinese and Russian energy conglomerates and provided Iran with nuclear material.
The Caracas regime is now a pariah, bereft of resources, sanctioned for human rights violations, and with wanted posters for the bulk of their leadership due to international drug trade, Venezuela’s citizens have to face the realities of living with a minimum wage of less than a dollar a month. The dramatic situation in the South American nation caused the worst mass exodus in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Nearly 10 million Venezuelans have fled the country and have flooded neighboring countries creating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that dwarfs the Syrian Civil War conflict.
Venezuela’s malnourished and sickly population, coupled with a Coronavirus spike in the region, has the governments of the Dutch Antilles putting innocent Venezuelan citizens in jail, the Colombians forcefully deporting citizens, and other nations further to the South that also hosts Venezuelans are scrambling to face the social issues of the largest Western Hemisphere Latin diaspora, ever.
More than 58 countries labeled the Venezuelan government a criminal organization, its links to drug trafficking guerrillas and middle east radical terrorists, countries like France, the United Kingdom, and the United States’ intelligence services have identified terrorists that use real Venezuelan passports to get visas and visit those countries to form sleeper cells. The Caracas administration blatantly denies this as they starve their population and squander resources left and right.
For Venezuela, the situation is dramatic and poses a geopolitical issue because the domestic problems that the nation once had became exported to the rest of the world.
