Venezuela's Political Crisis

The political instability, social unrest, and economic recession in Venezuela is leading to government collapse of the country.

Current Events

The current political climate is creating an immediate impact to Venezuela. There is an ongoing problem in Venezuela with looting, food shortages, and financial deficiencies from the lack of proper government from the current administration. This lack of proper management has put the population in a state of social unrest. As a result of the social unrest there are daily protests from citizens. As recent as April 21, 2017, twelve people lost their lives because of violence associated with a wave of anti-government demonstrations; eight died from electrocution when they tried looting a bakery, according

The 1983 elections demonstrated the predominance of ineffective government (known locally as desgobierno), corruption, increasing foreign debt, and a growing list of unaddressed socioeconomic problems all contributed to a widespread disillusionment with the political process among the electorate (Haggarty, 1990). After twenty-five years of gradual consolidation of democracy in Venezuela, doubts had emerged as to the future stability of the much-cherished democratic political process that had proven so elusive before 1958 (Haggarty,

Venezuela's government has tried to deny economic reality with price fixing and currency controls. The idea was that it could stop inflation without having to stop printing money. All they had to do was tell businesses what they were allowed to charge, and then give them dollars on cheap enough terms that they could actually afford to sell at those prices (Obrien, 2016). The problem is, that it's not profitable for unsubsidized companies to stock their shelves, and not profitable enough for subsidized ones to do so either when they can just sell their dollars in the black market instead of using them to import products. That's left Venezuela's supermarkets without enough food, its breweries without enough hops to make beer, and its factories without enough pulp to produce toilet paper (O'Brien, 2016). The government has started rationing, kicking people out of line based on the last digit of their national ID card. It's only going to get worse, because socialist president Nicolás Maduro has changed the law so the opposition-controlled National Assembly can't remove the central bank governor or appoint a new one. Not only that, but Maduro has picked someone who doesn't even believe there's such a thing as inflation to be the country's economic czar. "When a person goes to a shop and finds that prices have gone up," the new minister wrote, "they are not in the presence of 'inflation,' " but