The mainstreams typically avoid reporting on the rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela because acknowledging that socialist country’s epic failure would mean exposing their fatally flawed worldview, but even Newsweek felt compelled to mention this latest tragic development ~ Polio Returns to Venezuela As Economic Crisis Cripples Healthcare System ~

The deadly polio virus has returned to Venezuela 30 years after being eradicated, as the country’s health care system struggles under a nationwide economic crash […]
 
(V)accine coverage is falling across Venezuela as the health system reacts to the nation’s economic crisis. In Delta Amacuro, vaccines only reach around 67 percent of the state. “The government is not approving the money for the vaccines,” said Manuela Bolivar, a member of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled National Assembly who is analyzing the increase in infections […]
 

It took more than a month for local health officials to notify the Pan-American Health (PAHO) Organization of the polio case. International health regulations dictate that such notices should be sent within 24 hours, demonstrating either that the local healthcare system is near non-functional, or a conscious effort to mask just how bad things have become in Venezuela.
 
 
A measles epidemic is also causing great concern, with the country accounting for 85 percent of all cases in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last 12 months, PAHO said. Malaria is also spiking, with 406,000 cases reported last year, the WHO said in April. This represents an increase of 69 percent on 2016, the fastest anywhere in the world.

Just a couple decades ago Venezuela was a relatively prosperous country of 30 million people. And then, in 1999, socialism happened. Hugo Chavez convinced the naive voters that capitalism was evil, that the government could run things much better. At first Venezuelans were content with their new dependent status, but eventually the private sector was ruined, and everything the government touched turned to crap.
 
Nicolas Maduro succeeded Chavez after the president checked out five years ago and proceeded to make things even worse. Bad news from the past several months include these headlines ~

 
• Cash-strapped Venezuela offers to pay for medicines with diamonds ~

CARACAS—With hospital shelves bare and the government stumped on how to settle $5 billion in arrears to pharmaceutical companies, cash-strapped Venezuela recently offered some foreign suppliers alternative compensation: diamonds, gold and coltan, the rare metal used to make cellphones and Playstations.

• Starving mob beat cattle to death with rocks in desperate search for food and four people are killed during looting in Venezuela as country’s economic collapse continues ~

Dozens of men shout ‘we are hungry’ and ‘people are suffering’ as they surround the cow in the field, throwing stones at it and beating it with a stick.
 
The helpless animal was slaughtered at the Hacienda Miraflores, in the fishing village of Palmarito in Merida, during a day deadly of civil unrest and looting in the state […]
 
‘What we’re living is barbaric,’ said opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido in a tweet referencing the slaughter the cattle. ‘The dehumanizing regime of Nicolas Maduro is turning a blind eye to the tragedy that we Venezuelans are living.’

 
• Venezuelan children are starving to death at an increasing rate ~

“There are six to eight children dying a week,” Fr. Sifontes said in an interview Thursday. “In my state of Monagas, in the first two and a half months of 2018 we have seen 34 children die of malnutrition. A family needs the equivalent of 22 salaries just to get a basic basket of food, to cover the basic nutrition for a month for children in their family. Sometimes that help doesn’t even get to the children because the aid must pass through various hands, and the food disappears.”

 
• In Venezuela, hungry child gangs use machetes to fight for ‘quality’ garbage ~

At 16, Liliana has become the mother figure for a gang of Venezuelan children and young adults called the Chacao, named after the neighborhood they’ve claimed as their territory. The 15 members, ranging in age from 10 to 23, work together to survive vicious fights for “quality” garbage in crumbling, shortage-plagued Venezuela. Their weapons are knives and sticks and machetes. The prize? Garbage that contains food good enough to eat.

 
Sick, starving, desperate, despairing – Venezuelan society is simply crumbling. Isn’t socialism great kids?
 
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Related:
It’s Time for a Coup in Venezuela ~ Sounds like a plan ~

(I)f time is running out, it’s less clear exactly for whom: the Maduro regime or those struggling for a restoration of democracy in that benighted country? After all, Cuba — which serves as Maduro’s ideological mentor — has demonstrated that a strategy of forcing out the discontented and subjugating the rest, while muddling along with a dysfunctional economy, can sustain an authoritarian regime for decades.
 
The question thus becomes, as the New York Times editorial board wrote, “how to get rid of Mr. Maduro before he completes the destruction of his country.” […]
 
Millions of Venezuelans once placed their good faith in the chavista project because they were told the country’s oil wealth would be shared more equitably. Today, they are ruled by nothing less than a criminal conspiracy more interested in protecting their ill-gotten offshore accounts than the welfare of the millions of Venezuelans it once promised to represent.