In the spring of 2017, and all through the year, social media feeds in
Venezuela were filled with images of deprivation and despair: long lines
of people hoping to purchase food; women fighting over a stick of
butter; mothers who could not find milk to buy; children picking through
garbage in search of something to eat; empty shelves in pharmacies and
stores; hospitals without stretchers, drugs, or minimum levels of
hygiene; doctors operating on a patient by the light of a cell phone;
women giving birth outside of hospitals. Venezuela’s economy, the
economist Ricardo Hausmann wrote in a recent study, is suffering a
collapse that is “unprecedented” in the Western world.1 Between 2013 and 2017 the country’s national and per capita GDPs
contracted more severely than those of the US did during the Great
Depression and more than those of Russia, Cuba, and Albania did after
the fall of communism.
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