Eight years ago I was on a commuter train from DC to Baltimore and a strange woman sat next to me and started asking all sorts of questions about the train and

Eight years ago I was on a commuter train from DC to Baltimore and a strange woman sat next to me and started asking all sorts of questions about the train and Baltimore. By strange, I meant that she was talking: no one talks on a commuter train, we're all zombies. Turns out she was from Venezuela and was visiting her young niece being treated at Johns Hopkins after being severely injured by a family pet down there. Let that sink in for a moment. Child was injured in Venezuela, and Kaiser flew her all the way up to JH in Baltimore for treatment back in 2010. The Venezuelan family, obviously on the affluent side back in those days, had purchased a health insurance policy made available from Panama because they felt the socialized health care system run by Venezuela was grossly inadequate, and as they discovered, it was. Fast forward to today and you have two major government-run systems collapsing beyond recovery. First one is oil- state income is beyond a systemic collapse: oil workers simply don't have enough calories to work the actual jobs. There had been a longstanding incentive to work in the oil field because there were oil cafeterias feeding the workers and they've now run out of supplies to sustain that. Now, oil workers are fleeing in unrecoverable numbers. Latest news here is that the military has taken over policing this function out of desperation. The second system is healthcare. These are old articles (hospital one is two years old) but very germane to the discussion. Beyond a soft paywall, so open in incognito windows. Also steel yourself before looking at the photo gallery, as outdated as it is. 1: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-venezuelan-workers-are-collapsing-so-is-the-oil-industry https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-ve... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/world/americas/dying-infants-and-no-medicine-inside-venezuelas-failing-hospitals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/world/americas/dying-infa... So what's happening now? Venezuela stopped paying its debts and is in default. Foreign embassies are closing and leaving the country due to instability. Official currency has cratered to a point of you needing a dump truck of cash to pay for a loaf of bread, if you can find it, so black market currencies are being used for transactions instead. Elites running the country are messaging that everything is fine and pitching some make-believe cryptocurrency tied to a physical oil barrel (which they won't be able to produce with the oil industry labor drain) as a way to save the country. Venezuelan citizens have fled in vast numbers (Colombia by way of Miami Herald alone estimates 600-800k, wiki entry has it at 4 million), and though that effect slowed the food crisis from worsening in mere places, overall effect is unstoppable because neighboring countries are tightening the borders. I didn't even get to mention rising violence and neighbors fighting over contents of garbage cans. I just don't see how you can call this an exaggeration. Venezuelan government cronies couldn't squander the money fast enough fifteen years ago, and here's the end-result of their mismanagement.