| It will get darker and darker, it may/will (unfortunately) cost more lives, but I hope that once clean elections take place (and a couple of government terms down the road) normality and calm will be established, and all that will be a thing of the past. Judging from Argentina's problems - I know, not the same source of problems - things are now better off than 10-15 years ago. Still in recovery mode, but the darkest days are a thing of the past. Edit: adding the below (apologies) timeline -Big Oil corporations tried to do business in Venezuela. -Having a massive public sector, I bet there was A LOT of bribery involved. -Big corporations then played the greed-game. -Someone decided to have a revolution and bit the hand that was feeding him (bribes/public sector). -Then then got caught in a Oil-price-power-game that hurt Russia and some other satellite countries. -Been unable to cope with the lack of 'free-oil-money' they got caught unprepared to go through the financial challenges - no savings, no FX. -As a country, Venezuela was living on the respective 'salary-loans', they went bust on the first hiccup. -And it all went downhill after that. It took Venezuela a decade to get where it is now, it will take another 20 years to fix things. Root Cause Analysis: oh so many things.. huge public sector service, very little privatization, plenty of bureaucracy, centralization of decisions (central government) |