As recently as 2001, Venezuela was South America’s richest country. If present trends continue, it will become one of its poorest. Though the country boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, it is enduring an economic crisis unparalleled in recent history. Its GDP per capita has fallen by 40 per cent in just four years, inflation has surpassed 700 per cent, infant mortality has increased a hundredfold and citizens suffer chronic shortages of food and medicine.
Meanwhile, Venezuela is immersed in a grave political crisis. Since the farcical election of a new “constituent assembly”, the country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, has lived down to expectations by arresting two opposition leaders and sacking the critical attorney general Luisa Ortega Díaz (who described the assembly vote as “a mockery of the people”). In the past four months, at least 123 people have died in the violence between government partisans and rebels.
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