Jeremy Corbyn claimed Venezuela had ‘made a big step towards Socialism’, but the once oil-rich nation now burns at the hands of the Labour leader’s ideology
Starving families scavenge bins in Earth's most dangerous city - a nightmare created by hard-left policies that Corbyn would bring to UK
STARVING families scavenge like rats through the bin bags in the heart of what has become the most dangerous city on Earth.
Feral packs of street robbers casually kill for a mobile phone or cheap jewellery and will bite wedding rings from the fingers of terrified women.
Shoppers queue for hours for dwindling food stocks and hold carrier bags of cash as inflation rockets towards 2,500 per cent.
Hospitals are in chaos, with no cash left to care for the sick including victims of the rampant Zika virus, malaria and dengue fever.
Thousands of skilled workers are fleeing the country in a “brain drain” sparked by fears of all-out civil war.
And the brutal dictator presiding over this tragedy brutally crushes all opposition as he steers this once prosperous nation into the abyss.
Welcome to Venezuela — the neo-Marxist nightmare created by hard-left policies that Jeremy Corbyn and and his ilk want to bring to Britain.
Corbyn — who polls predict would enter No10 if an election were held tomorrow — has for years held up this South American state as a shining example of socialism in action.
The Labour leader and Britain’s star-struck Left still idolise ex-president Hugo Chavez, architect of Venezuela’s disastrous social experiment.
Last week Corbyn went on holiday to Croatia, ignoring a chorus of calls to condemn the tyranny of Chavez’s sinister successor Nicolas Maduro.
And after Chavez’s cancer death in 2013, Corbyn praised “the huge contribution he made to conquering poverty in his country”.
He added: “Chavez showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things.
“It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice and it’s something Venezuela has made a big step towards.”
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In the city’s rainy Sabana Grande district, sad families joined vagrants waiting expectantly in doorways.
Our interpreter explained: “They’re not sheltering, they’re waiting for the restaurants to put the trash out.”
Minutes later we saw a family, including a pregnant woman, wolfing down scraps of rotting food taken from bin bags on a street corner.
Others stay home and face starvation rather than endure the indignity or the crime on streets which suffer the highest murder rate on earth — a startling 79 a day last year.
Our interpreter, a 28-year-old father-of-two, added: “If criminals see you with US dollars, an iPhone or a watch or any kind of jewellery they won’t just rob you, they’ll kill you to get what you’ve got.
“My mother and grandma have stopped going out since they were robbed two months ago.
"The robber put a gun to my grandma’s head and demanded my mother’s wedding ring but it wouldn’t come off because she’d worn it for so long.
“He grabbed her hand and tried to bite off her finger to get it before she managed to pull it free.
“A stolen iPhone is worth ten times the monthly minimum wage on the black market and people are being shot dead for them on sight. Anyone with US dollars is a target because the local currency is worthless.”
Yet just 20 years ago, Venezuela — which has the world’s largest crude oil reserves — was one of the richest countries on Earth.
Revolutionary Chavez swept to power in 1998, promising to share out the nation’s wealth.
Slum dwellers were housed in new tower block apartments, deliberately sited in well-to-do areas, and Chavez and his Saddam Hussein lookalike sidekick Maduro — a former bus driver and trade union boss — went on to create a mammoth dependency culture by giving away £640billion in welfare handouts, increasing the national debt five-fold.
But they neglected to invest in anything but their own popularity, and the collapse of oil prices has now triggered a total economic meltdown.
Maduro’s government’s answer to the crisis, which has escalated since his mentor’s death, has been simply to print more money.
Venezuela now prints four times more cash than it collects from sales and all taxes, including VAT and income tax. As a result, inflation — which in Britain sparked hand-wringing from Labour and the TUC when it touched 2.9 per cent earlier this year — is expected to hit 2,500 per cent next year in Venezuela.
Nationalised farms have seen yields fall every year, sparking catastrophic food shortages.
Due to huge state subsidies, a full tank of petrol is around 5p — 20 times less than a bottle of water — but production is now so inefficient that the country is importing oil.
A worker on the £25-a-month minimum wage must now work for two weeks to afford a bag of rice.
Office worker Lionel Marin, 53, queued for three hours yesterday for state-subsidised pasta to feed his family at the Livebras supermarket in downtown Caracas.
To play down the food crisis, the Government has banned queues forming outside stores, but we found the father-of-one in a 300-yard line of people nearby.
Lionel said: “I have to work and don’t have time for this but I can’t afford to buy food any other way any more. It’s humiliating.
“Chavez, Maduro and the Socialists promised fairness and dignity for working people. Look what we have become.”
Six years ago mum-of-three Elena Ibara had a well-paid job as a restaurant waitress but was laid off as rising food prices and falling trade began to bite.
She lost the city apartment she was buying with her husband and has been rehoused in an appalling, one-room shack in the city’s desperate Barrio Antimano slum.
Elena, 41, said: “I was in my own home with a good job when I voted for the socialists and never dreamed I could end up here. My husband left me and sends what he can and I work as a cleaner.
“But the money I earn buys less each day and my children and I go hungry. It breaks my heart to put them to bed when they’re crying for food but there’s nothing I can do. The politicians have failed us.”
Poor people such as Elena — once the backbone of Chavez’s revolution — are now joining the open revolt against his successor Maduro.
His answer has been to shut opposition parties out of government, though his crackdown on protests has failed to stop daily unrest on the streets of Caracas for the past four months, resulting in 120 deaths.
We joined demonstrators fleeing tear gas, rubber bullets and shotgun salt pellets fired by security forces and Maduro’s feared “Collectivo” paramilitaries on motorbikes.
Opposition congressman Richard Cabrera, who spent a year in jail under Chavez, told The Sun at the protest: “Like a lot of politicians here, I’ve heard of Jeremy Corbyn and have heard what he stands for.
“But the people of Britain should be wary of empty promises of people like him. Look where it got us.”
Accountant Hector Meza decided to flee the country the day after Maduro seized control of the National Assembly in allegedly rigged elections last week.
The number of Venezuelans seeking asylum has doubled to 50,000 in 2017, but hundreds of thousands more have fled without registering elsewhere.
Hector, 27, said: “Soon, the poor will be so hungry they will come down from the slums and start ransacking the shops for food, and order will completely break down.
“I’m young enough to get away before it happens and earn US dollars to feed my family — I’ve got a one-way ticket to Argentina.”
He added: “I had a friend from Wales who came here and told me all about Corbyn and what a great guy he was and how he supported Chavez and Maduro.
“Having seen what dreamers like them did to my country, I hope he’s no longer a fan.”
