Caracas Chronicles

It’s been a year of hyperinflation in Venezuela, with a yearly rate that ravages consumers’ purchasing power and devours companies left and right. Just where does it ends?

Reuters published an article describing how Chinese telecom giant ZTE helps Maduro & Co. monitor and keep track of fatherland card-carrying citizens’ every move. The details of the data recollection resemble a horror story gone Venezuela.

The revolution’s aim at a feudal state controlled by mafias grows stronger as smugglers and the black market thrive with the shortage of gasoline. Who will survive this mayhem? Ruthless mafias or scared citizens?

There’s been a lot of discussion around the potential use cases of crypto in Venezuela. Here’s an overview of some notable projects working in the space.

What does a day looking for medicine look like? It looks like an authoritarian game of ignominy and frontal abuse.

After the Tumeremo massacre, on October 14, we know for a fact that the ELN operates in Venezuelan territory. But the ecocide, human trafficking, slavery and “mysterious” disappearances started in 2016, with the Orinoco Mining Arc's decree.

After the fall of the DDR, Germans sought to turn tragedy into remembrance. Perhaps, when chavismo is over, because it will be, we can take a page from the Germans’ book and adapt the idea to build the Post-Chavista Museum we’ll need so it never happens again.

Teodoro Petkoff’s stint as a minister (1996-1998) is largely forgotten, or misremembered as a failure. In fact, his success at an impossible task—structural adjustment—was remarkable, almost unprecedented.

Maracaibo’s throbbing comercial heart looks like a post-apocalyptic zombiescape these days.

In Venezuela, gasoline is now, quite literally, priceless. Which is just as well, because there isn’t any.

Millions of Venezuelans are facing malnutrition. I know I can’t fix the entire problem. But, together with a couple dozen volunteers, we can help a few hundred at-risk young people and retirees beat acute hunger. So we do.

Colombia’s vicious ELN guerrilla kills Venezuelan soldiers...and Venezuela’s Defense Minister treats them like they’re the Godfather.

Despite the country’s huge freshwater reserves, only 18% of Venezuelans have regular access to water. Who doesn’t have trouble finding it? Mosquitoes... when the time comes to lay eggs.

Venezuela’s Western state of Zulia has a long and proud tradition of protest music: gaiteros have always raised their voices against injustice. But under growing pressure from the government, radio stations no longer dare to air it.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Kejal Vyas and Carlos Becerra have a brutal, engrossing feature about what happens to a small community in Portuguesa, when the government seizes the assets of a big local employer, and replaces it with nothing.

For kids in Venezuela’s hard-scrabble areas, it used to be the dream: get noticed by a pro scout and leave the barrio behind for the Big Leagues. But try as they might to hang on to the dream, the crisis is wringing the hope out of a new generation of peloteros.

Suicides are spreading across Venezuela: the latest iteration of a comprehensive public health crisis. In the Andean state of Mérida, with its more reserved culture, the problem is at its worst.

Sabino Romero, son of the eponymous indigenous leader murdered in 2013, talks to CC about expropriated lands, State negligence and native employment rates.

The barriers to sending money to people in need in Venezuela seem overwhelming...until you get the hang of Crypto. Then it’s easy.

The report, Freedom On The Net, finds the internet mostly doesn’t work in Venezuela. And when it does, you get punished for using it.

The government has started shutting down the shelters set up in Bolívar, after 3,351 people were displaced by out-of-season flooding along the Orinoco. The thing is, people's homes are still under water, and the actual rainy season just started.

With Barrio Adentro Mission now handling 96% fewer patients than in its heyday and public hospitals no longer stocking even aspirine, Venezuela is on the verge of a Complex Humanitarian Emergency.

Today, Venezuela lost a giant. Teodoro Petkoff, who died today at the age of 86, morphed from communist guerrilla to conscience of the nation.

Each of the Venezuelan States has its own specific set of idiosyncrasies, their own very distinct way of communicating, eating, living and handling their affairs. Particular ghosts, monsters and creatures roam each region, as an army of dead that remind us of the violence, misery and dispair within each community.