Editors at the Washington Examiner offer an idea for addressing socialist Venezuela‘s woes.
Meeting with the president of Chile at the White House on Friday, President Trump pledged to continue confronting humanitarian suffering in Venezuela.
The president deserves credit for his sustained leadership on this issue, but the time has come for more dramatic action. Specifically, the U.S. should orchestrate a global boycott of Venezuelan oil exports. Only such a boycott will exert the necessary pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s despotic government to force it to change course.
Major change of some kind must come to the Latin American nation. Child starvation is skyrocketing, and prostitution is increasingly the only option for women who want to feed themselves and their children. Along Venezuela’s borders with Colombia and Peru, tens of thousands of refugees are lining up begging for relief.
For those remaining in Hugo Chavez’s dystopian socialist paradise, medicine has disappeared and store shelves are empty. But the most damning indictment of the Maduro-Chavez socialist experiment is the fact that today, in the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves, the lucky few must lug vast bundles of worthless cash and spend hours in lines outside stores to buy their basic needs. The unlucky many waste away on the streets and in the slums of Maduro’s narco-state.
