Thank you @davidhay, great insights. I completely agree with your position about Petro, as a Venezuelan I would advise everybody to stay away from it , it's a high risk investment and at the same time you are financially supporting a dictatorship. actually I would like to provide additional details about the current situation in the country, hope you don't mind:
- About the economy: in the following articles you can see part of the decline of the Bolivar (Venezuela's currency) unfortunately it only covers from Jun 2014 to Dec 2017, but the story goes further back, just to give you an idea, in 2002 you could buy a brand new Opel Astra (European car) for 14.000.000, at today's exchange rate (233.351,14 VEF x 1 USD) and after removing three zeros from the denomination of the currency in 2008 that would be worth about 6 cents USD
http://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/research-programs/special-topics-venezuela/
https://www.cato.org/research/troubled-currencies?tab=venezuela
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/world/americas/18venezuela.html
https://news.bitcoin.com/why-venezuelas-new-national-cryptocurrency-el-petro-will-fail/
- Severe shortage of food and medicines: every basic product is scarce in Venezuela in the case of medicines 85% can't be found and in the case of food a greatly distorted black market serves a few at the expense of the population:
https://www.npr.org/2018/02/01/582469305/venezuelas-health-care-system-ready-to-collapse-amid-economic-crisis
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/venezuelans-suffer-deadly-scarcity-food-medicine
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-children/venezuelas-unrest-food-scarcity-take-psychological-toll-on-children-idUSKBN1CA1BI
Massive migrations, and violations to human rights: there are many different reports on this (mostly in Spanish) some of them mention up to 3 million people have left the country in the past few years:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-05/once-latin-america-s-wealthiest-venezuelans-flee-economic-crisis
http://www.dw.com/en/could-there-be-a-venezuelan-refugee-crisis/a-41384421
https://www.hrw.org/blog-feed/venezuelas-crisis
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/venezuela-crisisHighest criminality rates in the world: In Venezuela the homicide rate for 2017 was 89 per 100.000 habitant, with Caracas at the top of the list as the most violent city in Latin America
https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/2017-homicide-round-up/
https://www.insightcrime.org/news/brief/latin-america-dominates-world-50-deadliest-cities/
Thank you for adding this. It so important to have real Venezuelans tell their side of the story. Stay strong my friend, I wish you the best for the future.
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