CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.

This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent.

In one of the nation’s worst moments, riots spread from Caracas, the capital, in 1989, leaving hundreds dead at the hands of security forces. Known as the “Caracazo,” or the “Caracas clash,” they were set off by low oil prices, cuts in subsidies and a population that was suddenly impoverished.

The event seared the memory of a future president, Hugo Chávez, who said the country’s inability to provide for its people, and the state’s repression of the uprising, were the reasons Venezuela needed a socialist revolution.

Now his successors find themselves in a similar bind — or maybe even worse.

The nation is anxiously searching for ways to feed itself.

The economic collapse of recent years has left it unable to produce enough food on its own or import what it needs from abroad. Cities have been militarized under an emergency decree from President Nicolás Maduro, the man Mr. Chávez picked to carry on with his revolution before he died three years ago.

“If there is no food, there will be more riots,” said Raibelis Henriquez, 19, who waited all day for bread in Cumaná, where at least 22 businesses were attacked in a single day last week.

But while the riots and clashes punctuate the country with alarm, it is the hunger that remains the constant source of unease.

A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food, the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University found.

About 72 percent of monthly wages are being spent just to buy food, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis, a research group associated with the Venezuelan Teachers Federation.
In April, it found that a family would need the equivalent of 16 minimum-wage salaries to properly feed itself.

Ask people in this city when they last ate a meal, and many will respond that it was not today.

Among them are Leidy Cordova, 37, and her five children — Abran, Deliannys, Eliannys, Milianny and Javier Luis — ages 1 to 11. On Thursday evening, the entire family had not eaten since lunchtime the day before, when Ms. Cordova made a soup by boiling chicken skin and fat that she had found for a cheap price at the butcher.

“My kids tell me they’re hungry,” Ms. Cordova said as her family looked on. “And all I can say to them is to grin and bear it.”

Other families have to choose who eats. Lucila Fonseca, 69, has lymphatic cancer, and her 45-year-old daughter, Vanessa Furtado, has a brain tumor. Despite also being ill, Ms. Furtado gives up the little food she has on many days so her mother does not skip meals.

“I used to be very fat, but no longer,” the daughter said. “We are dying as we live.”

Her mother added, “We are now living on Maduro’s diet: no food, no nothing.”

Economists say years of economic mismanagement — worsened by low prices for oil, the nation’s main source of revenue — have shattered the food supply.

Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural center lie fallow for lack of fertilizers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories. Staples like corn and rice, once exported, now must be imported and arrive in amounts that do not meet the need.

In response, Mr. Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba.

“They’re saying, in other words, you get food if you’re my friend, if you’re my sympathizer,” said Roberto Briceño-León, the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a human rights group.

It was all a new reality for Gabriel Márquez, 24, who grew up in the boom years when Venezuela was rich and empty shelves were unimaginable. He stood in front of the destroyed supermarket where the mob had arrived at Cumaná, an endless expanse of smashed bottles, boxes and scattered shelves. A few people, including a policeman, were searching the wreckage for leftovers to take.

“During Carnival, we used to throw eggs at each other just to have some fun,” he said. “Now an egg is like gold.”

Down the coastal road in a small fishing town called Boca de Uchire, hundreds gathered on a bridge this month to protest because the food deliveries were not arriving. Residents demanded to meet the mayor, but when he did not come they sacked a Chinese bodega.

Residents hacked open the door with pickaxes and pillaged the shop, venting their anger at a global power that has lent billions of dollars to prop up Venezuela in recent years.

“The Chinese won’t sell to us,” said a taxi driver who watched the crowd haul away all that was inside. “So we burn their stores instead.”

Mr. Maduro, who is fighting a push for a referendum to recall him this year over the country’s declines, said it was the political opposition that was behind the attacks on the stores.

“They paid a group of criminals, brought them in trucks,” he said on Saturday on television, promising compensation to those who lost property.

At the same time, the government also blames an “economic war” for the shortages. It accuses wealthy business owners of hoarding food and charging exorbitant prices, creating artificial shortages to profit from the country’s misery.

It has left shop owners feeling under siege, particularly those who do not have Spanish names.

“Look how we are working today,” said Maria Basmagi, whose family immigrated from Syria a generation ago, pointing to the metal grate pulled over the window of her shoe store.

Her shop was on the commercial boulevard in Barcelona, another coastal town racked by unrest last

Silly comparing Venezuela and Nigeria. Venezuela is a fully welfarist state where govt provides and subsidises basically everything. Food stuffs are given to the citizens monthly while here they few things your govt used to subsidize have been withdrawn i.e. fuel, power etc. While Venezuela spends alot of its resources to subsidize everything, we don't know what the Nigerian govt is spending its money on. Receive sense OP.

rexel99:
Silly comparing Venezuela and Nigeria. Venezuela is a fully welfarist state where govt provides and subsidises basically everything. Food stuffs are given to the citizens monthly while here they few things your govt used to subsidize have been withdrawn i.e. fuel, power etc. While Venezuela spends alot of its resources to subsidize everything, we don't know what the Nigerian govt is spending its money on. Receive sense OP.

ignorant one. Saudi Arabia is also like Venezuela right? the fall in oil price is affecting all OPEC countries. it's time for you wailers to stop blaming buhari for your heroes failure. Nigeria will be in a far better position if your hero had managed to leave the foreign reserve at over 100-150b instead of looting endlessly

Even though I don't blame buhari ,even though I respect him and like him so much....truth be told,your point is meaningless...

This OP needs psychiatric attention before it's too late.

I love you bro. Please take my advice.

Thank me later.

Ewedu brain zombies hw far there?

Jst booking

No, don't blame buhari, blame me. I am the new head of state. Bunch of silly dunces littering every corner of NL since 2015.

Jaideyone:
ignorant one. Saudi Arabia is also like Venezuela right? the fall in oil price is affecting all OPEC countries. it's time for you wailers to stop blaming buhari for your heroes failure. Nigeria will be in a far better position if your hero had managed to leave the foreign reserve at over 100-150b instead of looting endlessly

Why didn't the Venezuelans drink their oyel ?

When push comes to shove, food trumps oil anyday.

Support diversification, support the agricultural revolution!

Venezuela has its official exchange rate pegged at an extremely unrealistic level and that is one of the pillars of the present problem. The peg is far worse than that Buhari foolishly tied the currency to.

Venezuela is run by s former bus conductor.

paschu:
No, don't blame buhari, blame me. I am the new head of state. Bunch of silly dunces littering every corner of NL since 2015.

yeah let's blame buhari for mismanagement of the funds during the oil boom. let's blame him for the first and second world war too. in fact buhari is responsible for oju iku's inability to impregnate bianca. buhari is also responsible for your inability to make proper use of your brain. you're the dunce

Will comment soon,

My brother, its been only 1 year and u are already making excuse for why Buhari's government failed woefully 3 years time. I thought supporters of APC weeds like u have been shouting that Nigeria no longer depends on oil and that TSA have saved enough money to finance the budget? Wasn't the budget benchmark pegged at 38 bucks and isn't oil selling for 51 bucks at the moment? So why blame oil or venezuela for Buhari's failure? Oh and venezuela's woes is more as a result of governments failures than oil price, but I guess u are too dumb to do your research. So I will just stop here and wish you well in your bufoonry.

onavae:
My brother, its been only 1 year and u are already making excuse for why Buhari's government failed woefully 3 years time. I thought supporters of APC weeds like u have been shouting that Nigeria no longer depends on oil and that TSA have saved enough money to finance the budget? Wasn't the budget benchmark pegged at 38 bucks and isn't oil selling for 51 bucks at the moment? So why blame oil or venezuela for Buhari's failure? Oh and venezuela's woes is more as a result of governments failures than oil price, but I guess u are too dumb to do your research. So I will just stop here and wish you well in your bufoonry.

Nigeria has officially become a full Market Economy, either get on the train ride or get left behind.

My guess is you and your kind will get left behind.

Op take my advise, u need serious medical attention,


So u mean the 3 trillion that have been locked up in CBN vault is also not part of the useless policies my buhari?

Can u imagine removing 3 trillion naira from Nigeria economy without investing it, and you still expect banks and other businesses not to retrench workers,

Abeg let's leave sentiment out this and reason probably, the economy will not have been this worse where people are losing there job on daily basis.

.

ISpiksDaTroof:
Nigeria has officially become a full Market Economy, either get on the train ride or get left behind.

My guess is you and your kind will get left behind.

Don't mind that analogue decoder the guy is still operating on 2011-2015 softwares.

It is normal that human beings must look for who to put the blame on.... Fall in oil prices has affected every oil producing country, but those who planned ahead of time when there was oil boom, aren't feeling it much.... Those who didn't save like Nigeria are feeling it's pinch. I want to thank Mr Buhari for having been able to sustain d situation like this, what Nigerians don't realize is tht it could actually have been worse. The one question I want to ask every Nigerian is that, how come our foreign reserves depleted under GEJ when we had one of our best times interms of crude oil price under him, if d money was spent, then what present infrastructure was it invested in, this r d questions we should ask, but d problem is Nigerians won't ask tht, we r a people elect a president, who wouldn't do anything yet we won't dare to ask him questions........ It leaves me with one fact n conclusion, d problem of Nigeria isn't with Buhari or GEJ... The problem lies with u and I.