'Why shouldn't we enjoy ourselves just because the country is burning?' Super-rich Socialists quaff champagne in Venezuela country club while middle class mothers scavenge for scraps in the gutter... and even the DOGS are starving. Venezuela's super-rich are enjoying lavish parties and gourmet cuisine, while middle-class people are forced to scavenge for food as the Socialist country's economy collapses.

Five hundred hungry Venezuelan women rushed across a bridge into Colombia in defiance of a year-long border closure in search of basic foods and commodities that have grown scarce at home due to a crippling economic crisis. The women, dressed mostly in white and coming from towns in western Tachira state, managed to break through a military cordon, across a bridge and into the northeastern Colombian city of Cucuta. One of the women told local media she had bought rice, sugar, flour, toilet paper and oil, all of which are hard to come by in Venezuela...

Venezuela's military has taken control of five ports in an effort to guarantee supplies of food and medicine. In a decree, President Nicolas Maduro has ordered the army to monitor food processing plants, and co-ordinate the production and distribution of items. Venezuela is going through a deep economic crisis despite having the world's largest oil reserves. Basic products are increasingly hard to find and many say they struggle to feed their families.

Professor Julia Buxton argues that the Bolivarian Revolution's weakness was its inability to institutionalize the radical popular energies it unleashed in a new order, a failing that has led to the present crisis. 

The diary of a desperate mother trying to put food on the kitchen table. By Fabiola Zerpa.

McDonald’s Corp.’s largest franchisee has had to stop selling the Big Mac in Venezuela as it can’t source the bread it needs to make the famous sandwich. Buenos Aires-based Arcos Dorados Holdings Inc., which operates more than 2,000 McDonald’s restaurants throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, said on Thursday that the problem was temporary and that other menu options were available. “McDonald’s Venezuela is working to resolve this temporary situation,” Daniel Schleiniger, a spokesman for Arcos Dorados, said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Some 50 animals have starved to death in the last six months at one of Venezuela's main zoos, according to a union leader, due to chronic food shortages that have plagued the crisis-stricken South American nation.

Jamaica has announced it is going to pay off oil debts it has with Venezuela with food, medication, and fertilizers, instead of cash. The barter agreement comes at a time when Venezuela is suffering from acute shortages of basic products amid a major economic and political crisis. Jamaica's government announced the deal last Friday, saying that the transfers will take place in the last quarter of this year and amount to $4 million.

Venezuela is stuck in a doom loop that's become a death spiral. Its stores are empty, its people are starving, and its government is to blame. It has tried to repeal the law of supply and demand, and, in the process, eliminated any incentive for businesses to actually sell things. The result is that the country with the largest oil reserves in the world now has to resort to forced labor just to try to feed itself. It gives new meaning to the revolution devouring its own.

Country is in free fall

Demonstrators filled the center of Venezuela's capital Caracas on Thursday in the biggest show of opposition to President Nicolás Maduro in years. Organizers, from a coalition of 19 opposition parties, claimed 2 million participated in the marches in six states around the country as well as in Caracas. In the capital they chanted "This government will fall" and sang the national anthem in one of the city's main boulevards.

Venezuelans of all political stripes want to abandon the country in record numbers, as the socialist nation continues its downward economic and political spiral, according to a poll released Friday. A survey by Caracas-based Datincorp found that 57 percent of all Venezuelans said they want to leave the country, up from 49 percent in May 2015. Broken down by political affiliation, the poll found that 24 percent of all government supporters and 71 percent of those who consider themselves the opposition want to emigrate.

These shocking images show how prisoners are starving to death in Venezuela's jails as food and medicine continues to run out amid economic collapse in the country. Video smuggled out of a jail at San Juan de los Morros, in the central Guarico region of Venezuela, show emaciated inmates struggling to survive.

Medical staff at the University Hospital in this eastern Venezuelan city delivered two premature infants that needed incubation earlier this year. But because of the shortages plaguing the country, the hospital had only one functioning incubator, forcing staff to make an agonizing choice. They put the stronger of the two babies in the incubator. The other died days later. Scenes like that continue to play out across this crisis-hit country on a daily basis. In the first five months of this...

Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly in a rowdy session on Sunday vowed to put Nicolas Maduro on trial for violating democracy, days after authorities nixed a recall referendum against the unpopular leftist president. By Alexandra Ulmer and Deisy Buitrago.

If upcoming Vatican-backed talks between Venezuela's bitterly antagonistic government and opposition fail, the result could well be "bloodshed," a papal envoy warned Saturday. "If one delegation or the other ends the dialogue, it's not the pope but the Venezuelan people who will lose, because the path then could truly be one of blood," Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli told the Argentine daily La Nacion in Rome, after visiting Caracas.

Venezuela’s currency - the so-called “strong bolivar” - is weakening beyond levels that analysts had forecast just a few weeks ago as an expanding money supply chases a limited amount of U.S. dollars.

Inflation in Venezuela is expected to reach 720 per cent this year, with the largest bolívar bill now worth just five US cents on the black market. Some shopkeepers have reportedly taken to weighing rather than counting the wads of cash customers hand them, and standard-size wallets have become all but useless in the socialist South American state. Instead, many people stuff huge volumes of cash into handbags, money belts, or backpacks, in scenes analysts have said are suggestive of "runaway" inflation.

Venezuelan officials have confiscated nearly 4 million toys from a toy distributor, accusing the company of planning to sell them at inflated prices during the Christmas season. On Saturday, the government initially said it had confiscated 4.8 million toys. It revised the figure Sunday, putting it at 3.821 million.

Roughly one person is being lynched in crisis-ridden Venezuela every three days as frustrated residents take revenge on suspected criminals, a monitoring group said on Wednesday. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), which monitors crime, said mob killings have become a generalized phenomenon across the country, with 126 deaths reported in 2016 versus 20 last year.