How Venezuela's Implosion – and Reconstruction – Will Transform South America
How Venezuela's Implosion – and Reconstruction – Will Transform South America
Venezuela’s crisis is attracting influential outside actors and reducing the continent’s capacity to shape its own destiny.
“South America for the South Americans!” a confident President Hugo Chávez cried at a packed rally in Buenos Aires in March 2007. It is not without irony that, little more than a decade later, the policies of the late Venezuelan leader and his successor have achieved the exact opposite. The oil-rich nation is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe and an unprecedented exodus, and the four most influential outside actors in Venezuela today are not from the continent, namely China, the United States, Russia and Cuba. South American leaders have been reduced to mere bystanders as the horror...
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