15 Percent of Venezuelans Eat Trash to Survive

More than 15 percent of Venezuelans eat trash to survive, according to a new study.  

Many Venezuelans have opted to leave the country rather than scrounge around for food, journalist Andrea Gonzalez Larios says.  

“The situation is terrible right now in Venezuela,” Gonzalez tells Charisma News. “It’s very sad that people are looking for food in garbage.” 

What’s more, 53.9 percent of Venezuelan respondents said they had gone to bed hungry, 48 percent say they have been forced to take time off work to scrounge for food, Breitbart reports.

“In Venezuela, there is a dictatorial regime where there is no liberty and human rights are violated, where people who do not belong to the group of the (President Nicolás) Maduro regime are put in jail and tortured, as in the case of Leopoldo Lopez. The Venezuelan opposition leader was tortured like the other prisoners of conscience by Maduro’s criminal regime,” Gonzalez says. “On the other side is the humanitarian crisis due to lack of food and (lack of) medicines. There are children with cancer because of the lack of medicines, and many have also died from lack of food. These children and adults die from malnutrition.”

The Venezuelan hunger crisis has been on the rise since Maduro implemented a socialist rations system two years ago. Earlier this year, he put armed guards in charge of the food supply system. 

“This is now a completely militarized government,” Luis Manuel Esculpi, a security analyst in Caracas and former head of the armed forces commission in the congress, told the Wall Street Journal. “The army is Maduro’s only source of authority.”

CNN reports the population cried at the mere site of food when they crossed into Colombia to purchase basic stock items. 

Some residents are so hungry they’ve reportedly broken into zoos in the middle of the night to eat the animals. 

“Venezuela is burning—and we’re overlooking the root cause of its crisis,” according to U.S. News and World Report.

Communications director at Americans for Prosperity–Florida Andres Malave, a native Venezuelan, points to the evils of socialism that have rotted the country from inside out.

Malave writes:

I read the messages telling me they had to go to five different markets that day to find bread. Even basic staples like Harina-Pan are missing from the shelves or skyrocketing in price.
I’ve heard them break down crying because they lack basic needs like toilet paper. And I hear the fear of not knowing what’s next or when these struggles will end.
In the midst of this chaos, I see people in the United States—most of whom have never known a life outside of the abundance available to them as a result of our market economy—gravitating toward socialism like it’s some natural force for good. As reported in these pages, a recent survey shows that nearly 60 percent of 18- to 26-year-olds believe socialism is the “most compassionate system.”
But socialism is not compassionate. Whether a socialist government owns the means of production via nationalized industries, or enforces central planning via price controls and stringent regulatory structures, socialism operates under the assumption that an insulated leader and his legion of bureaucrats are the best judges of what people are worth.

And while starving men and women dig through the trash just to feed their families, America seems to largely ignore one of the greatest hunger crises of our generation. 

“It is very sad. Only God can change my country,” Gonzalez says.