Venezuela: can a failing state protect its environment and its people?

Looting in Caracas, Venezuela. Photo by Prensa Presidencial – Government of Venezuela This story is the fourth in a series of Mongabay articles about Venezuela’s Arco Minero, produced in partnership with InfoAmazonia which has launched an in-depth multimedia platform called Digging into the Mining Arc, exclusively highlighting Venezuela’s mining boom. The first three Mongabay stories by Bram Ebus can be found here, here and here. Venezuela, its people and environment, are in terrible trouble. In 2017, its “economic, humanitarian, and political crises continued to deepen. The country is now on the brink of becoming a failed state,” wrote Christopher Sabatini last summer. Sabatini, a lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, offered up a litany of disquieting statistics in Foreign Affairs: “Some 11.4 percent of Venezuela’s children are malnourished and 10.5 percent of its workforce is unemployed. The economy is on track to shrink for the third straight year, with GDP set to drop 20.7 percent below its 2014 level, and inflation expected to reach 1,700 percent.” More recent estimates put the inflation rate for 2017 at 2,300 percent, or even 2,700 percent. In 2018, things have only gotten worse. Drastic food, fuel and medicine shortages are bringing widespread looting. In January, The Guardian reported rioting crowds picking clean an urban grocery store, with the owner lamenting: “It makes you want to cry. I think we are headed for chaos.” More than 100 such episodes were reported over just 11 days in January, with hungry mobs raiding a fishing vessel to steal fish, stoning a cow to…

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