Venezuela: 21st Century Socialism Is So Great That Doctors and Teachers Are Now Hooking For Food

We all know Venezuela is a socialist hellhole. The people have to deal with energy shortages and the resulting rolling blackouts. Basic items, like toilet paper, are lacking. They’re eating dogs, cats, and even zoo animals due to food shortages. Everyone from soldiers to the middle class is eating what they can out of garbage cans. In the hospitals, the lack of supplies has degraded health care in the country to conditions not seen since the 19^th century. Soap and gloves are in short supply, with reports of cardboard boxes being used to give newborns some sort of bedding. The government has also resorted to weaponizing food (what’s left of it) to punish those who have criticized the socialist government led by the successor of the late Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro. Now, with supplies dangerously low, we have this story from the Miami Herald, where they detail how teachers, doctors, and engineers have resorted to prostitution for food.

Prostitution in Colombia is quasi-legalized, with each town having a small red light district, where police look the other way, the publication noted. Venezuelans dominate the prostitution rings because they’re willing to work for less money. For some, their family members make the 18-hour bus trip from Caracas into Colombia, where family members across the border give them groceries, paid for by the money earned through prostitution (via Miami Herald) [emphasis mine]:

At a squat, concrete brothel on the muddy banks of the Arauca River, Gabriel Sánchez rattled off the previous jobs of the women who now sell their bodies at his establishment for $25 an hour.
“We’ve got lots of teachers, some doctors, many professional women and one petroleum engineer,” he yelled over the din of vallenato music. “All of them showed up with their degrees in hand.”
And all of them came from Venezuela.
[…]
The less fortunate find themselves walking across the border into Colombia looking for a way, any way, to keep themselves and their families fed. A recent study suggested as many as 350,000 Venezuelans had entered Colombia in the last six years.
But with jobs scarce, many young — and not so young — women are turning to the world’s oldest profession to make ends meet.
[…]
Dayana, a 30-year-old mother of four, nursed a beer as she watched potential clients walk down the dirt road that runs in front of wooden shacks, bars and bordellos. Dressed for work in brightly colored spandex, Dayana said she used to be the manager of a food-processing plant on the outskirts of Caracas.
But that job disappeared after the government seized the factory and “looted it,” she said.
Seven months ago, struggling to put food on the table, she came to Colombia looking for work. Without an employment permit, she found herself working as a prostitute in the capital, Bogotá. While the money was better there, she eventually moved to Arauca, a cattle town of 260,000 people along the border with Venezuela, because it was easier to send food back to her children in Caracas.
The previous night, her sister had traveled by bus for 18 hours from Caracas to pick up a bundle of groceries that Dayana had purchased — pasta, tuna, rice, cooking oil — and then immediately jumped on a bus back home.
[…]
With inflation running in excess of 700 percent and the bolivar currency in free fall, finding food and medicine in Venezuela has become a frustrating, time-consuming task. Dayana said she often would spend four to six hours waiting in line hoping to buy a bag of flour. Other times she was forced to buy food on the black market at exorbitant rates. Hunger in Venezuela is rampant.