While the world focuses on Brazil and the Olympic Games in Rio at the moment, a competition of a different sort is taking place in its neighbor to the north, Venezuela.

People are fighting to survive in this socialist “paradise.” And those who are suffering the most are children.

There is no good news out of Venezuela; there is only history repeating itself. Hugo Chavez might have died in 2013, but his toadies continue to carry a torch of socialism – and their own power – in a country that is starving.


Children are no longer in school, because their teachers are out looking for food, and the children need to work. Malnutrition is rampant. While the elite honor Chavez with cake, they pass a law enabling the government to commandeer people into working on farms – essentially creating a slave labor workforce. And young women are now volunteering to be sterilized, because they cannot feed another child.

Venezuela is a largely Roman Catholic country where Church doctrine rejects all forms of contraception and abortion is banned unless a woman’s life is at risk. The Archbishop of Merida, Baltazar Porras, told Reuters an increase in sterilisations would be a “barbarity.”

But Venezuela’s crisis has triggered almost daily riots for food and slammed a shrinking middle class as well as the poor who were once a bastion of support for late leftist leader Hugo Chavez’s self-styled “beautiful revolution.”

Pregnant women are particularly affected as they struggle to find adequate food and supplements, give birth in crowded and under-equipped hospitals, and have to spend hours in lines for scarce diapers, baby food and medicines.

And when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…

Seeing more cases of infanticide in Venezuela as birth control disappears at the same time basics like food and diapers become unaffordable

— Hannah Dreier (@hannahdreier) August 7, 2016

So, where are the American champions of the Venezuelan revolution? Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore – it seems all of them are dead silent about Venezuelan children starving. How convenient.

Sadly, American aid is stopped by the socialist government, who has total control and blames the United States for their economic crisis. Maduro has held on to power by declaring a “state of emergency” and delaying elections. When there are no humanitarian aid options, the people suffer. So, unless Sean Penn decides to show up with a cargo plane full of food (hey, he showed up with a boat during Hurricane Katrina), there is very little that can be done to help the Venezuelan people until the Maduro government is gone.

If President Obama cared about a legacy, maybe he wouldn’t let Venezuelan children starve. Of course, that means he’d actually have to act on the fact that socialism is killing people. The odds on that happening are exactly zero. May God help the people of Venezuela.