CABIMAS, Venezuela — Nobody lives as closely with the environmental fallout of Venezuela’s collapsing oil industry as the fishermen who scratch out an existence on the blackened, sticky shores of Lake Maracaibo.
The world’s largest crude reserves fueled an oil boom making Venezuela — a founding member of OPEC — one of Latin America’s richest nations through the 1990s. The lake’s namesake city, Maracaibo, with more than a million people earned the nickname “Venezuela’s Saudi Arabia” for its high-end restaurants, luxurious shopping and bright lights adorning an 8.7 kilometer bridge spanning the lake.
Today, the lake is an apocalyptic scene that’s getting worse as oil-soaked gunk of trash and driftwood lines its downwind shore. A breeze running across the fetid banks sends the headache-inducing smell of petroleum from perpetual oil spills through the waterside villages of simple cinderblock homes with corrugated metal roofs, exposing people who depend on the lake for food and jobs.
Along a polluted shoreline called Punta Gorda one sweltering afternoon, a crew hauled in its catch of crabs — introduced to U.S. markets after a Louisiana oilman in 1968 spotted large numbers in the lake’s oil fields and told his brother in the seafood business.
Sad...
Venezuela is A Socialist Paradise! Send Bernie there to enjoy the crime and filth!!!
Someone alert Bernie
No. ...as their SOCIALIST nation collapses...
Venezuela real live education in the consequences of Socialism.
The Joys of Socialism.
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