Formerly Well-Off Venezuelans Become Victims Of Human Trafficking
JOHN SEXTONPosted at 8:41 pm on July 27, 2018


The Washington Post has a heartbreaking story about the desperate exodus out of Venezuela. As people try to avoid starvation and the death of their children from lack of food and medicine, formerly well-off Venezuelans who led middle-class lives at home are now reduced to scraping by in neighboring countries by working menial jobs.

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The citizens of what was once South America’s richest nation per capita are now confronting a devastating reversal of fortune, emerging as the region’s new underclass.

As their oil-rich country buckles under the weight of a failed socialist experiment, an estimated 5,000 people a day are departing the country in Latin America’s largest migrant outflow in decades.

Venezuelan professionals are abandoning hospitals and universities to scrounge livings as street vendors in Peru and janitors in Ecuador. Here in Trinidad and Tobago — a petroleum-producing Caribbean nation off Venezuela’s northern coast — Venezuelan lawyers are working as day laborers and sex workers. A former well-to-do bureaucrat who once spent a summer eating traditional shark sandwiches and drinking whisky on Trinidad’s Maracas Bay is now working as a maid.

And for some, the