This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. “I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.” It was shortly after 10 pm on a […]
Venezuela is in an underreported hunger crisis that is getting worse by the day, and the Trump administration’s de facto alliance with the unelected and unpopular Chavismo government is only adding to the risks of a disaster. Francisco Rodríguez, the respected Venezuelan economist who has sounded the alarm, warns: “Food stocks are running dangerously low. You need an emergency plan for Venezuela. You need to get the World Food Program and other humanitarian organizations in there right away.” Firsthand details were provided by a prominent figure in the Venezuelan medical community. That source declined to be quoted by name, fearing reprisals from the regime. But they told The New Republic from Caracas that, in technical terms, the country is already in a “public health crisis” and skidding toward a “food emergency.” The source said: “Since 2023, our country has been in uncontrollable inflation. Our population increasingly does not have the economic wherewithal to obtain sufficient food. Indications are rising of infant malnutrition and of hunger among the elderly.”Jesús “Chúo” Torrealba, a longtime major opposition figure inside the country—he has one million followers on X—explained that hunger in Venezuela does not always follow classic patterns. “The inflation is terrible,” he said. “And hunger here breaks some of the usual stereotypes. We do have hungry children in poor neighborhoods. But we also have retired university professors, whose pensions have evaporated, who can now only eat because their former students take up collections for them.”Phil Gunson, a Venezuela-based analyst at the respected International Crisis Group, adds: “Triple-digit inflation is accelerating toward a return to hyperinflation and worsening poverty rates that are already at record levels.”Meanwhile, the mainstream U.S. media is once again missing the story (with one honorable exception). The cable news networks and the major newspapers devoted lavish attention to opposition leader Maria Cortina Machado’s January 15 visit to the White House, during which she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. But the media continues to ignore the looming humanitarian crisis.The most immediate cause of the rising risk of hunger is the ongoing U.S. naval embargo that blocks Venezuela’s oil exports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that in marketing year 2025–26, Venezuela will have to import 1.62 million metric tons of corn, which is 56 percent of its needs. Corn is the key ingredient in the arepa—the flatbread that is a staple in the national diet and is as central in the national consciousness as the tortilla is in Mexico. No oil exports means no earnings to pay for imported corn. The current status of the U.S. blockade is unclear; American military forces on January 20 boarded and took control of the seventh oil tanker that was carrying Venezuelan oil. At the same time, though, there are credible reports that the United States did broker the sale of some Venezuelan crude; the first buyer was a company called Vitol (which employs a senior trader who had donated millions of dollars to Trump’s reelection campaign). Naturally, any oil export earnings should be allocated immediately to ameliorate the food (and medicine) crisis, but no one knows where the money that’s been collected will end up.Even if the U.S. ended the blockade tomorrow, the crisis would persist. A genuine democratic government in Venezuela would have to respond as food shortages and hunger grow. But Nicolás Maduro and his ruling circle lost the July 2024 election in a landslide, and people there estimate that only one in five Venezuelans still support his successors. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s only real constituents are Donald Trump and his advisers, not the 20 to 24 million Venezuelans who remain in the country. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the apparent brain of the U.S. operation, are allying the U.S. with a regime that opposition figure Torrealba calls “Madurismo without Maduro.” While Venezuela’s regime is getting by, thanks to its deference to Trump, it remains a repressive and corrupt force in the lives of those it ostensibly governs. Human rights groups on the scene estimate that it still holds nearly 800 political prisoners, many of whom were active in the opposition movement that actually won the 2024 election. The regime is releasing some of them slowly, but most are still locked up. Human Rights Watch has pointed out that “dozens have been held incommunicado for weeks, months, and some for over a year.” Before his release on January 22, Rafael Tudares—the son-in-law of 2024 election victor Edmundo González—was among the prisoners. Jailed for more than a year, he was regarded by human rights groups as a “hostage” of the regime.The regime’s corruption also is contributing to the looming food crisis. Torrealba pointed out that Venezuela’s heavy dependence on imported corn and other foodstuffs has also raised risks because “our national import and distribution system has been riddled with corruption from 2012 onwards.” In other words, even the resumption of food shipments will not necessarily allow food to reach the people who are hungry.The food emergency is descending on a nation that has been in acute crisis for more than a decade. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. followed the suggestions of right-wing Venezuelan exiles and declared economic war against the country, in the mistaken belief that the crisis would topple the regime. Instead, the economist Rodríguez has outlined in great detail how the U.S. onslaught, along with criminal mismanagement by the Maduro government, detonated the greatest economic collapse in any nation in recent history that was not the result of an actual war. Some eight million people have already fled, a quarter of Venezuela’s pre-crisis population—and that desperate exodus could soon restart. Once more, the Trump administration will be partly to blame. Torrealba explained: “In a democratic country, food shortages translate into votes against the government. But in a semi-totalitarian system like ours, the government accepts hunger and uses it as an additional weapon of political repression and social control.” It doesn’t take much imagination to predict that the regime will divert any oil earnings to raising the pay for its secret police and high-ranking military.Torrealba’s warning is ominous. Venezuela’s regime has regularly proven how ruthless it can be. Trump and Rubio are smug right now, still basking in the success of the January 3 U.S. military raid that captured Maduro, and confident that they can work with their new allies and smoothly “run Venezuela” as they promised. But their troubles are only beginning.
Some Senate Democrats who had supported reopening US agencies after last fall’s record closure are vowing to vote no this time.
“The final act of his life was trying to help a woman who was being physically assaulted,” described one journalist.
One of the consequences of covering American politics is that it forces you to have frequent close encounters with some of the dumbest people alive and their terrible ideas. Cutting taxes on wealthy people will eventually enrich the middle class. Invading and occupying Iraq will spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Michael Bloomberg should be president. The list goes on. Anyway, here’s the latest, greatest hit from the terminally stupid: We can fix ICE by retraining them. The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. I’m not sure where these fears find their foundation given that when “Abolish ICE” was in vogue, Democrats did great: They won in 2018 and 2020 and surprisingly overperformed in 2022. Then they got to 2024 and lost, not long after they took a rightward turn on immigration in an attempt to prove that they could be tougher on migrants than Trump was, as if his main failing was that his draconian immigration policies weren’t dressed up in enough management consultant–speak.The Searchlight Institute, the Beltway consultant class’s latest rebrand of gelatinous centrism, recently released a sternly worded memo tsk-tsking everyone who believes that it was a mistake to resurrect the Stasi and turn it loose to terrorize liberal cities. “Let’s be clear that advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,” the memo bleated. “Instead, Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”This is all written at a significant remove from what’s actually happening in places like Minneapolis or even Washington, D.C.—and it’s no mean feat to be out of touch with a community of which you’re ostensibly a member. To have a real-world understanding of what ICE has been doing makes calls for its reeducation land in the ears with a cloddish thud. These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children. They grabbed an elderly man from his house and dragged him outside in his underwear in the freezing cold simply because he wasn’t white. They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away.Here’s a disturbing fact: When Minneapolis parents started putting stuffed animals on their dashboards so that kids could identify safe cars driven by the volunteers assigned to ferry them safely home from school, ICE started doing the same thing. What I’m trying to say is that ICE—from Secretary Kristi Noem down to the lowliest desk jockey—really, really has a fixation on abducting children. This is irredeemable beyond measure.ICE misrule isn’t happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process. This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption—not that anyone at ICE wants to be “cured.” ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore. In the latest instance, we’ve learned from a whistleblower that agents have claimed the right to break into homes without a judicial warrant, directly countermanding their vaunted legal training. No one can or should trust a retrained version of this agency. A root-and-branch teardown is in order. Mass firings are in order (I guess the leakers and whistleblowers can stay in some capacity). The clawback of billions of dollars is in order. Damnation, in every sense of the word, is in order.One of the problems with the argument that this mob of sickos can be retrained into something sane and decent begins with the fact that people misconstrue what ICE actually is and does. Searchlight’s statement, for instance, assumes that ICE is performing the task of enforcing immigration law. But ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency. It’s a rotted tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people. A real immigration enforcement agency would be operating in places like Texas or Florida, which have large numbers of undocumented immigrants, and not Minnesota, which has relatively few. It also wouldn’t be targeting Minnesota’s Somali population, most of whom are American citizens and thus not subject to immigration enforcement. In addition, a real immigration enforcement agency would have a decent working relationship with local law enforcement. As Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley recently explained, ICE is impeding Twin Cities cops from doing their jobs—and harassing them to boot.The road back to a competent, humane, and lawful immigration enforcement agency necessarily begins with the elimination of the agency that’s absorbed all the money to perform those tasks while putting it toward an army of jackbooted thugs who harm innocent people. Don’t want to call this “Abolish ICE”? That’s fine, I’m invested in action, not slogans. Whatever gets us to the point where we’re firing all of the paramilitaries doing enforcement and removal operations, re-vetting all the people doing laptop jobs so that we can fumigate the agency of all its cryptofascists, and perhaps housing the enforcement agency at the Justice Department, alongside a bunch of other lawyers and bureaucrats working on immigration and naturalization processes—some kind of Immigration and Naturalization Service, maybe?—would do the trick.Retraining ICE isn’t just a stupid idea from an intellectual or moral perspective. It’s also really bad politics. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that for the first time, a bare majority of respondents—46 to 43 percent—were in favor of abolishing ICE. But what’s more important, from the perspective of Democrats, is that 80 percent of Democrats were in favor of it. That puts “Reform ICE” at the business end of an electoral shellacking. The wine moms Democrats need to win anywhere aren’t having it with going soft on Trump’s hoodlums. If you bring a timid, half-measure response on ICE to the people whose bonds to one another have been forged in the fires of protecting their own neighbors from state violence, I promise: You will eat no small amount of shit.It’s no wonder that a pretty broad swath of Democratic officials, from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, have reached the correct conclusion that ICE is beyond redemption. Here we have a simple example of people who have seen what this agency is all about and understand what needs to be done. To be out here making the case that an outlandishly malevolent gang of brownshirts can be reformed will require a lot of explaining. And when you’re explaining, you’re losing.The salient fact is this: What most of us see in ICE are people who are not fit to serve in any governmental capacity, many of whom should probably be in jail for serial violations of citizens’ constitutional rights and lawless corporal violence on the residents of major American cities. If you want sane and effective immigration enforcement that doesn’t shame the nation on a daily basis—well, ICE is standing in the way of that. They are a force for misrule. I’m not going to entertain the stupid notion that any of ICE’s current workforce can be meaningfully reeducated, and neither should you. It’s like suggesting a rabid dog can be retrained.This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
By Julia Conley for Common Dreams Twin Cities residents are weeks into the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents in an operation that has seen a legal observer and young mother fatally shot; US citizens dragged out of their homes and vehicles by masked officers; one of President Donald Trump’s top Border Patrol officials lobbing a gas grenade at lawful protesters; children as […]