And so Jeremy Corbyn has decided not to condemn the thugs who run Venezuela and instead would like us to recognise the regime’s ‘effective and serious’ attempts at reducing poverty.
Try telling that to my skeletally thin friend, Tyrone, who lives in a city in the Venezuelan Andes, almost in tears on skype. Ty is a student, aged 23, and has been living on nothing but potatoes for the past couple of weeks. Like millions of others he is desperate to leave the country but he does not have the money to buy his passport. It costs around 130,000 bolivars to obtain – in other words, around £9,900 at the official exchange rate (13.1 bolivars to the pound) or a snip at £7.70 at the black market rate (16,900 bolivars to the pound).
In Venezuela, you see, the minimum monthly wage is around 250,000 bs a month, including luncheon vouchers – in other words, an amazing £19,080 at the official rate or a measly £14 at the black market rate. Of course, no one apart from the drug traffickers in president Nicolas Maduro’s extended family earns almost £20,000 a month. And, so, Ty has to work at least three weeks in order even to be able to afford his passport. How he can possibly consider the cost of a flight by one of the few remaining airlines that operate to and from the country? How can he possibly contemplate re-locating to a normal, peaceful country?
Incidentally, 250,000 bs or £14 is the monthly state pension in Venezuela. Corbyn may think that is a dignifying sum and amounts to an ‘effective and serious’ stab at reducing poverty but I suspect that the millions of Venezuelans who have to live on it every month would beggar to disagree. You see it’s not much fun being a member of the Third Age in Venezuela.
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