Reply #9: More from your article. This is so rotten....

[Judi Lynn]

About 65 percent of all food consumed in the country is imported from Canada, the United States, Brazil, and other countries. So every devaluation of the bolivar has had devastating consequences for working people.

Can you IMAGINE? A country that size having to import so much food. It's a crime. Previous officials were running it just like any colony, producing crops to send outside the country. This was dead wrong. The native-born people suffer in every case. They don't have the ability to afford imported food like the wealthy landowners.

Also from the article:

During a lunch break in a nearby town, Tortolero showed Militant reporters a truck passing by full of sugarcane cutters, all covered with soot from cutting cane in the fields where the weeds had been burned. These workers work mostly for capitalist farmers—overwhelmingly “batistianos” in this area, Tortolero said. These are Cuban capitalists who fled the Caribbean island and came to Venezuela after workers and peasants in Cuba overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 through a popular revolution.

The cane cutters are paid less than the minimum wage of 200,000 bolivars a month ($100), and face some of the worst working conditions, Tortolero said. “We are trying to figure out how we can help them get organized and work with them,” he stated. “That’s one of the ways we can confront the power of the capitalists.”

This should be interesting to people who didn't know that a lot of "exiles" from the corrupt Batista era also went to Venezuela, as well as South Florida. Some of them are wildly active in the ongoing anti-Chavez class war. One of them is Cuban "exile" Roberto Alonso, who was discovered with over 100 armed Colombian paramilitaries on his ranch next door to one owned by Gustavo Cisneros, media tycoon/friend of George H. W. Bush.