One sad story I came across is the following from the Miami Herald. The headline sums up the article, "In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes."
The LA Times recently wrote a couple articles; one about Venezuelans in American shipping food and other necessities to Venezuela and the second about Venezuelan refugees across South America.
My first thought when I started reading the article about sending food and other necessities to Venezuela was, "That seems risky, won't those items get stolen as the whole country is having issues? How safe are these items even in the post office?" The article addresses my questions. Folks in the US know they're taking a gamble. Some send money. Other send package. There are underground networks. Bribes are provided.
As for refugees across South America, there are some stunning statistics:
Argentina: 40,000 total in 2017.
Chile: 45,000 immigrants in the first 7 months of 2017.
Colombia (allowed to stay for 2 years): 300,000 to 400,000 total in 2017.
Ecuador: 44,000 estimated immigrants in 2017.
Note that the population of Venezuela was approximately 31.6M as of 2016. So about 1.5% of the population has left the country and we can probably bet that it is the more educated and wealthy that have left. Venezuela is suffering a massive brain drain.
This will have long term consequences for Venezuela. A perfect example is that Venezuela's oil production problems is partially driven by Hugo Chavez firing 18,000 oil workers in 2003. Click on The Economist link and you'll get to read how countries from Colombia all the way to Canada are benefiting from that firing some 14 years back. I suspect that we'll be hearing similar stories in the future about how Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and other countries gaining benefits while Venezuela suffers.
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