Venezuela

César Báez | 10.25.2024 11:35 AM

Growing up in Venezuela, I saw how the country's socialist economic policies made it a struggle to survive. Every day, I would look out my dad's car window and see people rummaging in the trash for food—a reminder that it could be much worse.

In 2016, while some Venezuelans were literally starving to death, President Nicolás Maduro announced that he was launching a new program called CLAP. Maduro claimed that this would be the "beginning of a new economic revolution in the Venezuelan food economy."

Through this program, every Venezuelan family was supposed to receive a box of essential food items on a regular basis, but they rarely arrived. When they did arrive, the food inside was often inedible—especially the powdered milk.

Juan Andrés Ravell uncovered this massive corruption scandal for PBS's Frontline in a recent documentary titled "A Dangerous Assignment." The film is told through the eyes of the investigative reporter Roberto Deniz as he follows where the money allocated for the CLAP program really went. Deniz's investigation led him to Alex Saab, a close associate of Nicólas Maduro, who received the contracts to import food for the CLAP program. Saab became a multimillionaire practically overnight. He built a sprawling mansion in Colombia,........

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