The march of time has a cruel way of bestowing feast or famine on people and countries—something like the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of biblical times.  Now it’s Venezuela’s turn.

Once Venezuela and its people were a festival of oil and money and the good life.   Now like those biblical cities, the once prosperous nation is on its knees beset by poverty and bad politics and a corrupt social system that appears to have no end.

Most Latin American countries have such histories, but Venezuela in its adult years seemed to be an exception although it had its run of incompetent and corrupt leaders.     

Its oil resources fed a social welfare system that seemed to inure it to the socioeconomic maladies that other Latin American countries have been unable to escape or without the means to avoid. 

I lived in Caracas as a foreign correspondent during one of its best epochs and a year when it celebrated its 400th anniversary.  Government ministries and civil organizations seemed to hold a party every week with joyful abundance and with the participation, it seemed, of the entire community.

Although it had its share of corrupt and malfeasant leaders as in most developing regions in Latin America, Venezuela seemed to be a cut above its contemporaries due to providence and the stroke of rich natural resources like oil that kept the good times flowing.  

How much of it was shared with the people and how much was plundered by inefficient and corrupt leaders remains an unquenchable debate.

Rich or poor, it created a sort of arrogance once displayed to some foreigners that included me at Caracas' international airport when a midnight group of returning locals cut in front of a line of long traveled, exhausted visitors. 

“We don’t stand in line.  We’re Venezuelans; we got money,” they said more pretentious than jocular, and a melee broke out until the police intervened.  

Well the good times are over.  A string of bad, maybe even disastrous government leadership highlighted by the unschooled regime of military man, Hugo Chavez, has brought the once socially prominent and capitalist country South American nation to its knees.

His anointed successor, the current president, Nicolas Maduro, once a bus driver, hasn’t done any better and for many is rated worse than his tutor who had a short and dubious reign. 

Complicating things are the hard times Venezuelans are enduring like going hungry, getting sick and begging in the streets and for some resorting to violence and criminality in order to survive.

Venezuela is no longer rich although it still has plentiful petroleum resources. Unfortunately, the oil industry and the income it brings is also on the skids with much of the world awash in oil or resorting to other energy producing alternatives.

Maduro, the former bus driver and union official, isn’t as dumb as his political detractors thought when the then vice president succeeded his departed mentor, the army general Hugo Chavez. 

Like most political despots, Latino or otherwise, Maduro is a keen student in the art of political manipulation and survival though his tenure is still young. 

Ex bus driver he may be, he has survived because he has learned well how to outmaneuver political potholes in his path and also perhaps because, while Venezuelans may be good in fielding Ms. Universe winners, they don’t seem as adept in picking competent political leaders to whom they entrust their welfare and destiny.

Venezuela is noted for its beautiful women and at one time fielded an array of Ms. Universe contest winners.

It still has beautiful women, but now it is known more for its ugly politics and an inability to steer its once formidable socioeconomic ship thru unruly civic waters that beset it.  

Maduro has taunted the U.S. with some belligerent domestic policies that has increased suffering and also hammered whoever his adversaries may be leading to jail time for those that persist. 

As big brother watching, the U.S. has intervened accusing Maduro’s government of human rights abuses and has frozen any assets in U.S. jurisdiction.

It’s just a shot across the bow for Maduro and his government with little consequences except for international stigma.  Other than that, life goes on the Maduro way in Venezuela. •