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A Venezuelan folk band plays on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse. Jim WyssMiami Herald
On a crowded Colombian street packed with holiday shoppers and bathed in the sounds of Christmas music, Larry Centeno sat on the sidewalk and wept.
The 44-year-old, his wife and grown daughter all fled Venezuela earlier this month, and each headed to a different Colombian city in hopes that one of them would land a stable job.
“It’s hard here being alone,” the former electrician said as he wiped away tears and tried to sell small cups of black coffee to passersby. “But in Venezuela there was nothing for us anymore. They stole our hope.”
The number of Venezuelans who have fled to other parts of South America has increased more than seven-fold in the last three years, as hunger, chaos and helplessness are sparking a mass exodus.
According to a new report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there were more than 629,000 Venezuelans living in nine major South American countries in 2017 — up from just 85,000 in 2015.
The number of Venezuelans emigrating to other countries in South America has increased seven-fold in the last three years, according to the International Organization for Migration.
International Organization for Migration Courtesy
The trend is remarkable in a region that’s usually a net producer of migrants to places like Europe and the United States.
Colombia is a case in point. Amid decades of a bloody civil conflict, millions of Colombians fled abroad, including to Venezuela. But in the last three years, there’s been a staggering 10-fold increase in Venezuelans coming to Colombia — spiking from 44,615 in 2015 to an estimated 470,000 in 2017.
Places like Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Argentina have also seen the Venezuelan population more than triple.
And those numbers exclude the growing number of Venezuelans seeking asylum.
"The Venezuelan people are starving and their country is collapsing," President Donald Trump stated before the United Nations on Sept. 19, 2017. He later called on other countries to do more to address the crisis in Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro, which "has inflicted terrible misery and suffering on the good people of that country."
The White House
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, from 2014 to 2017 more than 100,000 Venezuelans sought asylum protection in foreign countries — half of those applications were filed this year.
“People are leaving Venezuela for all sorts of reasons,” said UNHCR spokeswoman Regina de la Portilla. “Some are fleeing armed groups, others because they’re being persecuted for their political vision, and others because of the lack of medicine, food and other basic necessities.”
Larry Centeno, 44, once had his own construction company in Venezuela. Now he makes a living selling coffee on the streets of Colombia’s capital. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald
Venezuela is being eviscerated by four-digit inflation and a shrinking economy. Food and medicine shortages sweep through the country. Despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, many are going hungry.
Jesus Montesinos, 42, said he once had an enviable job running a theater in northern Venezuela. But as the bolívar currency became worthless, and food became hard to find, he dropped from 308 pounds to 132 pounds.
He crossed into Colombia in August fearing for his health, and with the mission of sending money back home to support his family.
“The social, economic and cultural conflicts are killing the country,” he said. “And the government doesn’t want to acknowledge that it’s part of the problem.”
President Nicolás Maduro and his socialist administration blame the woes on an “economic war” waged by the opposition and shadowy foreign forces. While the United States has slapped the country with financial sanctions in recent months, economists say it’s the country’s draconian price and currency controls — along with declining oil revenue — that have turned the once-proud nation into the hemisphere’s basket case.
In the heart of Bogotá’s tourist district, on the steps of the Gold Museum, a group of four Venezuelans, dressed in the red, blue and yellow of their national flag, played traditional folk songs in hopes of earning some spare change.
All of them were teachers and educators back in Yaracuy, in northern Venezuela, and all fled without their families. The men said that on a good day they might make about $10 in spare change — the equivalent of their monthly salary back home.
Orlando Muñoz, 33, who was playing the maracas, said he sold his most valuable possession, a refrigerator, to buy a one-way bus ticket to Colombia.
While he said he would go home “immediately” if things got better, he described his decision in stark terms.
“We’re not here because we want to be — we had to escape,” he said. “We’re fleeing from the quiet death of hunger.”
Asked what the name of the band was, the drummer shrugged as if it was an unnecessary luxury.
“We don’t have a name,” he said. “I guess you can just call us Venezuela.”
For the most part, Latin America has opened its arms to this new breed of economic refugees.
Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Colombia have all carved out special visa programs that have made it easier for Venezuelans to seek temporary residence and find work.
Chile and Ecuador also have lax immigration policies that have made them a safe haven for Venezuelans.
Larry Centeno, 44, once had his own construction company in Venezuela. Now he makes a living selling coffee on the streets of Colombia’s capital. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald
Centeno, who was selling coffee, used to have his own construction company before the economy collapsed. He said the last straw for him came on Dec. 10 when the government won 305 out of 335 mayor’s seats amid opposition abstention.
“Everything is so corrupt there,” he said. “The only brave people left are the students, but they’re carrying flags and the army has guns, so what can they do?”
He and his immediate family crossed the border on a bus with $140 to their name. Once a proud entrepreneur, he now keeps himself on a pauper’s budget: $4 a night for a room and $1.50 a day for food. The rest of his earnings (about $15 a week) he sends home to support relatives.
Asked how long he thinks it will be before he can return to Venezuela, he starts to cry again.
“We can’t even say how long it will take us to rebuild the country,” he explained, “because we have no idea how long this problem is going to last.”
Follow Jim Wyss on Twitter @jimwyss
A Venezuelan folk band plays on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse. Jim WyssMiami Herald
Despite what the Trump transition and mainstream media may be telling you the investigation into Hillary Clinton is not over. It’s just evolving. The FBI is still investigating the pay for play activity of the Clinton Foundation, and the Trump team is asking other countries to help.
Sources inside the transition team told the The NY Post the new administration plans instruct the US ambassadors it will appoint to suggest to foreign governments they probe the Clinton foundation financial dealings.
“Haiti and Colombia will be key diplomatic posts for this because of all the money involved,” said the source.
In Haiti, recently leaked e-mails indicate “Friends of Bill” Clinton may have been given priority from the State Department as it prepared to spend some $10 billion in aid after a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010. The State Department has denied any special treatment.
Haiti may have the most reasons to aid in the investigations. After that horrible 7.0 magnitude earthquake in January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, Clinton Foundation Chief/ former POTUS Bubba visited Haiti just a few days after the devastation occurred. Both promised to help Haiti rebuild. In fact, Bill was named the UN special envoy to Haiti and in conjunction with his Secretary of State wife controlled billions of dollars of contracts awarded by the State Department to rebuild Haiti. “Coincidentally” many of those companies who got one of those lucrative State Dept. contracts to help rebuild Haiti, also “just happened to” give large donations to the Clinton Foundation.
For example, there was the Haitian Mobile Money Initiative a system developed to allow Haitians to transfer money via cell phones after the That contract was awarded to a company called Digicel who earned more than $50 million in Haiti. The company is run by Irish billionaire who set-up high-paying speeches for Bill Clinton and donated millions of his own money to the Clinton Foundation.
One program put in place to enable Haiti to raise needed capital by exploiting the country’s mineral resources. One of the companies which got a mining permit was VCS Mining. The company had little experience in mining, but right after they got the contract “just happened” to put Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony, on its Board of Directors.
Then there was the Caracol Industrial Park, announced in Haiti with great fanfare at a ceremony which included many American Celebrities. The Anchor store is a Korean manufacturer who “just happened” to be Clinton supporters.
During the presidential campaign, the former president of the Haitian Senate, Bernard Sansaricq, told Donald Trump that he had the documentation to prove that the Clintons tried to bribe him in an effort to get his support for the Clinton foundation’s work to defraud the people of Haiti.
So Clinton Foundation staff was hobnobbing with a powerful Haitian politician and using connections at the State Department to try to influence U.S. policy decisions involving that same politician. That’s unethical and it is also contrary to what Mrs. Clinton promised when she went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2009 as president-elect Barack Obama’s secretary of state nominee. But most of those promises were ignored.
In Colombia, Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra pledged $100 million to the foundation in 2005 and later benefited from the foundation’s philanthropic work in the country, where he acquired large parcels of land and set up an oil business, according to watchdog groups.
A long-time friend of Bubba Clinton’s Giustra was also a key player in the Uranium One scandal as outlined in the Peter Schweizer book Clinton Cash. Nine investors who profited from the uranium deal which gave ownership of 20% of the U.S. uranium supply collectively donated $145 million to Hillary’s family foundation, including Clinton Foundation mega donor and Canadian mining billionaire Frank Giustra, who pledged $100 million.
The Clinton Foundation, headed by Donna Shalala, the former health and human services secretary in the Clinton administration, has received millions from dozens of foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Sweden and Ireland.
Days after Hillary Clinton’s election defeat, French federal comptrollers began following a trail of tens of millions in government money that ended up in Clinton Foundation coffers, according to a document reviewed by The Post.
After the Hillary Clinton election defeat the Australian and Norwegian governments their donations to the Clinton Foundation and Foundation donations in total dropped by 37 percent to $108 million last year. was it because of the evidence turned up that the foundation was simply part of a criminal pay for play enterprise? Or perhaps it was because foreign government’s originally donated for the opportunity to influence foreign policy, and with the Hillary loss that was no longer possible.
Whether the donations were cut because of the possible pay for play charges or because the Clinton’s could no longer help them influence foreign policy, Trump may have the right idea. Foreign governments may be more likely to help the U.S. discover the truth about the Clintons exploiting the Foundation and the office of secretary of state to influence American foreign policy and make the Clinton Family wealthy.
A Truly Mind-Boggling Summary of “Coincident events” Connecting the Time Table with the demise of the United States as a world power as a well planned and executed consequence, transpiring to this very day.
Any one of these ‘coincident events’ when taken singularly appear to not mean much, but when taken as a whole, a computer would blow a main circuit if you asked it to calculate the odds that they have occurred by chance alone.
(Now read and ponder the Obama-related ‘coincident events’, that superimpose the bigger picture of most recent events i.e., Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal and the National Security Agency revelations with Hillary Clinton.
(Who most assuredly deserves a carefully outlined summary of “fortuitous coincident events” of her own)
Barack Hussein Obama: just happened to know 60s far-left radical revolutionary William Ayers, whose father just happened to be Thomas Ayers, who just happened to be a close friend of Obama’s communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, who just happened to work at the communist-sympathizing Chicago Defender with Vernon Jarrett, who just happened to later become the father-in-law of Iranian-born leftist Valerie Jarrett, who Obama just happened to choose as his closest White House adviser, and who just happened to have been CEO of Habitat Company, which just happened to manage public housing in Chicago, which just happened to get millions of dollars from the Illinois state legislature, and which just happened not to properly maintain the housing which eventually just happened to require demolition. Not to mention that this is the property that would have been the grounds that hosted the Olympics, had Obama’s efforts been successful.
Valerie Jarrett also just happened to work for the city of Chicago, and just happened to hire Michelle LaVaughan Robinson (later Mrs. Obama), who just happened to have worked at the Sidney Austin law firm, where former fugitive from the FBI Bernadine Dohrn also just happened to work, and where Barack Obama just happened to get a summer job.
Bernardine Dohrn:
just happened to be married to William Ayers, with whom she just happened to have hidden from the FBI at a San Francisco marina, along with Donald Warden, who just happened to change his name to Khalid al-Mansour, and Warden/al-Mansour who just happened to be a mentor of Black Panther Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and a close associate of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and al-Mansour coincident events just happened to be financial adviser to a Saudi Prince, who just happened to donate cash to Harvard, for which Obama just happened to get a critical letter of recommendation from Percy Sutton, who just happened to have been the attorney for Malcolm X, who just happened to know Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, who just happened to be a close friend of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., who just happened to meet Malcolm X when he traveled to Kenya . Obama, Sr.
just happened to have his education at the University of Hawaii paid for by the Laubach Literacy Institute, which just happened to have been supported by Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, who just happened to be a friend of Malcolm X, who just happened to have been associated with the Nation of Islam, which was later headed by Louis Farrakhan, who just happens to live very close to Obama’s Chicago mansion, which also just happens to be located very close to the residence of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who just happens to have been occasional baby-sitters for Malia and Natasha Obama, whose parents just happened to have no concern exposing their daughters to bomb-making communists.
After attending Occidental College and Columbia University, where he just happened to have foreign Muslim roommates, Obama moved to Chicago to work for the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization that just happened to have been founded by Marxist and radical agitator Saul the RedAlinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, who just happened to be the topic of Hillary Rodham Clintons thesis at Wellesley College, and Obamas $25,000 salary at IAF just happened to be funded by a grant from the Woods Fund, which was founded by the Woods family, whose Sahara Coal company just happened to provide coal to Commonwealth Edison, whose CEO just happened to be Thomas Ayers, whose son William Ayers just happened to serve on the board of the Woods Fund, along with Obama.
Obama also worked on voter registration drives in Chicago in the 1980s and just happened to work with leftist political groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Socialist International (SI), through which Obama met Carl Davidson, who just happened to travel to Cuba during the Vietnam War to sabotage the U.S. war effort, and who just happened to be a former member of the SDS and a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which just happened to sponsor a 2002 anti-war rally at which Obama spoke, and which just happened to have been organized by Marilyn Katz, a former SDS activist and later public relations consultant who just happened to be a long-time friend of Obamas political hatchet man, David Axelrod.
Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), whose pastor was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a fiery orator who
just happened to preach Marxism and Black Liberation Theology and who delivered anti-white, anti-Jew, and anti-American sermons, which Obama just happened never to hear because he just happened to miss church only on the days when Wright was at his most enthusiastic, and Obama just happened never to notice that Oprah Winfrey left the church because it was too radical, and just happened never to notice that the church gave the vile anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan a lifetime achievement award.
Although no one had ever heard of him at the time, Obama just happened to receive an impossible-to-believe $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations, which he just happened to fail to write while using the cash to vacation in Bali with his wife Michelle, and despite his record of non-writing he just happened to receive a second advance, for $40,000, from another publisher, and he eventually completed a manuscript called Dreams From My Father, which just happened to strongly reflect the writing style of William Ayers, who just happened to trample on an American flag for the cover photograph of the popular Chicago magazine, which Obama just happened never to see even though it appeared on newsstands throughout the city.
Obama was hired by the law firm Miner, Banhill and Galland, which just happened to specialize in negotiating state government contracts to develop low-income housing, and which just happened to deal with now-imprisoned Tony Rezko and his firm Rezar, and with slumlord Valerie Jarrett, and the law firms Judson Miner just happened to have been a classmate of Bernardine Dohrn, wife of William Ayers. In 1994 Obama represented ACORN and another plaintiff in a lawsuit against Citibank for denying mortgages to blacks (Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank), and the lawsuit just happened to result in banks being blackmailed into approving sub-prime loans for poor credit risks, a trend which just happened to spread nationwide, and which just happened to lead to the collapse of the housing bubble, which just happened to help Obama defeat John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.
In 1996 Obama ran for the Illinois State Senate and joined the New Party, which just happened to promote Marxism, and Obama was supported by Dr. Quentin Yong, a socialist who just happened to support a government takeover of the health care system.
In late 1999, Obama purportedly engaged in homosexual activities and cocaine-snorting in the back of a limousine with a man named Larry Sinclair, who claims he was contacted in late 2007 by Donald Young, who
just happened to be the gay choir director of Obamas Chicago church and who shared information with Sinclair about Obama, and Young just happened to be murdered on December 23, 2007, just weeks after Larry Bland, another gay member of the church just happened to be murdered, and both murders just happened to have never been solved. In 2008 Sinclair held a press conference to discuss his claims, and just happened to be arrested immediately after the event, based on a warrant issued by Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, who just happens to be the son of Joe Biden.
In 2003 Obama and his wife attended a dinner in honor of Rashid Khalidi, who just happened to be a former PLO operative, harsh critic of Israel , and advocate of Palestinian rights, and who Obama claims he does not know, even though the Obamas just happened to have dined more than once at the home of Khalidi and his wife, Mona, and just happened to have used them as occasional baby-sitters. Obama reportedly praised Khalidi at the decidedly anti-Semitic event, which William Ayers just happened to also attend, and the event Obama pretends he never attended was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network, to which
Obamajust happened to have funneled cash while serving on the board of the Woods Fund with William Ayers, and one speaker at the dinner remarked that if Palestinians cannot secure a return of their land, Israel will never see a day of peace, and entertainment at the dinner included a Muslim children’s dance whose performances just happened to include simulated be-headings with fake swords, and stomping on American, Israeli, and British flags, and Obama allegedly told the audience that Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine and there has been genocide against the Palestinian people by (the) Israelis, and the Los Angeles Times has a videotape of the event but just happens to refuse to make it public.
In the 2004 Illinois Democrat primary race for the U.S. Senate, front-runner Blair Hull
just happened to be forced out of the race after David Axelrod just happened to manage to get Hulls sealed divorce records unsealed, which just happened to enable Obama to win the primary, so he could face popular Republican Jack Ryan, whose sealed child custody records from his divorce just happened to become unsealed, forcing Ryan to withdraw from the race, which just happened to enable the unqualified Obama to waltz into the U.S. Senate, where, after a mere 143 days of work, he just happened to decide he was qualified to run for President of the United States!
And now you really do know some of the rest of the story…..Perhaps you know someone else who also might like to read it, especially before the forthcoming Presidential, Senatorial and House elections
- See more at: http://israel-commentary.org/?p=12949#sthash.IxNb7P7W.dpuf
Remember a few years ago when pro golfer Tiger Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade?
Isn't it amazing that within a week the press found every woman with whom Tiger had an affair during the previous few years?
They even uncovered photos, text messages, recorded phone calls, etc.!
Furthermore, they not only knew the cause of the family fight, but they even knew it was a 9 iron from his golf bag that his wife used to break out the windows in the Escalade.
Not only that, they know which wedge!
And, each and every day, they were able to continue to provide America with updates on Tiger's sex rehab stay, his wife's divorce settlement figures, as well as the dates of tournaments in which he planned to play.
NOW,
BarackHusseinObama has been in office for over six years, yet this very samepress:
Cannot find any of his childhood friends or neighbors;
Or find any of Obama's high school or college classmates, or any of his former girlfriends;
Or locate any of his college papers or grades;
Or determine how he paid for both a Columbia and a Harvard education;
Or discover which country issued his visa to travel to Pakistan in the 1980s;
Or even find Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis on racism.
They just can't seem to uncover any of this!
Yet, the public still trusts that same press to give them the whole truth!
