Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has this week increased the basic minimum wage in his country by 150 percent. This represents the sixth such readjustment this year. Though it is hard to see it tackling the urgent problem of hyperinflation; which, according to the IMF ran at 1,350,000 percent this year. Such economic dire straits at home have prompted what has been described as the world’s largest exodus across national borders since the Syrian civil war. Indeed, some 2.3 million Venezuelans have left their country — though some reports have put this figure at nearly double this — effectively in search of food and medicine. Around one million of these are children or those under the age of 18 years; many travelling without adults because their families simply cannot afford to feed them. An overwhelming majority do not have the required paperwork to seek legitimate work once in neighbouring Columbia. The end result being that the border town of Cucuta is filled with thousands of Venezuelans sleeping rough; often with little more than pieces of cardboard for blankets. Observers on the ground have talked of how unprecedented the sheer numbers are given that no humanitarian disaster has taken place. So, who is to blame? For Maduro, there can be only one answer. Donald Trump, he argues, is persecuting the Venezuelan people in much the same way that Hitler treated the Jews. And it is true that this White House has imposed several rounds of crippling sanctions on Caracas; something that the latter sees as a first step towards regime change. But it was Barack Obama who linked Venezuela’s human rights record — under the Maduro regime — to economic punitiveness. In fact, the latter even went as far as declaring the country a threat to US national security. Fast-forward two years to 2017 and Trump confirmed he would not rule out “a military option” when dealing with Maduro’s autocracy. To be sure, it is not in Washington’s interest to see a Socialist regime triumph in any part of the world. And then there is the troubling record of IMF programmes in Latin America. But be that as it may, this does not abdicate the Venezuelan government from responsibility when it comes to fulfilling the social contract between state and citizenry. However, this burden must also extend to the international community. For the simple reason that entire societies cannot be economically decimated just because the major powers do not like any system of governance that directly challenges the global capitalist paradigm. The onus is on the international community to strengthen safety nets for the world’s most vulnerable. Sanctions, after all, do not hurt elite power centres; as Iranians know only too well. And it just does not make long-term economic sense to take away with one hand and ‘give back’ with the other in terms of humanitarian aid packages. If nothing else, when sovereign nations are essentially managed in this way from abroad — akin to a part-time charity — it does absolutely nothing to strengthen democracy. Rather, the opposite occurs. * Published in Daily Times, December 1st 2018.