Being unaware of an economic depression

I’m in Mexico City right now but I can’t keep my mind off of Venezuela. Mexico City is beautiful, food is great, and people are nice but every bit of time I get where I have some time with my phone, I’m reading about what’s going on in Venezuela.

Until earlier this week, I was actually not aware of what was happening in Venezuela and I was, especially, not aware of what has been happening since the death of Hugo Chávez.

If you’re like me a week ago, right now there is an economic depression sweeping all of Venezuela as the government struggles to support its populace with basic necessity like milk, sugar, coffee, basic hygiene needs, and health care. I won’t go too much into details about all of what’s happening, there are better sources for that here:

I am writing this more from a perspective a moderately informed American. I keep up with major news stories and I read into things that interest me beyond tweets and headlines but this one has completely escaped my radar. It’s also surprising that nobody in my circle of friends has posted about it on twitter or facebook. At least that means that there are 500+ people in some capacity who haven’t read or read enough to share about the crisis in Venezuela. I’m upset at myself for not finding out more about this earlier but now that I know, I’m looking for better sources to get familiar with the topic.

From the outside, the Venezuelan crisis looks like any other crises that oil-relying nations go through but I’m curious to find out if there are external influences that affected Venezuela differently than say Norway in the 60s or Kuwait in the 80s.

This does give me something to read more about and learn because I don’t want my blog to be a political opinion blog so I wanted to share this from the perspective that it’s possible to miss out on big news like this and then the best thing to do is to be informed about it.