The final act of Venezuela’s tragicomedy is playing out in slow motion, and the British government, bless their stiff upper lips, have sent in the humanitarian aid teams to assess the aftershock toll. Because nothing says ‘we care’ quite like a team of clipboard-wielding bureaucrats in khaki shorts arriving six years after the buffet has been cleared.
Let us paint a picture for you, dear reader. Venezuela, once a petro-state that could barely bother to pump its own oil, now a petro-ghost. The economy has crumbled faster than a digestive biscuit in a hurricane. Hyperinflation has rendered the bolívar so worthless that locals use it as toilet paper. Which is at least practical, because the actual toilet paper ran out back when the country still had a functioning government.
Enter the British aid assessment team, a flock of doves in high-visibility vests, here to ‘evaluate needs’ and ‘coordinate response’. The same British government that has spent the last decade defunding its own humanitarian aid budget, now sending brave souls to Caracas to count the number of empty shelves in supermarkets. The irony is so thick you could spread it on a stale arepa.
The aftershock toll, they say. Aftershock implies there was a primary shock. Was that when the electricity grid failed for the fortieth time? Or when the food distribution system collapsed so completely that mothers had to feed their children newspaper clippings of Chávez speeches? Or perhaps the shock was the realisation that the entire country’s infrastructure was held together by chewing gum and revolutionary rhetoric?
Let us not forget the earthquake itself. The earthquake was the first tremor, back in 2010 when the oil price began its slow slide. The second tremor was the descent into authoritarianism, then the third was the complete decimation of the healthcare system. And now, the aftershocks: British aid workers wandering through hospitals where patients lie on floors, sharing beds, sharing diseases, because there are no antibiotics, no painkillers, no clean water. The doctors, the ones who haven’t fled, are using vodka as antiseptic. And the British assessment team is here to ‘coordinate’.
But who are we to mock? After all, Britain themselves are no strangers to the art of managed decline. The NHS is on life support, the railway system is a national joke, and the Houses of Parliament are literally falling down. Perhaps the Venezuelans should send an aid assessment team to London to count our potholes and measure the queue times at A&E. At least then we’d have some authentic empathy, a shared understanding of what it means to watch your country rot from the inside out while the politicians argue about whose turn it is to steer the sinking ship.
Yet there is a difference. Venezuela’s collapse is sudden, violent, a spectacular burnout. Britain’s decline is a gentle, almost dignified decay, like a gentleman who refuses to admit he’s bankrupt and still insists on ordering the claret. The Venezuelan people have suffered the shock of the new, the aftershock of the real. We, meanwhile, are slowly being pickled in nostalgia and bad poetry.
So welcome, British aid teams. Welcome to Caracas. You’ll find the gin is terrible, but the view of a country in freefall is quite something. And when you return to London, with your spreadsheets and your debriefs, spare a thought for the builders in Whitehall who are trying to stop the roof from falling in. Because the aftershocks, my friends, are coming for us all.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my duty-free bottle of Venezuelan rum has just run out. I must attend to an emergency of my own.
