Venezuela, by the numbers, resembles a country hit by civil war.
Its economy, once Latin America’s richest, is estimated to have shrunk by 10 percent in 2016, more than Syria’s. Its inflation that year has been estimated as high as 720 percent, nearly double that of second-ranked South Sudan, rendering its currency nearly worthless.
In a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, food has grown so scarce that three in four citizens reported involuntary weight loss, averaging 19 pounds in a year.
City streets are marked by black markets and violence. The last reported murder rate, in 2014, was equivalent to the civilian casualty rate in 2004 Iraq.
Its democracy, long a point of pride, became the oldest to collapse into authoritarianism since World War II. Power grabs, most recently to replace the Constitution, have led to protests and crackdowns that have killed dozens just this month.
Established democracies are not supposed to implode like this. Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist, said Venezuela was one of “four or five, ever.” Among those, none was as wealthy or fell so far. “In most cases,” he said, “the regime quits before it gets this bad.”
Venezuela’s crisis came through a series of steps whose progression is clear in retrospect, and some of which initially proved popular
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