One of the things that might make you think things are different in Venezuela compared to the Eastern European communist regimes of the past is the fact that Venezuela is allowing people to flee the disintegrating socialist hellhole.  East Germans, by contrast, shot people trying to escape through the Berlin Wall.

Well, as with everything Chavista and communist, everything old is new again.

Venezuelans are facing substantial obstacles to fleeing because other nations, such as Peru, are starting to require passports.  That makes sense from Peru's perspective, given that the Peruvians need to know who's coming into their country, just as we need to know who's coming into ours.

But it leaves a tremendous problem of refugee flight unaddressed.

The problem here is that Cubans control Venezuela's passport issuance.  And guess what: they aren't delivering them.  Look at this Twitter note from Venezuelan expert Pedro Burelli:

Venezolanos huyen por razones obvias. Pero la razón que lo hacen sin pasaportes es que una empresa cubana tiene el contrato para producirlos y optó por quedarse con el dinero y no entregar pasaportes. Es hora de responsabilizar a La Habana por su criminal injerencia en Vzla https://t.co/PXzXmjcGbJ

— Pedro Mario Burelli (@pburelli) August 26, 2018

Translation:

Venezuelans flee for obvious reasons.  But the reason they do it without passports is that a Cuban company has the contract to produce them and opted to keep the money and not deliver passports.  It's time to hold Havana accountable for its criminal interference in Venezuela.

What that means, now that Peru and other nations, including the U.S., require passports, is that Venezuelans cannot effectively flee.  Sorry, back you go, no illegal aliens.  That's been going on for a while, actually, back when Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez turned the issuance of passports over to a foreign country in an amazing self-colonializing move.  So it's obvious that the regime knew that such a move would serve its interests by controlling the movement of its people.

For someone fleeing for his life due to forced starvation and an absence of medical care, based on the typical horrors of socialism, it sounds like a death sentence.

There isn't much outcry from the usual suspects – the Church, the NGOs, the open borders lobby – about this problem.  Perhaps it would cast too much attention on the failures of socialism, which, in this case, very much include penning people in against their will, if only through the default actions of nations such as Peru that require passports.  Not having a passport pretty much makes you a non-person.  And control of movement has always been a feature of socialism – which shows that this is what socialists have aimed to achieve all along.

What we need here is an international effort to get around this barbarism, given that people are starving.  There are protocols in place for North Koreans fleeing their hellhole, which might be a model.  Right now, it's important to find a way to create an exception for these genuine refugees going to the nearest country over, and resources if necessary, because allowing Cuba to triumph in stopping people's flight is a bit rich.  It would be good to see the U.S. speaking out, loudly, on this travesty that amounts to the same walls seen in Eastern Europe, designed to keep people in.

Image credit: University of Minnesota Institute of Advanced Studies, public domain.