It would be hilarious if it weren’t absolutely tragic. Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro, who destroyed the economy of a country that was once among the richest in Latin America and is now poorer than Haiti, promised this Saturday (15) to eradicate extreme poverty in the country by 2025, a situation which, according to the Research on Living Conditions (Encovi) of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), corresponds to 76.6% of the population.
Maduro assured Parliament that, in 2021, extreme poverty in the country, “measured with this methodology of the United Nations”, was 4.1% of the population.
“We proposed, for 2025, zero extreme poverty. It will be difficult, but it has to be the goal”, he declared, without even blushing.
The president also said that there was a “substantial” improvement in “general” poverty indicators, from 18.4% to 17.7% in 2021, “in the midst of the miraculous economic recovery”.
In September last year, UCAB reported that, according to Encovi, 94.5% of Venezuelans live below the poverty line, if measured by income.
The survey also showed that 76.6% of Venezuelans live below the extreme poverty line, which is 8.9 percentage points higher than in the previous 2019/2020 report.
In the presentation of the report, Luis Pedro España, researcher and professor at UCAB, explained that the growth of poverty has reached “what can be the ceiling” and said he doubted it would grow any further.
“Poverty will not grow, this is the maximum possible because we have 5% (of society) that can index (their salaries) when there is inflation or maintain their level of income despite the recession”, analyzed the professor, when explaining that what varies, “basically, is extreme poverty”.
The study showed that in 2019/2020 the extreme poverty rate was 67.7%, while in 2018 it was 76.5% of society.
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