CARACAS: Other countries in the region see extreme poverty as high as 53 percent.
In spite of Venezuela’s economic turbulence in 2015, the government has managed to reduce extreme poverty to 4.9 percent thanks to social investment and initiatives, the vice president for social development, Gladys Requena, announced Monday.
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When former President Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, 21 percent of Venezuelans lived in extreme poverty. Since then, under Chavez’s same PSUV socialist party government, a variety of government “missions,” or initiatives, have bolstered living conditions for millions.
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The housing mission, for example, between 2011 and 2015 has provided 800,000 low-income families with new homes, while it was reported that the 12-year-old health mission has completed over 700 million free appointments to date.
The spending on social projects has continued in spite of an economic war waged by international opponents to the wealth redistribution project of the PSUV’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” which has driven up inflation and smuggling.
Speaking at a Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) ministers meeting, Venezuela’s vice president, Jorge Arreaza, said that his government’s goal is to eradicate extreme poverty within the coming years.
The continuation of this trend under the PSUV will depend, in part, on Venezuelan parliamentary elections Dec. 6.
World Bank statistics from 2012 show that the regional average for those living under US$1.90 per day stood at 5.6 percent. However, individual country statistics varied greatly from over 53 percent in Haiti to almost 19 percent in Honduras to 0.3 percent in Uruguay. At that time the World Bank and the Venezuelan national statistics agency put Venezuelans living in extreme poverty at 9.2 percent.
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