The Maduro Diet

0:02 Famous for his suave sprinkling style, the sodium celebrity is now viral for serving up a steak to Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Maduro visited chef Nusrat Gokce, known online as Salt Bay in Istanbul, Turkey, when he stopped on the way home from China. Gokce posted the videos of Maduro's visit on his Instagram that was seen by almost 16 million followers.

0:38 In the video, he stands over a thick cut of meat for none other than Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores. They're in Istanbul at his restaurant. Maduro stopped in Turkey on his way back from China, and the chef is giving Venezuela's president the full treatment. The video quickly goes viral, leading to a rupture of outrage online.

1:00 Back in Venezuela, people watched as their president was served an expensive steak while they starved. Later in the video, Maludo's seen smoking a cigar after enjoying his meal. By then, families had spent years cutting meals and watching their children grow thinner. People were literally searching through the garbage outside restaurants, desperate to find anything to eat.

1:22 Maduro, meanwhile, was enjoying a luxury meal. There was something impossibly cruel about this scene. The president of a country consumed by hunger allowing himself to be filmed at a luxury restaurant, untroubled by the contrast. But that was the country that Venezuela had become. A government that had called itself socialist had presided over the destruction of its people's livelihoods.

1:46 A revolution that claimed to defend the poor, coerced them with food boxes. And the men and women responsible continued to live as though the catastrophe that they created didn't exist. A year earlier, Madudro had survived the largest challenge to his rule yet. Now he was consolidating his victory. By the end of the summer of 2017, the protests were fading.

2:13 For months, Venezuelans had filled the streets, demanding elections and resisting the destruction of their democracy. Security forces had killed demonstrators, detained thousands, and turned neighborhoods into battlefields. Then Maduro imposed a constituent assembly.

3:05 In agreement with the vote, Luisa Ortega Diaz is stripped of her post as chief prosecutor.

3:10 It also assumed legislative powers that belonged to the opposition-controlled National Assembly. But the National Assembly didn't disappear. Its deputies continued to meet. Foreign governments continued to recognize it. The election that had given the opposition its majority in 2015 remained the foundation of its democratic legitimacy.

3:34 Venezuela now had two competing assemblies, the National Assembly and the Constituent Assembly, both operating within the same legislative palace. One represented an election that the government had lost, the other existed solely because the government refused to accept that loss. But inside Venezuela, it was the Constituent Assembly whose decisions were enforced.

3:56 The courts, the military, the ministries, and the electoral authorities belonged to the same authoritarian regime. When the opposition parliament passed a law, they just ignored it. When the Constituent Assembly issued a decree, they obeyed. And that's exactly what happened. Even though he won the election, the regime prevented him from taking office.

8:10 The election in Sulia was repeated in December. This time the governorship went to Chavismo. That's how elections could continue under dictatorship. The government retained the ceremony of competition while reserving the authority to decide what a victory actually meant. The opposition emerged more divided than before.

8:28 By the December municipal elections, its principal parties were boycotting, while other opposition candidates chose to participate. Voters were left watching their leaders fight over choices that all seemed to lead back to the same place. Maduro remained in power. For Venezuelans, this political exhaustion came on top of a crisis that had destroyed their lives.

8:51 The hunger didn't begin after the protests of 2017. Shortages, inflation, and collapsing incomes had been worsening for years. The economic crisis had helped bring people into the streets in the first place. By 2016, families were already skipping meals. What followed was a dramatic worsening of a catastrophe already underway.

9:11Speaker An extraordinary journey inside a country on the brink of an economic collapse. Venezuela's once thriving middle class is now trapped in desperation, struggling to put food on the table, some even dying from simple infections due to a lack of basic medicines.

9:33 Supermarkets changed their prices hourly. A salary could be raised and then swallowed by higher prices. Savings accumulated over a lifetime became worthless.

9:52 The removal of five zeros from the Venezuelan currency.

10:39 They skipped meals just so that their children could eat. And when there was no food, many turned to trees. Mangoes had always been part of Venezuelan life. Children climbed after them, and the ripe fruit fell along roads and sidewalks. During the crisis, those trees became a source of meals. By June 2016, workers were collecting mangoes during their lunch breaks.

11:02 Parents fashioned long poles to reach fruit higher in the branches. In La Fria, a 13-year-old girl described taking two mangoes when there was nothing in the refrigerator. In Bolívar, a student spent days eating nothing but crackers with mangoes from his backyard. Imagine waiting for a tree to bear fruit, just to be able to eat.

11:22 Two years later, a mother named Yurasmeli Acuña was still organizing her children's meals around the mangoes falling outside her home. She couldn't afford to feed them three times a day. Mangoes in the morning helped delay a meal until around noon. Dinner came late, close enough to the bedtime to keep the children from going to sleep hungry.

11:41 At her worst point, she sent them to bed with only water. Her daughter became painfully thin. Eventually, the family received nutritional support through the NGO Caritas, but their experience captured the calculations being made in homes across the country. How much food was left, how many mouths could it feed, and how long before somebody would ask for more.

12:15 Just milk. These kids aren't asking for candy or fast food.

12:32 Our kids are starving to death. Among those who had, the average loss was about 19 pounds. In 2017, nearly two-thirds reported weight loss, averaging around 25 pounds. Venezuelans called it the Maduro diet.

14:06 Over the last few months, the economic crisis in Venezuela has left people lining up outside, emptying supermarkets, desperate for food, and the situation is now hitting the population's health. Many Venezuelans have been inadvertently losing weight. Some have even started joking about the Maduro diet named after the current president, Nicolas Maduro.

14:27 It was the kind of bitter humor people used when something unbearable has become a part of ordinary life. And unbelievably, Maduro himself joked about it. When he asked someone in the crowd on one of his broadcasts why they were so skinny, someone yelled out the Maduro diet. The Maduro diet makes you strong.

15:15 Hunger also made every other crisis harder to survive. A child who was already malnourished became ill. The family searched for medicine. The hospital needed supplies that they couldn't afford. Doctors tried to treat patients without equipment, drugs, or reliable services for their work. Families sold belongings and searched through personal contacts for treatment.

15:35 Medical professionals left, joining the growing number of Venezuelans seeking a life elsewhere. By the end of 2018, about 3 million Venezuelans were living outside the country. That's about 10% of the population. Some left by plane, carrying the remains of a life they hoped to rebuild. Others crossed borders on foot, taking their children and whatever they could carry.

16:23 Instead, they blamed an economic war, sabotage, and foreign enemies. But the chronology matters here. The collapse was already well underway before Washington imposed financial sanctions on the Venezuelan government and Pedereza in August 2017. And even those measures were restricted to access to financing, debt restructuring.

16:43 The much broader sanctions against Pereza would come in January 2019. Sanctions could deepen the damage to an economy already in ruins, but they weren't responsible for the destruction of the economy in the first place. But the regime had another response to hunger. It distributed food through neighborhood committees known as the CLAPS.

17:02 Carajo! Los CLAP es pueblo vivo y activo, construyendo la respuesta contra la guerra económica, es amor! Los CLAP son amor in acción.

17:14 As we discussed in our previous episode, the CLAP system gave the regime extraordinary power over ordinary Venezuelans. Deliveries could be irregular, and access depended on local arrangements that tied food to the government's political machinery. You could despise the regime and still need its food.

17:31 But behind those boxes was a business. One of the products that attracted suspicion was the powdered milk. People complained about its taste and the way it behaved when mixed with water. It could leave a thick residue at the bottom of the glass. Journalists at Armando Info had samples tested. The results exposed shocking differences between the actual nutritional contents and the claiming on the packaging.

17:55 Low levels of protein and calcium and excessive carbohydrates or sodium. What was being labeled as milk didn't even meet the nutritional standards for milk. Consider what that meant for a mother trying to feed a child. The investigation followed the food through suppliers and intermediaries. A Hong Kong registered company, Grand Group Limited, had obtained lucrative contracts to supply the program.

18:19 Behind the business network were Colombian businessmen Alex Saab and Álvaro Pulido. Saab had already built a corrupt career around contracts with the Venezuelan state. His connections reached back to the Chavez years when he entered the business of supplying materials for public housing. Public housing that was never built.

18:37 As the country grew poorer, his access to the government became more valuable. The CLAP business offered enormous opportunities to overcharge. The difference became profit. Subsequent U.S. investigations described a system of kickbacks that rewarded regime insiders, including Maduro's family. So the same hunger that made the boxes a form of coercion to starving Venezuelans were being used to enrich Maduro and his cronies.

19:02 That is the cruelty of the system. The suffering of the population became a source of leverage over that population, and a source of corruption among the dictatorship's elite. By 2018, Maduro was preparing to secure another presidential term. His existing term would have ended in January 2019. The country that approached that vote was exhausted.

19:25 The opposition coalition had fractured. Leading politicians were imprisoned, disqualified, or in exile. Parties faced restrictions on participation, and the government controlled the institutions responsible for the election. Smartmatic, the company that had supplied Venezuela's voting technology for years, had publicly challenged the turnout announced for the 2017 Constituent Assembly election.

19:46 It subsequently withdrew from Venezuela. Confidence in the machinery of elections had been shattered. Most of the main opposition refused to participate in the presidential vote. Once again, the opposition confronted the choice that had divided it after the regional elections. Participate under conditions designed to defeat you or abstain and leave the government to announce its victory.

20:06 Maduro also campaigned with fear and social control. There is nothing free about asking hungry people to choose while making them fear that the wrong choice would cost them their food. On election night, the electoral authorities declared Maduro the winner. Even the official turnout was below half the electorate.

20:25 At Miraflores Palace, the celebrations went ahead. Around the lights were darkened homes, where Venezuelans were starving. Families deciding who would leave the country, who would stay with an elderly parent, and how to pay for a medicine that had become impossible to find. While Maduro celebrated another six years.

21:18 For those who had marched, voted, organized, and watched friends disappear into prison or exile, the result carried a crushing suggestion that perhaps none of it could change anything. The dictatorship could survive, despite the country's ruin. But there was a problem Maduro's celebration could not resolve.

21:41 His announced victory had not produced a credible democratic mandate. Governments across the Americas and Europe rejected the election's legitimacy. And the term under which he had been governing still had an expiration date. January 10th, 2019. The opposition-controlled National Assembly remained in place.

22:01 It had survived years of obstruction, intimidation, and attempts to render it irrelevant. Its members still held the mandate Venezuelans had given them in 2015. Now, opposition leaders were developing a plan to use that mandate to challenge Maduro's claim to the presidency. The plan would depend on persuading Venezuelans, foreign governments, and above all, the armed forces that the new term could not begin with Maduro legitimately in office.

22:28 And it would place an unfamiliar figure at the center of the struggle. The deputy chosen to take over as president of the National Assembly in January was 35 years old. Most people inside and outside Venezuela had never heard his name. That man was Juan Guaidó. And within weeks, Venezuelans would fill the streets again.