Tag: venezuela

Backdoor Survival: Going Stealth When Using a Generator

Going Stealth When Using Generators: Lessons From Venezuela comes from Jose Martinez in an article at Backdoor Survival. Jose Martinez was able to flee Venezuela and make a life elsewhere, but shares what he learned in the chaos in various articles.

…This long introduction is only meant to open your eyes so you can understand the attitude and behavior of the people who very likely will be roaming in the streets after or while the collapse is occurring. There will be some pockets where the situation won’t be that bad, but won’t be too many, and perhaps far away from each other. More about that in the next articles.

Not all of your neighbors may be good.

Let´s go on topic now. I´m sure there is plenty of preppers around there with generators and a huge fuel tank. Many of us even with a propane system as a backup. Great. We all agree that, under some type of threat, and the power grid is shut down in our nearby area, we´ll turn on our generator, and start to count how many hours it´s on, and check the fuel level every few hours.

Hopefully, you´ll have a battery rack large enough to have some lights and heating on for a while, when the generator is off to save fuel. It should be possible to replenish the tank, after all. This will depend, of course, on every different situation. I know something for real: we can´t prep for everything.

But we can prepare for some general situations that are going to generate some type of scarcity. The difficult part here, and I speak from my own experience, is the calculation of how much time that contingency is going to last.

We were more or less prepared for civilian turmoil and general disorder that could make us bugging in. Time proved us wrong. Dangerously wrong. I´ve mentioned this in other articles, though. Let´s keep going with this…

It´s astonishing to learn how silence can rule over the land when there is no electricity. When we were still living in Venezuela, the worst of the blackouts (even for me, a lover of peace and quiet) was the silence. It was good for some purpose, though, because sometimes it would allow to detect early presence of undesirable or threatening individuals, like those running in small Chinese motorbikes all over the place, with two guys, the one in the backseat generally armed with a 9mm or a .38 revolver. Those would rob everyone within their reach.

Once a small engine motorcycle is detected, everyone looks for getting out the way in Venezuela. If your generator is too loud, you won´t hear inside your home what can be happening outside, and we can’t be monitoring our CCTV surveillance cameras (and if you don´t have them, get them. Now, when they´re on the cheap, and PLEASE conceal them. Don´t be a smart a$$ and leave them in the open as a “deterrent” to someone knocks them down with a silenced .22 and blind your eyes outside). If you are nearby the sound source it´s very likely you won´t be able to hear anything going on around. This is a very powerful reason to think carefully about where we put money in. There are quite expensive generators, liquid-cooled, where the coolant act as a soundproof layer, and with specially designed casings to quieten the sound. Of course, you can imagine how expensive these machines are. They worth it, though, for those who can´t or won´t bug out to a secluded location and prefer to stay put in their place. I can accept that…

Backdoor Survival: 3 Proven Profitable Activities in a Collapse, Venezuelan Edition

This article was written by Jose Martinez, an eyewitness to the collapse of Venezuela, for Backdoor Survival. It details three occupations that are allowing people to continue to survive in Venezuela – small scale farmer, plumber, and electrician.

The worst part of the economic collapse has already passed and people have slowly understood that they can´t keep working to receive useless and worthless currency.

The mafia has injected (illegally, I guess, as the most parts of what they do) hundreds of tons of dollars to increase the liquidity they destroyed themselves, with shadowy intentions.

Maybe not so shadowy after all, if we see the hundreds of kilos of all kinds of drugs that “someone” is smuggling all over the place.

How this amount of illegal product circulates in our roads and gets through the airports, is a mystery for me as a civilian. Unless, of course, those responsible to keep the country safe are busy in some other “activity”…

This is not intended to be a list compiling what you should study to be the most wanted employee in the next collapse. It’s just a simple, reliable and proven testimony of how some people, who could not or would not flee and leave our beloved and sunny country behind, are surviving and getting enough food on their table, medicines, clothing, and generally sneaking into the dark waters of this induced collapse á-lá Cuban…

1. Small Scale Farming and Food Production

This seems obvious? It is not. Small farms in Venezuela never were excessively productive, with some honorable exceptions I personally know of. It takes a lot of hard, back-breaking work. Being smaller, usually, owners don’t invest in tons of machinery, even if they could have afforded them at some time. They may have some grinding equipment, for cattle feed and such. Small tractors are found expensive for many owners. I know because they have talked to me about this and listened.

Cheap Chinese spare parts could make equipment fail in the worst possible moment and ruin the entire crop, so they prefer renting or trading in some way when they need plowing or some kind of tractor work. They hire laborers to crop, or rent the needed machinery, once again…

Click here to read the entire article at Backdoor Survival.

Organic Prepper: Six Warning Signs that Civil Unrest Is Imminent

Jose Martinez, who escaped the unrest in Venezuela, writes this article for The Organic Prepper about the current unrest in Ecuador and signs of unrest in general.

Six Warning Signs that Civil Unrest Is Imminent

…A couple of weeks ago, everything was so quiet in Ecuador that it was even boring. Don’t believe me? Watch the news. A few days ago, a violent mob kicked out the police out of their way and invaded the National Assembly (something very similar, indeed to what happened in Venezuela).

A very volatile situation is brewing in all of South America.

Countries that had been relatively peaceful are now (thanks to the hidden terrorists sent by the Maduro regime) a powder barrel. The timing could not be worst for me and my reduced family group. An old illness has come back and I´m struggling to recover at least partially before things get worst. Fortunately, we are in a popular neighborhood where there are lots of Venezuelans, and the people renting me have no complains because I´ve been quite a good tenant: no noises, paying on time (thanks to my extreme frugality and the generosity of a few readers, I have to acknowledge). They are a senior couple and hardly would allow me to get hurt by an angry mob or someone of my family. However, I´m ready to defend myself and mines.

OK, here´s the thing. Maybe you can have some indications in the nearby days about how bad things can get, all of a sudden. You won´t even notice it until you´re in the middle. If you don´t believe me just ask to Ecuadorians. They were caught in the middle of a geopolitical storm stirred from abroad. Looting, empty shelves as a result, and half of the country blocked because of the mobs. Tear gas, and shootings. Three young men thrown from a bridge by other angry enemies. Things like this happen when people are exposed, and unaware.

I want to tell you something. I’m not in my better moment these days. But every time I need to go outside for some reason, I do it with the firm, strong idea in my mind, of defending myself and my family (and the means to do it). Being partially impeded, defense will have to be lightning quick and disabling. No mercy and I am sorry about this, but it’s true. It’s the survivor’s mind setup clicking in since I saw the chain of events. Facing the law afterward? Sure, as much as the taken down predators face it too. There is footage of an angry mob (identified with leftist guerrilla colors by the way) beating with batons innocent people inside a building. Same as Germany in the 30s. Jeez.

If for some reason in the future these few paragraphs save your life or someone’s you love, I will feel rewarded.

Although our exposition to xenophobic behavior has been minimal, I´m pretty aware how bad things can get under the current social climate. Therefore, signals definitely can´t be ignored. Every society of the world, unfortunately, seems to have the potential for civilian turmoil, and the possibility of the appearance of more or less organized gangs of marauders NEVER can be dismissed. (I´m sorry Canada, never been there but maybe even you have some percentage of this happening somewhere in the future).

Here are 6 signs that civilian unrest is impending or already occurring.

The first sign, of course, is bad looks when you walk on the street. Small groups of people (especially young men) staring at you? Don´t show fear, but leave the place fast, and find a safe spot. A shop, a restaurant, someplace with guards, preferably. If you´re classified as a “vulnerable” inhabitant (a migrant, ethnical minority, etc.) you know what I´m talking about. Don´t expose yourself and become gray. No one will open an investigation until much time afterwards an attack under these circumstances. And what we want to avoid is an attack…

Read the entire article at The Organic Prepper by clicking here.

Survival Rules from Venezuela

Prepper Website has a guest article up from a man who recently visited his brother in Venezuela – Survival Rules When Society Collapses. It’s worth a gander to find out what life is currently like there and could be like anywhere else that experiences a severe collapse — violence warning, though.

…The trash bags I brought were used to store clothes that you got from pretty much anywhere. You store them in the trash bags for months to allow time for the lice, crabs and the eggs to hatch and die. It’s a must. There were whole families I saw shaved from head to toe, and not because they are getting cancer treatment. It’s because it’s the only way to get rid of the lice and crabs.  Hygiene here means having no hair. The good news is that there are no fleas, which used to be the problem before the collapse. The reason is there are no dogs, cats, or small animals left. They’ve all been eaten.

…Realize That There Will Always Be Evil and People Willing to Hurt Others!

Two days before I left to come back to the states, some of the gang members on the corner in front of my brother’s house saw a cat in the window of a single elderly lady across the street. From my brother’s broken window, we could hear the gang members discussing how she must have food and lots of other valuable stuff. Later that evening, we heard them discuss how they were going to break into the lady’s house later that night.

At about midnight, my brother and his wife woke me up because there was a gang of about fifty people outside their house. As we lifted the shades to see outside in the dark, the moon was bright enough to watch those fifty or more people descend on the elderly woman’s house. In less than five minutes, every window had been broken, every door had been kicked in and the house entirely ransacked. We watched a person in front of the house cut the still living cat in half and share it with another hooded person who ran off with it…

Click here to read the entire article at Prepperwebsite.com.

Barter Is the New Currency in Collapsing Venezuela

From Reuters, Fish for flour? Barter is the new currency in collapsing Venezuela describing how hyperinflation and failing banking infrastructure is being replaced by barter even in the capital.

Under the midday sun, dozens of fishermen wait to sell their day’s catch by a lagoon in the town of Rio Chico on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. But they aren’t expecting cash in return.

Instead, they’re swapping mullets and snappers for packages of flour, rice and cooking oil.

“There is no cash here, only barter,” said Mileidy Lovera, 30, walking along the shore with a cooler of fish that her husband had caught. She hoped to exchange it for food to feed her four children, or medicine to treat her son’s epilepsy.

In the hyperinflationary South American country, where bank notes are as difficult to find as chronically scarce food and medicine, Venezuelans are increasingly relying on to barter for basic transactions.

Payment for even the cheapest of goods and services would require unwieldy piles of banknotes, and there simply are not enough of those in circulation…

Even in the capital Caracas, some 130 km (81 miles) to the west, many informal merchants lack access to bank services or point of sale terminals and prefer to be paid in kind.

The rise of barter exchange, amid hyperinflation and a dearth of cash, is a reflection of how the once-prosperous country is reverting to the most rudimentary of mechanisms of commercial exchange.

“It’s a very primitive payment system but it’s also very primitive for a country not to have enough cash available,” said economist Luis Vicente Leon of consultancy Datanalisis…

Disease Increasing in Venezuela

From a post by a Venezuelan citizen at Organic Prepper, Venezuela Faces the Return of Forgotten Diseases

Forgotten diseases are returning

Recent reports from these last few days have been, for someone who understands the importance of the endemic diseases that had been under control, spreading quickly.

I am talking about serious stuff: Tuberculosis, Diptheria, Leishmaniasis. There have been adults and children who died because of these things. The diseases themselves, under normal conditions can be healed. But without the appropriate medications and proper nutrition, they become deadly…

Click here to read the article at Organic Prepper.

Venezuelan Parents Giving Up Children They Can’t Feed

Venezuelans have been experiencing food shortages off and on for several years, but the shortages have been especially bad and getting worse over the last couple of years during the current economic crisis there.  Roughly 90% of Venezuelan families cannot afford to feed their families as the inflation rate over the past twelve months reached over 4000%. The inflation rate for the month of January, alone, was 84% which would have prices doubling every 35 days.

According to a recent report:

…the sheer number of children being taken to orphanages and child-custody centers has increased so much that public institutions for vulnerable children are “collapsing,” and private organizations are struggling to take in the others. The number of children being abandoned on the streets is also increasing at alarming rates.

A Venezuelan social worker provided the Post with a heartbreaking quote that captured the desperation of the situation.

“They can’t feed their children,” said Magdelis Salazar in reference to poverty-stricken parents. “They are giving them up not because they don’t love them but because they do.”

…As this reality affects parents who struggle to provide for their children, placing them in the care of a foster organization is becoming an increasingly common decision. One mother told the Post that she hoped she would one day be able to collect her children from the agency she was forced to leave them at.

“You don’t know what it’s like to see your children go hungry,” she said. “You have no idea. I feel like I’m responsible, like I’ve failed them.”

Related:

Household Food Security Preparedness (pdf) – World Health Organization

Venezuelan Hunger Turns to Looting

Conditions in Venezuela continue to deteriorate, as their society and economy collapse further. From the PanamPost, Recent Wave of Looting Shows Extent of Hunger in Venezuela

The economic crisis and the food shortage in Venezuela is so serious that looting has become commonplace throughout the country. In January alone, nearly 400 small protests and more than 100 instances of looting have taken place across 19 states, according to the Venezuelan Conflict Observatory.

On Saturday, January 13, Venezuelans began looting for food in the states of Guárico and Zulia.

In Maracaibo — the capital of Zulia — residents looted a supermarket after waiting hours in line to buy corn flour. Violence broke out when they were informed that only members of pro-government community councils could make purchases…

The Bolivarian National Guard has been tasked with keeping the area in order with gunshots and tear gas, but the situation seems irrepressible…

The situation in Venezuela is becoming increasingly worse. Inflation has reached 2,616 percent and the minimum monthly salary is at US $5 — barely enough for a kilo of meat and a carton of 30 eggs…

n January 11, a group of Venezuelans desperate to find food broke into a farm in Merida and dismembered about 40 cows for their meat.

According to Manuel López, President of the Association of Agricultural Producers of the Sur del Lago area, criminals go from farm to farm, extorting producers and asking them to give up an animal. If they don’t,  they destroy everything…

(Twitter)

Letters from Venezuela: This Is What Life Is Really Like in a Post-Collapse Society

From The Organic Prepper, Letters from Venezuela: This Is What Life Is Really Like in a Post-Collapse Society

You can’t go outside to buy food or supplies or medication because each activity is a high risk and more with a baby. So I stay home as much as I can. There are a lot people outside trying to live normaly, trying to go to work and buy foods and continue there lives. But when you are working or whatever thing your doing you dont know is you will be able to come back home safe… people continues to work to get whatever miserable pay to buy some food. Everything is so expensive. Perhaps the beans and rice are affordable but still not cheap and is so hard to find food. options are limited because of the price… you can only buy one item or two of pasta, rice, like I say the less expensive food , and you have to wait in long long lines at your own risk because there are a lot of fights in this store. imagine tones of people wanting to buy the same product. this have being worst since perhaps about 5 years now… because of scarcity.

Malls and big stores are basicly alone because there are places where “colectivos” use to attack, with bombs and there is a group of about 40 men in motorcicles that have been creating chaos in the whole city, every day the take the city they have plenty of arms and the just go through the city shooting building houses, stealing stores, people on the streets, batteries of cars, everything the want… this situation is far worst that we ever imagine. they kill people every day and they are pay mercenaries from the goverment because no one does nothing. the goverment people is also killing inocents. kids… teenagers, the youth. we are panicking.

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