This is how badly the "Bolivarian Revolution" has f***ed up Venezuela

For Older Venezuelans, Fleeing Crisis Means ‘Starting From Zero,’ Even at 90

In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans — by some estimates as many as two million — have migrated abroad, with the tendency accelerating in the past several years during the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Nicolás Maduro.

The vast majority have been younger Venezuelans in the prime of their working lives. 

Yet the huge flow of émigrés has also included a smaller number of older Venezuelans, driven abroad for many of the same reasons, including scarcities of food and medicine, soaring poverty and crime.

Many are following the steps of their children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren who have been imploring them to leave, too.

But for older migrants, the decision to leave is fraught with unique anxieties and uncertainties: about access to health care in destination countries, about the loss of social networks and the comforts developed over a lifetime, about starting from scratch in a brand-new place just when they expected to be enjoying retirement.

. . . .

Mr. Reyes, who spent his career running small businesses, has glaucoma. 

With medicine increasingly scarce in Venezuela, it has become a near-daily ordeal for him to visit as many as seven pharmacies in an often fruitless search for the eye drops he needs.

Ms. Reyes, a retired employee of Venezuela’s Education Ministry, was told by her doctor that the cancerous lesion on her forehead was probably the result of all the hours she was forced to stand in lines in the sun waiting to buy food or withdraw money from the bank.

As inflation has soared, the value of the couple’s pension has diminished. 

The last three-milliliter bottle of drops Mr. Reyes bought cost him more than half his monthly pension.