A sad Christmas day message. It follows the pattern of how failed states decline and break apart.

When I was in college, I had an acquaintance from one of my calculus classes that was a mechanical engineering major. He was from Caracas, Venezuela and was the son of an executive in one of the country’s oil firms. He had been in college in Venezuela and was a few years older than the average college junior or senior. He drove a Porsche and prided himself in doing much of the maintenance and was active in some auto race club in Venezuela. We viewed him as an international “play boy”. After getting his bachelor’s degree he planned to return to Venezuela as an engineer. Among my college acquaintances he seemed to be one of the really wealthy ones. He reflected the oil wealth we saw from students from the Middle East. I had no idea back then how that country’s fortunes could change.

Three years ago I had a graduate teaching assistant in my summer class that was from Caracas as well. Both parents were physicians. By then reports were frequent in the media of the collapse of the Chavez and now Maduro economy as part of the failed Castro-oriented government. We had several conversations about her home country that semester and the next as she worked for my research group. She was married to a Cuban, who was also studying in our country in Washington, D.C. She described her home neighborhood in Caracas as prosperous and peaceful but said she had a several block walk from a nearby bus station when coming in from the airport and that she always wore older clothes and hid her cell phone. She said showing the phone would invite muggers. The last I heard from her, a year ago, was they had jobs in the Washington, D.C. Area and though both homesick for Cuba or Venezuela, were postponing their returns.

This pattern of economic and now social decay encompasses more than this country, Venezuela, extending through Brazil and much of Central America into Mexico. Latin America contains many of the world’s most violent cities with Acapulco in some countings, the world’s most violent. The promise of globalization from the 1980’s to 2010 with export jobs and rising incomes has ended. Regrettably, Venezuela may show the path for many other countries.

National collapses don’t typically happen abruptly. Decay begins in areas such as neighborhoods that then develop higher crime rates. Overall crime measures such as homicide rates are fairly dependable and rising rates correlate with rising decay. In time, cities and then larger geographical areas become unstable. The trend is evident in Mexico where states such as Guerrero (Acapulco), Michocoan, Tamaulipas (Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo) have professional crime groups, cartels, that challenge the state for control.

As “sanctuary hopes” abound in several American cities, the math is not promising. Much of the unanticipated strength of the vote for Donald Trump came from cities and states thought to be safe Democratic areas such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, West Virginia, etc. These states have cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburg, St. Louis that were formally bustling manufacturing cities now filed with unemployment and rising crime with St. Louis being among the 50 most violent cities in the world. Those persons, those neighborhoods seem be part of the calculus missed by the pollsters in this year’s Presidential Elections. In Europe, millions are being displaced and overwhelming limited immigrant resources. We see signs of that in the United States. This will be a strong theme in the next four years. Trump proposes to stop immigration. How that is done is not offered and the millions seeking sanctuary grow.

The solutions do not seem apparent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/world/americas/venezuela-hunger.html?_r=0