Why Venezuela Now Has 526 State-Owned Companies

Dairy maker Lacteos Los Andes was taken over by the government of Hugo Chavez with great fanfare in 2007. The company, the leader in its field of milk production, was deemed strategic by the late Venezuelan President and the nationalization was announced on live television as a great achievement. Nowadays, the company has more than doubled its employees but milk and other products are scarce, since production has fallen by 33%. Workers however are expected to remain faithful to “el proceso”, the Bolivarian Revolution that began in 1999 and continues to this day under Nicolas Maduro.Now imagine that example repeated 526 times and you begin to understand why Maduro broke Chavez’s old records in 2015, when he created 47 of those companies. More…