A June 19 article by Nicholas Casey of the New York Times painted a vivid picture of the crisis in Venezuela:

With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Casey spelled it all out: dozens of food riots; people marching on supermarkets, “screaming for food”; mass looting; businesses destroyed; at least five deaths. “A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food,” he wrote. Thanks to the decline in value of the Venezuelan bolívar, he explained, the average family needs at least 16 minimum-wage salaries to feed itself. People are literally dying of starvation.

Casey recalled that when Hugo Chávez was first running for president, he said that Venezuela’s inability to feed its people was the reason why the country needed a socialist revolution. But now, Casey noted, things are possibly even worse than they were then. In response to the current crisis, reported Casey, Chávez’s hapless successor as president, Nicolas Maduro, has “put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba,” where friends of the government get fed first, others perhaps not at all.

But why has all this happened? Why is one of the world’s major oil-exporting nations the one with the very worst economy on earth? Other, more honest American newspapers have published analyses that explicitly trace this nightmare to chavista economic policies – in short, socialism. Not The New York Times. The Venezuelan government, wrote Casey, “blames an ‘economic war’ for the shortages. It accuses wealthy business owners of hoarding food and charging exorbitant prices, creating artificial shortages to profit from the country’s misery.” Casey gave no indication that this is a transparent lie. Casey also cited low oil prices; he did not bother to point out that other oil-producing countries are still doing very well indeed.

As Thomas Lifson observed at The American Thinker in a commentary on Casey’s article, “in over 1,500 words on the situation, there is no mention whatsoever of socialism as a root cause….there is no mention of the price controls, the demonization of business owners, the seizures of businesses, the decline in oil production thanks to state management, or any of the other socialist policies that make Venezuela the only oil producer in the world to see mass starvation in the wake of the oil price decline.”

Even the left-wing Guardian ran a fairer account of the Venezuelan mess. (The Guardian even included mention of the high level of government corruption.) Meanwhile The Nation predictably assured its readers that the crisis in Venezuela is “deep but not cataclysmic” (or, later in the piece, “dire, but not apocalyptic”) and that “mainstream US media have consistently exaggerated the extent of it.” Nation hack Gabriel Hetland even found “sparks” of hope in the rise of private and communal vegetable gardens and of the practice of bartering the goods produced by these gardens. Chavismo, one gathered from Hetland’s report, may end up giving rise to the purest and most beautiful kind of revolution – namely, a total rejection of the money-based economy in favor of prehistoric-style direct trade in agricultural products.

Lifson’s conclusion is that “the leftist media are busily engaged in covering up the evils perpetrated by socialism.” It’s hard not to agree with him.