Anatomía política del hambre: dominación y control social en Venezuela

The article seeks, from heterogeneous bibliographic sources, to understand various aspects related to the production and distribution of food in society; processes seen from the particular perspective of their use as a weapon of political control for the maintenance of authoritarian political regimes in power, through repression and the denial of life. This is the case of access to food, which according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must be addressed and materialized within a normative framework of food security based on ethical considerations. Two distinctions are made at the outset: between hunger and famine, along with the general differentiation between the various causes that lead to famine: natural (such as drought, floods, natural disasters) and sociopolitical causes (government incompetence and mismanagement, corruption and armed conflict). It is taken into account that famine is the consequence of a sum of causalities, which combine various factors ranging from massive crop losses due to pests and diseases and post-harvest losses, to war conflicts, all of which have until recently been considered the main causes of classic famines and the aggravation of conditions of extreme poverty in the world –especially in the poorest regions. It examines “artificial” famines, intentionally provoked by authoritarian regimes to subdue the population through a regime of terror. In this context, the famines in Bengal (1943), the Netherlands (1945), the Holocaust (1943-1945), Ukraine –as part of the former USSR– (1932-38), and China (1958-1961) were examined, ending with the study of the particular case of Venezuela, during the current authoritarian political regime. In the latter country, the use of food -distributed in the form of CLAP boxes/bags- as a political weapon of submission and domination, as well as of social control, is clearly observed. One of its main consequences has been the massive and desperate exodus of several million young (and adult) Venezuelans around the world, in search of better living conditions.