SOCIALISM KILLED MY FATHER: VENEZUELA'S FAILED COLLECTIVIST EXPERIMENT BROUGHT DEATH AND DESPAIR TO A ONCE-PROSPEROUS COUNTRY.

• Author: Cordeiro, Jose

I WAS WORKING in Silicon Valley when my mother called me from back home in Caracas with some alarming news: My father had experienced sudden kidney failure. I immediately flew from San Francisco to Miami, where I had to wait two days until I could get one of the few flights left to Caracas. Since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 ushered in successive waves of nationalization, inflation, and recession, international airlines--American, Delta, United Airlines, even carriers from next-door Colombia and Brazil--had been steadily reducing, canceling, and eventually abandoning all routes to my once-prosperous country. I slept in the Miami International Airport with many other desperate Venezuelans. Finally I was able to purchase a ticket for an exorbitant sum from Santa Barbara Airlines, a Venezuelan carrier that has since gone bankrupt.

Fortunately, my father was still alive when I arrived in Caracas, but he required continuous dialysis. Even in the best of the few remaining private clinics, there was a chronic lack of basic supplies and equipment. Dialyzers had to be constantly reused, and there were not enough medicines for patients. In several parts of the country, electricity and water were also rationed, including in hospitals. Given the precarious economic situation, and thanks to our comparatively advantageous financial situation, we decided the best course of action would be to leave Venezuela and fly to my father's native Madrid, where he could get the treatment he needed.

But because of the decimated air travel situation, we had to wait three weeks for the next available flight to Spain. The few airline companies still operating in Venezuela had reduced their flights dramatically because of Venezuelan government controls. Sadly, the Caracas dialysis couldn't hold out that long. Just two days before he was scheduled to leave his adopted country, my father died because of its disastrous policies. I still remember it vividly. I cannot forget.

That was August 26, 2013, a few months after Nicolas Maduro had assumed control of the country in the wake of Hugo Chavez's death. Things have gotten much worse since then. I can't imagine how hospitals attempt to function in the murder capital of the world with no medicine, no electricity, and sometimes even no water, while able-bodied doctors bolt the country at the first available opportunity. My family's story is heartbreaking and infuriating. But think of the millions of Venezuelans in worse financial straits who face the terrible choice of either wasting away in their homeland or taking up the perilous journey to whatever nearby country will accept them.

The growing number of people in the West who say they prefer socialism--or even, God help us, the pernicious Cuban and Venezuelan variants that might more properly be known as communism--often cite the provision of universal health care in their case for collectivism. That is why it's so important for me to tell my father's story. An entire nation is being hollowed out because some people refuse to accept that one of history's most deadly...