Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The democratic socialist nation of Venezuela’s collapse is showing just how far people will go in order to escape the horrors of big government. In fact, the situation in Venezuela has gotten so bad that women are willing to risk being sexually abused in human trafficking rings in order to escape the horrors of socialism.

Unfortunately, the harsh reality of government is bearing down on real people and making life incredibly miserable for those stuck in Venezuela. It’s also no walk in the park for those who have managed to escape. The Washington Post detailed one woman’s plight, and it’s a disturbing an harrowing tale:

In Trinidad, the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations body, has received 23 suspected cases of trafficked Venezuelans in the past three months — compared with no Venezuelan cases last year, according to Jewel Ali, the organization’s local director. They include victims like Luz — who said she lost one of her three children in April after the hospital in her Venezuelan town ran out of medication to treat her daughter’s bacterial infection. When she was approached to come to Trinidad, the offer seemed too good to be true. “But I told myself, I’m going anyway. I’m not going to lose the chance for my kids to be better off just because I had some doubts,” she said. The ordeal — five weeks spent captive and repeatedly filmed being raped — had “damaged” her, she said. At one point, Luz said, she and a friend were tied up and raped side by side. “We were looking at each other,” Luz said, tearing up. “We would cry. And I would tell her, ‘Sister, be strong, you have a daughter.’ I would just keep repeating that.” –The Washington Post

As the oil-rich country buckles under the weight of a failed socialist experiment, an estimated 5,000 people a day are departing the country in Latin America’s largest migrant outflow in decades. Millions have fled Maduro’s reign of terror creating an even bigger crisis.

Carolina Jimenez, a senior official with Amnesty International, said, “Venezuela’s unprecedented situation has turned a domestic human rights crisis into a regional human rights crisis. Countries in the region are not prepared to take in so many migrants and do not have the asylum systems needed to prevent job exploitation and human trafficking,” she said. “These people should be protected, but instead they are being taken advantage of.”

The beginning of the end for Venezuela came when Hugo Chávez became president in 1999. Spouting similar policies to those of American socialist Bernie Sanders, Chávez forced a form of socialism on the people that resulted in many businesses collapsing or being nationalized. A purge of the state-run oil industry which was a center of opposition to his rule and essential to the nation’s economy removed thousands of workers, who were often replaced by political supporters with little to no technical experience. Venezuela’s slide into despotism increased in speed exponentially under current President Nicolás Maduro. The tyrannical authoritarian was a former bus driver and union leader who inherited power after Chávez’s death in 2013.

The United Nations projects 2 million Venezuelans will flee their dystopian native country and this year. That’s in addition to an exodus of 1.8 million over the past two years. Diplomats in Trinidad along with international agencies say there is also evidence of a horrifying trend: Desperate Venezuelans, mostly women, have become commodities to be bought and sold.