For a while there, a lot of leftists were defending the socialist regime of Venezuela – first, because they liked it, and second, because they insisted it wasn't like a Stalinist regime. There was still freedom of the press, and there were no extrajudicial killings.

Venezuelan security forces have carried out hundreds of arbitrary killings under the guise of fighting crime, the UN's human rights body says. In a report, it cites "shocking" accounts of young men being killed during operations, often in poor districts, over the past three years. The UN's human rights chief said no-one was being held to account, suggesting the rule of law was "virtually absent". Venezuela has in the past dismissed human rights allegations as "lies".

Guess these Israel-hating global namby-pambies of the United Nations are trying to regain some kind of credibility after the U.S. pulled out of that august body. These would be people from the same United Nations who as recently as 2013 praised Venezuela for "reducing hunger" and gave it a recognition award. Now they confirm that "hundreds" have been slaughtered by the regime's "security" forces, mostly in the shantytowns, where few Western reporters venture and where the organizing of the poor against the regime's shortages and oppression scare the hell out of the regime. That even the U.N. is admitting the obvious means that what's going on has got to be bad, because it's likely that the U.N. are understating things. What happened? Did the Venezuelan regime run out of bribe money?

What we have now is a classic death-squad regime. The regime's goons just go into these slums and machine-gun the locals down, using the pretext of "fighting crime," same as the worst of any third-world hellhole. The crime excuse is classic, and given that the crime rate over there is only going up due to the regime's coddling of the drug trade, it's not about crime. I doubt it's criminals who pay bribes and align with the regime who are getting slaughtered; it's the likely their drug rivals and, even more likely, the long-suffering good people. How very convenient to have the world's highest crime rate to hide behind as the machine-gunning of dissidents and potential troublemakers goes on without a hitch.

Mass deaths have always been a feature, not a bug, of socialism. It's the logical next step following the hunger, shortages, real refugee flight, monster inflation, overspending, pocket-lining, politicized courts and government, bad medical care, zero free press, and industrial collapse. Every last one of those catastrophes, sure as the sun rises, comes to regimes wedded to socialism. In Venezuela, the disaster started not immediately, but in 1998, with the election of Hugo Chávez, and then slid downhill, slowly at first, one year at a time, one bottom dropping out at a time, one freedom or product of freedom going missing. A great timeline can be made about how each bottom fell out from the society as a whole in Venezuela, with death squads and mass slaughter coming as the logical conclusion. This is late-stage socialism in a nutshell, and it's a horror.

Yet, incredibly, Bernie Sanders stands for the same socialism, denying that he has any similar designs on America. His would be a "really good socialism," see (as Tom Wolfe put it), not the political mudslide that has disastrified Venezuela, which he now pretends not to see. There is always that denial from socialists, and Hugo Chávez's admirers take the same tack. Hey, we have free press. Hey, our jails aren't full...until, of course, it happens.

Now the results are in, and what we have here is a classic Latin American death-squad regime, way worse than anything in Somocista Nicaragua or any of the other regimes the left has made hay out of. Sanders is planning to run for president again in 2020, and, incredibly, his cosseted, ignorant Millennial supporters, quite unlike Colombia's impoverished shantytown dwellers (who have seen the ruins of socialism next door up close), still think socialism – what with all its never fulfilled promises free health care, free education, free everything, and taxing the rich – is just fine and dandy. It's absolutely amazing what they are championing with the results of such ideas evident just a few hundred miles from our shores. Bernie Sanders is their pied piper drawing them down the merry path.

Proud of yourself, Bernie? This is the Bernie program in action.

Image credit: Tonynetone, via Flickr, CC SA-BY 2.0.