TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK speaks to the Morning Star’s Berny Torre about the increasing frustration the trade union movement feels at a government that promised change, but has been too slow to bring it about

THE world has been stunned by a double wonder: Bolivarian Venezuela’s political survival and its miraculous economic recovery: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has reported that it expects the Venezuelan economy to grow for the first time since 2014, by 5 per cent, one of the highest in the region.
Venezuela’s rate of inflation has come down from something like 10 million per cent, as reported by CNBC in 2019, and described as the “biggest economic disaster in modern history” by the Washington Post in the same year, to 7.1 per cent in September 2021 and to an incredible 1.4 per cent in March 2022.
The March 2022 issue of the PSUV magazine Economia Politica y Revolucion reports that corn production, essential for arepas — Venezuela’s staple food — has increased by 60 per cent, rice 17 per cent, with an increase of non-oil exports of 76 per cent.

FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ asks what we should read into the sudden doubling of Washington’s outrageous bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s head


