Crisis in Venezuela: No More Breast Implants

A critical shortage of quality breast implants has hit Venezuela, demonstrating once again the short-sighted folly of socialism.

A crisis of extra large proportions has struck the worker's paradise of Venezuela.  

Restrictive government currency controls have led to a shortage of high-quality American-made breast implants.  For a country wracked by shortages of food, paper products, personal hygiene products, and many other items, this latest shortage seems the unkindest cut of all.

Venezuela is thought to be the country with the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world.  And boob jobs are the flagship of Venezuelan plastic surgery procedures.  About 85,000 boob jobs were done in Venezuela in 2013.  

Only three countries in the world had more - the United States, Brazil, and Mexico - silly, shallow countries, yes, but also countries with populations 4 to 10 times the size of Venezuela.  

In Latin American culture, a girl's 15th birthday (known as "la quince") is often thought to denote her passage into womanhood.  This is true in Venezuela, where one of the traditions is to celebrate la quince by buying the girl her first set of breast implants. 

Which raises an important question: why doesn't everybody live in Venezuela?

Anyway, breast implants are so much a part of daily life in Venezuela, that even normally-emaciated clothing store mannequins seem to have them.

Venezuelan mannequin.

Since 2003, in an attempt to stop money from leaving the country, the dirty communists who run Venezuela have made it difficult for ordinary Venezuelans to get their hands on that most highly-prized of all currencies, the United States dollar.  

The only place you can legally trade increasingly devalued Venezuelan bolivares for US dollars in Venezuela is from the government itself, and they reject most currency exchange applications.  

With few dollars available, it's become increasingly difficult for Venezuelans to get their hands on those most highly-prized of all breast implants, the American-made, FDA-approved ones.


The Search for Alternatives

So what's a beauty-conscious Venezuelan woman to do in this climate of austerity, and this time of lack?  Many women have had to forgo the operation altogether.  

Often, this sparks an unstoppable cascade of personal setbacks, including wrecked marriages, missed job promotions, and dimmed prospects in general.  With no bodacious ta-tas to parade down the street, many women become depressed and stop leaving their homes. 

Other women roll the dice and buy Chinese-made breast implants, though many doctors actually refuse to implant these.  China, a country long-known for its stringent quality  and safety controls, has somehow fallen down on the job when it comes to breast implants.  

"I'm not saying they're not safe," says one Venezuelan doctor.  "But I've removed more than a few ruptured Chinese implants.  I just don't feel comfortable with them."

Finally, many women simply buy whatever American-made implants they can find, even if they're the wrong size.  In most cases, this means getting new breasts that are too big.  Few Venezuelan men complain about this.

The official national motto of Venezuela is "Power to the people."  The unofficial motto is "Too much is not enough." 

One man did complain, however.  He would go so far as to get on television and harangue the masses, denouncing this "monstrous" obsession with large breasts.    

"It is painful to see girls or women that may not have sufficient resources for housing, to accommodate housing for the children, for clothes, who are looking to see how to do an operation on the breasts," he said.

That man was Hugo Chavez, former President of Venezuela.  But then the CIA gave him cancer, and he died.  Which would have seemed to open the door of freedom, leading to unlimited breast implanting.  But the socialist revolutionary, with his authoritarian currency restrictions, controls his people even from the grave. 

"It's monstrous, I tell you!"

There's a lot of human suffering going on in the world today.  I mean, there's the Ebola outbreak in Africa, there's ISIS running amok in the Middle East, and now this.

Makes me wonder sometimes.  Is there no God?


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