Angry Mexicans are accusing Venezuela's Chavistas of selling the food aid they donated to hungry Venezuelans for funds and profit.

Now, aid of any kind is illegal in Venezuela, since it reduces people's dependence on the state.  So the Mexicans donated their taco trucks or whatever it was through Venezuela's unfortunately named CLAP agency of food rationing, which was started about a year ago.

The Chavistas, of course, say there was no food aid, and in any case, they would not sell it.  But the ones doing it are some of the most unsavory thugs this side of a Chechen warlord den or a FARC negotiation team.

The real question here is not whether and how the Mexicans made their donation, but whether they could have been stupid enough to do it and expect a less than thieving result.

Could the Mexicans be that dense to think that food aid, given through CLAP, wouldn't be stolen, given the trillions that have already been stolen from Venezuela's oil bounty?  Did they think about whom they were donating it to?  At least one of these Chavistas of CLAP was placed by President Trump on the Treasury Department's drug dealer list in a rigorous process.  And more to the point, could the Mexicans have really imagined that food aid at all, rather than ending price controls and stabilizing the currency, could help anyone in that hellhole?  It's rather astonishing that they could be so surprised or outraged, given whom they were dealing with.

Freddie Bernal is a powerful longtime Chavista shantytown thug with the stony face of a drug dealer, who now runs the Chavista food-rationing program.  Several years ago, when I visited Caracas, I met some Chavistas who wanted to show me their world, and they took me to their leader high in the shack-covered hills on the outskirts of Caracas – or at least his office, which happened to be then-mayor Freddie Bernal's.  They even let me sit at his desk, hospitably serving rum straight from the bottle, pirate-style, and had aging hippies serenade us with 1960s protest music on their guitars.

To say the least, it was weird.  Outside, motorcycle-mounted thugs with guns in their hands circled menacingly.  That's who the Mexicans thought would honestly distribute their food.