LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Driven by unrest and violence, Venezuelans are fleeing their country by the thousands.

“Everything there has turned ugly. There’s hunger and crime. You can’t leave your house after 5 p.m. because you’re going to be robbed or killed,” Linares said, adding that she now earns enough to afford three meals a day, an impossibility for many these days in Venezuela.

“I miss my mother, my house and at times I feel out of place here, like in someone else’s home,” Linares said. “But Peru has opened its doors to us.”

Linares is part of the rising tide of Venezuelan immigrants washing over Latin America as conditions at home steadily worsen. Arrivals in Peru have roughly doubled since last year and more than 20,000 Venezuelans have either applied for or received a special residency permit since the government began offering them in February.

And here’s the one mention of socialism in the lengthy Los Angeles Times report:

Eduardo Febres Cordero, 32, a former Venezuelan consular official from Maracay, decided to stay in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, after resigning in 2011 and marrying an Ecuadorean woman. He says President Maduro “betrayed” the socialist revolution begun by his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, whom he served as a student leader.

Scapegoats, scapegoats everywhere, but never a socialist to blame.