YUGE: Maduro to curb fuel subsidies.

Venezuela’s president has said its subsidised fuel prices should rise, to stop smugglers cheating the country out of billions of dollars.

“Gasoline must be sold at an international price to stop smuggling to Colombia and the Caribbean,” Nicolás Maduro said in a televised address.

Like many oil producing nations, Venezuela offers its citizens heavily subsidised petrol.

A fuel price rise in 1989 caused deadly riots in the capital, Caracas.

Cheap gas is one of the popular bribes employed by Venezuelan autocrats to take, maintain, and increase their political power. Under the Bolivarian Socialists, cheap gas has also helped to destroy the country’s oil industry — so the irony here is schadenfreudelicious.