The average Venezuelan has lost 24 pounds in weight since 2017. Failed socialist economic policies are resulting in major food shortages, and almost 90 percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. This is according to a study published Wednesday by the Central University of Venezuela, the Andrés Bello Catholic University and the Simón Bolívar University.

“Over 60 percent of Venezuelans surveyed said that during the previous three months they had woken up hungry because they did not have enough money to buy food,” Reuters reported. “About a quarter of the population was eating two or less meals a day, the study showed.”

Clashes between protesters and police over scarcity of food led to more than 150 Venezuelan protesters killed, 2,000 injured and 5,400 incarcerated. The protests have died down, but if parts of the military side with protesters in the future, a coup or civil war is a real possibility. In the meantime, people are fleeing the country.

According to the Brookings Institution, since the start of the crisis, 4 million Venezuelans have fled the country—more than 10 percent of the population. The majority of these refugees have poured into Brazil and Colombia.

“The economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is perhaps the worst that the hemisphere has seen in modern history,” wrote Dany Bahar, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “To keep proportions, bear in mind the estimates of refugees who left Syria during the war account for about 5 million individuals. Considering that the situation on the ground is deteriorating by the minute and the lack of food and medicine in Venezuela will probably get much worse, the 4 million figure will only go up, and very rapidly.”

Experts warn this crisis could soon eclipse the Syrian migrant crisis in severity.

United States Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo warned last May that Venezuela’s government was distributing weapons to civilian militias. These weapons could end up in the hands of terrorist organizations or drug cartels, which sometimes work with the Venezuelan government. If so, they could also spread to surrounding nations. “There are plenty of weapons running around in Venezuela,” Pompeo said. “And this risk is incredibly real and serious and [an] ultimate threat to South America and Central America in addition to just in Venezuela.”

This situation was created by a toxic convergence of socialist economic policies, drug trafficking and terrorism. Emanuele Ottolenghi and John Hannah wrote in Foreign Policy: “Venezuela has become a rabidly anti-American failed state that appears to be incubating the convergence of narco-trafficking and jihadism in America’s own backyard.”

The people of Venezuela are already suffering terribly, and the crisis is spreading to Brazil, Colombia, Central America and possibly the United States.

This situation is actually prophesied in your Bible. The greatest prophet who ever lived, Jesus Christ, forecast that “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world” will encompass all nations, including those in Latin America (Matthew 24:21).

In the Old Testament, God told the ancestors of the Anglo-Americans that they would be blessed for obeying His laws and cursed for disobeying. He specified that one curse for disobedience would be that “[t]he sojourner who is among you shall mount above you higher and higher; and you shall come down lower and lower. … They shall besiege you in all your towns, until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down throughout all your land; and they shall besiege you in all your towns throughout all your land, which the Lord your God has given you” (Deuteronomy 28:43 and 52; Revised Standard Version).

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in “Where America’s Race Riots Are Leading” that this reference to the fall of America’s “high and fenced walls” refers to illegal immigrants streaming into the U.S.

People across the Western Hemisphere have turned away from God. Violence is escalating. The Bible prophesies that God will allow a final resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire to conquer America as punishment for its sins. This empire is termed “holy” because it is guided by a religious entity, the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church will almost certainly continue to increase its influence in Latin America as leverage against the United States.

Bible prophecy indicates that as crises intensify, Latin Americans will cry out to Catholic Europe for help. They will willingly subject themselves to the Holy Roman Empire. The empire will then use its Latin allies to lay siege to the descendants of the Israelites in the Western Hemisphere: the United States and Canada.

Watch for the following developments indicated by events in Venezuela: 1) escalating violence across the Western Hemisphere, and 2) increasing European involvement in Latin America.

The world’s problems are happening for a specific purpose. God is allowing humanity to reap the consequences of its actions until man comes to the point where he will obey God’s law. The good news—for Venezuelans and the rest of mankind—is that we are approaching the time when we can nearly count the days until Christ’s return. Only He can defend humanity from our own misguided attempts at governing ourselves.

For more information on Latin America’s place in end-time events, read Chapter 7 of Gerald Flurry’s free booklet Isaiah’s End-Time Vision.