Venezuela is looking to tourism to boost its wrecked economy, but the empty beach in the resort town of Todasana last month underscores how the number of foreign visitors has plummeted. With its oil industry floundering, Venezuela is searching for a new engine of growth for an economy in free fall. The embattled socialist government thinks it has an answer — a future built not only on drilling and roughnecks, but beach umbrellas and piña coladas. “Tourism is the oil that never runs out,” Marleny Contreras, the nation’s tourism minister, recently proclaimed. Yet for a country saddled with the world’s highest inflation rate and rampant violence, becoming a tourist paradise may be as improbable as a new Disney theme park in Damascus. Amid severe scarcities of basic goods, some hotels here have begun rationing toilet paper. Crisis-battered Venezuelans on local escapes, meanwhile, […]