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| Este artigo é dedicado ao Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos OVOODOCORVO |
Hunger eats away at Venezuela’s soul
as its people struggle to survive
The Maduro regime denies its once
oil-rich country is in crisis. But on the streets the desperation cannot be
hidden
Emma Graham-Harrison in Caracas
Sunday 27 August 2017 00.05 BST
Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that
claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of
food, many desperately so. As night falls over Caracas, and most of the city’s
residents lock their doors against its ever more violent streets, Adriana
Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she
has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14.
She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more
than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran
out of food. “It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating,”
said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her.
Since then Venezuela’s crisis has deepened, the number of
women working at the brothel has doubled, and their ages have dropped. “I was
the youngest when I started. Now there are girls who are 12 or 13. Almost all
of us are there because of the crisis, because of hunger.”
She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the
minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30,
barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new baby brother. She has
signed up to evening classes that run before her nightly shift, and hopes to
one day escape from a job where “everything is ugly”.
Velásquez grew up in one of Caracas’s poorest and most
violent districts, but Venezuela’s food crisis respects neither class nor
geography. The pangs of hunger are felt through the corridors of its major businesses,
behind the microphone on radio shows, in hospitals where malnutrition is
climbing sharply and already claiming lives, and at schools where children
faint and teachers skip classes to queue for food.
Nearly three-quarters of Venezuelans have lost weight over
the past year, and the average loss was a huge 9kg, or nearly a stone and a
half, according to a survey by the country’s top universities. For many that is
simply because food is too expensive. Nine out of 10 homes can’t cover the cost
of what they should eat.
And 10 million people skip at least one meal a day, often to
help feed their children.
David González, not his real name, had a college degree, a
career and modest middle-class dreams of owning a car and a house before
Venezuela slipped towards its current crisis, and spiralling inflation made the
food he needed to stay alive unaffordable. In a cafe in downtown Caracas, he
explains how his dreams shrank with his wasting body, now so emaciated that
ribs and collarbones poke through a once-chubby chest.
“It’s sad because you stop thinking of what your
professional goals and challenges are and instead just focus on what you can
eat,” said the 29-year-old activist and journalist. Like many of Venezuela’s
hungry middle classes he was ashamed of his situation.
“I had seen people suffering, I saw people queueing for
bread, but it had not reached me, I didn’t expect it would,” he said. “Never in
my life had I spent a night worrying about what I would eat tomorrow.”
This year he has done little else. He stands 5ft 7in tall,
and has lost more than a quarter of his body mass, shrinking to little over
50kg (7st 12lb) since the start of the year. During a checkup for a new job,
doctors diagnosed a heart murmur caused by stress and hunger. He gets up at 5am
to queue for food, but sometimes it isn’t there.
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“Its like an obstacle course. You have to find money to buy
food, a place to buy it and then get there in time,” he said, with a wry grin
that has survived better than his health, before adding: “One of the good
things about Venezuelans is they laugh about it all – food, and security and
health.”
This summer he swallowed his pride and signed up for a
monthly box of subsidised food sold by the government for about $1. “I didn’t
want to be part of that scheme. But I had to change my decision, to literally
not die of hunger.”
President Nicolás Maduro says Venezuela’s problems are the
result of “economic warfare” waged by the US. He points to Donald Trump’s
public mulling of a “military option” earlier this month as evidence Washington
is pushing for regime change, and on Friday slammed ramped-up US sanctions
against the government and the state-owned oil corporation as an overt bid to
undermine the government by forcing it to default on debt.
Former foreign minister and top aide Delcy Rodríguez has
denied the country has a food crisis, denouncing the “blackmail of hunger”. She
told the new legislative super-body she heads: “In Venezuela there is no
hunger, there is willpower. There is indignation and courage to defend
Venezuela.”
But critics and economists say the crisis is both real and
self-inflicted, the result of a government using a raft of imports as a
shortcut to meet promises of development and food security during the heady
years of an oil price boom. Venezuela used to produce more than two-thirds of
its food, and import the rest, but those proportions are now reversed, with
imports making up around 70% of what the country eats.
When crude prices began sliding in 2014, bringing down oil
earnings, it left the country short of dollars, and the government decided to
focus its income on servicing the national debt rather than importing food.
“This administration decided people have to eat less for
them to balance their accounts,” said Efraín Velásquez, president of the
semi-official National Economic Council. “That implies poverty, social
deterioration, that people are worse off.”
Supplies dried up and inflation sliced through savings and
earnings, slashing the value of the currency by more than 99% since Maduro’s
2013 election. Bolivares bought with $1,000 then would be worth little over a
dollar at today’s black market rate.
There has been no official inflation data from the
government since 2015, but the opposition puts the figure at 250% in the first
seven months of the year. In a tacit recognition of the scale of the problem,
the president himself boosted the minimum wage nearly 500% last year, to
“offset inflation”.
“We are the only country in the world where people dread a
wage hike, because they know the price of food will follow [up],” said Ingrid
Soto de Sanabria, head of nutrition at Venezuela’s top children’s hospital, who
has been raising the alarm about the steep rise in cases of malnutrition.
The number of children with severe malnutrition who were
admitted to the hospital rose from 30 in 2015 to 110 last year, and looks set
to climb further this year based on figures from the first half of the year,
she said. There has been a subtle shifting in the nature of the problems
parents face. Formula for babies who can’t be breastfed was hard to track down
anywhere last year, with shortages so severe they claimed the lives of
newborns.
Since the government unofficially relaxed price controls
there are more supplies, but parents struggle to pay for what they need, she
said. “Last year there were terrible shortages, this year there are less
shortages, but the prices are through the roof.
“We don’t have formula, and what little we do is thanks to
donations,” she said. Mothers who are malnourished can struggle to breastfeed,
exacerbating the problem.
Catholic charity Caritas has been among those raising the
alarm, after launching a project to monitor and tackle child nutrition across
four Venzeulan states. “Humanitarian help is needed to save lives. I wouldn’t
have said that a year ago, because people weren’t dying,” said Susana Raffalli,
who led the project. After decades tackling food crises around the world, from
Pakistan to Algeria, she was horrified to find herself doing the same in her
native Venezuela.
“Its not a country with a tradition of humanitarian crises
like others in the region,” she said. But malnutrition has been rising sharply,
with more than half of all children affected in some way. The percentage of
children showing signs of acute malnourishment climbed from 8% last October to
12% in July. That is well over the 10% threshold for a severe food crisis, and
she fears it is still rising. If acute malnourishment reaches 15%,
international agencies consider a country or area to be in a state of food
emergency.
“They are getting younger, and the cases more serious,” said
Raffalli, who is particularly disturbed about the long-term implications, for
individuals and for the country. Malnutrition in the youngest children can
stunt development for life.
“If children are severely malnourished under two years old, it
has an irreversible effect. The first 1,000 days are the most important in the
life of a baby, and sets up the cognitive situation that will affect them for
their whole life.”
She is waiting for funding to take the survey, and food
support, to a wider range of provinces. It fills a gap in data left by a
government that has not published statistics on nutrition for several years,
and a gap in support left by failed public support programmes.
But she warns that no feeding programme can do anything more
than protect individual children. “We need this help because people are being
harmed, they are dying. But it’s a temporary solution, it won’t resolve the
problem of supply and access to food.”
Many mothers are already fearful. Luisa García, not her real
name, wept when she heard her malnourished son had been nursed back to health
by the Caritas feeding project, but not tears of joy. She was still unemployed,
with empty cupboards and a bare fridge, and yet the food handouts he had been
living on would end.
“On the day they said he was up to weight, I went away
crying, because I had nothing to give him to eat. I counted on that food,” the
38-year-old recalled as she waited in line at a church soup kitchen, also
organised by Caritas. “We eat like crabs, picking a little where we can. Often
only once a day, at best twice.”
The volunteers who make and serve the soup understand the
desperation; they too have become familiar with the gnawing pain of an empty
stomach. “We are all professionals and we spend almost everything we earn on
food and basic needs,” said Rosalinda Rodríguez, a retired teacher who hasn’t
bought new clothes since 2014, and has lost 12kg over the past year.
Although she is still in her own words “stout”, she was
recently diagnosed with anaemia because she is eating such poor quality food.
Another volunteer has shrunk even more. “Life has been totally derailed,” said
Ricardo López, a lawyer whose son went to an international school until the
crises shrank his salary – paid in bolivares – to far below the foreign
currency tuition fees.
“I try to leave lunch as late as possible myself, so you can
just have a snack in the evening. My colleagues sometimes faint from hunger, or
don’t have lunch.”
As with other former members of the middle class, the crisis
has brought not just hunger but a hollowing out of his life. Cinemas, meals
out, gym membership, even hiking in hills around the city have been cut out by
the need to stave off hunger. López, who asked for his real name to be
withheld, has so little money left these days after paying for food and other
essentials that he could only budget 15,000 bolivares, or a single US dollar,
to enjoy the summer holiday with his son.
Instead of beach trips, he spent August weekends feeding
those who are even worse off. “We thought no one would come but then we were
full. Hunger doesn’t take holidays.”
The crisis has left the promises, and legacy, of former
president Hugo Chávez, in tatters. He rose to power and stayed there until his
death from cancer in 2013, in large part promising a more equitable
distribution of the country’s oil wealth and food security for all. The
benefits were real for many Venezuelans, and even if they have not proved
sustainable they nurtured a fierce loyalty that carried Maduro to power and a
base that is sticking with him through hardship.
Even today his supporters include those who have lost
serious amounts of weight, pine for their favourite food, and have been
separated from beloved relatives by the vast exodus of Venezuelans seeking a
better chance of going to bed on a full stomach.
“If we supported Chávez with oil at $100 a barrel, we have
to support him now with it down at $40 a barrel,” said Henny Liendo, a cocoa
cooperative member in the village of Chuao. Diets have shifted back to patterns
more familiar to parents and grandparents, to fish, root vegetables and
bananas, with less sugar, flour and meat.
He sees his curtailed diet and occasional hunger as
sacrifices in a bigger war, but mourns for the past. “We were happy and we
didn’t know it,” Venezuelans say in towns and villages, looking back over
recent turbulent decades. The government’s most recent effort to hang on to
Chávez’s legacies has been the boxes of subsidised food, known colloquially by
their Spanish initials CLAP, that were launched last year. They bundle imported
food together for a low price. They never last a whole month, often little more
than a week for large families, but they bring cheap food and much needed
variety, staples-turned-luxuries like mayonnaise, butter and milk powder into
homes.
When González, the activist, got his first government box
after months of waiting, he sat down to a dinner of arepas, the national
corn-flour patties, with butter and cheese and a cup of milky coffee. Once an
everyday meal, it felt, he said, like a luxurious indulgence.
For the very poorest in this crumbling economy, though, even
a dollar to pay for them can be out of reach. “We eat yuca, bananas, green
papaya,” said Katiuska Pérez, not her real name, a 28-year-old mother of six,
who lives in the village of Tocoron. “When the boxes come I’m allowed two, but
sometimes I can only afford one, or none at all.”
Her five daughters all registered as severely malnourished
when Caritas did checks, even though like many parents she had been cutting
back her own meals to boost their portions.
“I feed them first, so they have enough to eat, and we go
without,” she said. Most recovered with feeding support, but on the latest
visit her one-year-old had slipped back to six kilograms, a weight more
appropriate for a baby half her age. Pérez said she feels hopeless. “We have
been screwed for several years now. Everything that Chávez built with his hands
has been kicked down.”
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