The global pandemic of the coronavirus has reached Venezuela in a critical situation, with collapsed economy and services, a humanitarian crisis, the dollar de facto ruling and making prices soar and a regime clinging to power that now tightens social and political control.
As in most of Latin America, in Venezuela the measures recommended and updated by the World Health Organization to prevent the spread of the virus from escalating were taken in time. Maduro’s regime ordered physical distancing, isolation/confinement at home and in community clinics or hotels for those who have had the virus, as well as the mandatory use of masks. The country has been under quarantine since March 17.
The regime has also applied diagnostic tests for the virus, mainly from Russia.
“It is still too early to evaluate the effectiveness of government policies in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes economist Francisco Rodríguez in a report for the Carolina Foundation this month. In Rodríguez’s opinion, these initial actions appear to have “succeeded in flattening the curve,” because “alternative measurements” seem to confirm the official ones.
However, he points to what has not changed: “There are strong reasons to predict that these initial successes will not be sustained in the absence of access to international financing. The weak public health infrastructure, the economic fragility of families hit by a long process of impoverishment (which prevents them from paying the economic cost of social alienation), and the return of the migrant population through irregular channels add to the weakening of fiscal and external accounts caused by the drop in oil prices, the intensification of sanctions and the fall in remittances,” he details in his analysis.
On the other hand, Maduro’s regime has control over information on coronavirus cases and their follow-up.
While in European countries, where the mortality and infection rates are highest, experts speak of an underestimation of the number of cases — no massive tests have been done; in France, for example, infections in nursing homes have not been counted; — in Venezuela it is no guarantee of transparency that it is the communications minister, Jorge Rodríguez, one of the regime’s strongmen, who reports on the evolution of the pandemic, with any other official source closed to journalists.
At his last appearance on April 14, Jorge Rodriguez said there were four new infection cases, which puts the official figure at 193 and nine deaths.
The humanitarian crisis
On April 10, the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs published the Cross-Sectional Plan for Preparation and Attention to Covid-19 for Venezuela, in which it warns that the country is moving from phase 3 to phase 4 — the last one — in the transmission scenarios established by the World Health Organization. That means it is moving from the phase in which countries that have clusters of people infected “in time, geographical location and/or common exposure” to the one in which there are major outbreaks of local transmission, which is technically called community transmission.
According to this study, although the majority of reported cases are located in the most populated areas of Venezuela, there are already infections in all 20 states of the country. The risks are higher for those along the border.
“The possible epidemic and the preventive measures adopted by the authorities to limit the transmission of the virus could have an impact on the already existing humanitarian situation in the country and exacerbate people’s vulnerabilities,” the report warns.
This is what Philip Reeves’ recent report for U.S. public radio NPR confirms: health workers fear the growth of the pandemic in Venezuela because of the effects it could have on the network of hospitals and health centers lacking essential service, a hospital network that collapsed beforehand and could not handle an expansion of Covid-19 cases, as we reported in March in IQ Latino citing the National Hospital Survey.
Most hospitals do not have the basics for care, from essential hygiene — water and soap — to operating x-rays machines and labs. Reporter Reeves refers to the shortage of protective equipment, intensive care beds, medicines and personnel, thousands of whom have emigrated from the country. At the University Clinical Hospital of Caracas, for example, where there are 1,000 beds, the staff has been reduced by half, says María Eugenia Landaeta, head of the Infectious Diseases Unit, to Reeves. “It is really hard to make the hospital work proper in those conditions.”, she said.
UNICEF and the Pan American Health Organization sent a humanitarian shipment to Venezuela of 90 tons of humanitarian aid, which, according to La Voz de América, will be distributed to 15 hospitals and 51 primary care centers: they contain emergency kits, pediatric beds and protective equipment for health personnel, said Rocío Ortega, Communication Specialist for UNICEF Venezuela. The UN announced that they will ask for $61 million to provide medical equipment and hygiene products to health centers.
However, La Voz de América reports, doctors and patients are asking for more help for children’s hospitals. “There is a lack of everything, even jabs. There is nothing. They’re sending children who are convulsing to Caracas. When you go to the bathrooms, those bathrooms are filthy,” Egleisy Hernández said. She had to travel from the central region of the country to the capital with her convulsing son because he could not be attended to locally.
NPR’s Phillips Reeves recalls that Maduro’s allies, Russia, China, Cuba, have also sent aid to Venezuela, but, “even so, ensuring the large amount of international aid that Venezuela needs is complicated by geopolitics.
“Venezuela is not exempt from the dilemma between taking rigorous measures to contain the transmission of the virus or maintaining the socio-economic status quo,” continues the UN’s Covid-19 Cross-Sectional Plan for Venezuela. “Although measures have been taken to mitigate the most severe effects of the policies, it is important to seek ways to maintain and expand humanitarian operations within the framework of the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), to support the most vulnerable populations,” the study recommends.
The economy
An Efecto Cocuyo piece by Ronny Rodríguez Rosas and Reynaldo Mozo Zambrano describes the situation in Petare, at the east end of Caracas, a district populated mainly by hundreds of marginalized slums close to each other, and therefore considered the largest favela in Latin America, with more than one million inhabitants.
Official measures restricting the hours for food purchase affect informal vendors who make it their livelihood, while consumers see food prices quickly rise.
Cristina González, for example, buys peppers and onions at the Coche wholesale market, also in Caracas, to sell them on the streets in Petare. Before the quarantine that began on March 17, the price of a basket of these products at the wholesale market was 500,000 bolivars and now it has risen to 900,000.
“I work from time to time because the police wants to take us out of the streets, but but we come back when they leave,” González said.
The Efecto Cocuyo reporters went to the local butcher’s shop and found something similar: the price of a kilo of meat was 200,000 bolívares before quarantine and now it costs 595,000, something that the owner of this shop attributes to the rise in the parallel dollar, the currency that de facto governs general prices in the country.
In the interior of the Venezuela, the shortages are becoming more acute.
In La Goajira, for example, in the state of Zulia (on the border in the west of the country), there were protests recently over the lack of food and water, Eira González reported for El Pitazo, with detainees and wounded, including a woman who was shot in the face with pellets by security forces. Inflation and overpricing of food are the main issues. The government gave some people 3,000 bags of subsidized food, which is insufficient, only enough for four days, according to González reporting.
Also in Zulia, but in its livestock area, producers say they have lost 15% of their production in a month of quarantine, Edwin Urdaneta wrote for El Pitazo.
Iván Herrera, a cattle rancher in Barinas, a llanero state in central-western Venezuela, told Anatoly Kurmanaev of The New York Times: “We’ve never been worse off in our lives. We are paralyzed.”
The country’s gasoline shortage, which has become more acute in recent weeks, is having a tremendous impact on production. “Farmers, having no fuel to tend their fields, have let their crops rot, even as aboyut half of Venezuelans don’t get enough to eat,” the reporter adds.
Maduro set up a fuel rationing plan. As Guillermo Olmo reports for BBC Mundo, the capacity of Venezuela to refine gas has been undermined for some time now, by the “effects of years of mismanagement, lack of investment and corruption” in the state oil company PDVSA, he writes, quoting the experts. The extension of U.S. government sanctions on PDVSA’s operations made it worse. Hence Maduro, Olmo explains, began importing gasoline in exchange for crude oil through the Russian company Rosneft. The U.S. government sanctioned one of its subsidiaries in February and at the end of March the company announced that it was ceasing operations in Venezuela and passing all its assets to a company controlled by the Russian government.
So in the midst of the pandemic, gasoline is more scarce and rationed.
And now, Kurmanaev shows in his The New York Times piece, the black market is growing; the world’s famously cheapest fuel has gone on to cost $15 a gallon on the parallel, “more than twice the country’s minimum monthly wage.”
Strengths: Solidarity and Resilience
Regardless of the regime and political leaders, Venezuelans have shown what they are capable of doing to resist, continue and move forward. Experts and masters of resilience, many people in the country have developed their own neighborhood initiatives as well as local, forms of independent organized solidarity.
The blackout of several days in March 2019 was a turning point in their ability to weather the storm and rise up.
Victor, 49, was discharged from Covid-19 on April 2 in Caracas. He told Efecto Cocuyo’s Ibis Leon, that at first, when word of his infection spread, some neighbors called Civil Protection to get him out of the building, although he was isolated in his home. But others showed up to help him. “To those who helped me, if that happens to you, count on me. They came with their gloves and their mask to bring us the groceries and did us favors”.
The civil initiative Laboratorio Ciudadano recently joined the international platform Frenar la curva, a geolocation program that began in Spain to connect volunteers with neighbors in their area who need help in their homes, especially in everyday tasks.