Humanitarian aid for Venezuela: the highlights in the road to February 23th

Juan Guaidó, the Venezuela’s interim president and president of the National Assembly, said it on February 12: humanitarian aid will cross the border from Colombia to Venezuela on February 23, “no matter what” (#síosí, also a hashtag on social media). The way of making that instruction a reality will be unveiled that day.

Guaidó will be in Cúcuta. He will join the caravan that will travel from Caracas this Thursday with volunteers and 77 members of the National Assembly. In the meantime, shipments continue to arrive at the border city. There are more than 600,000 volunteers registered on the site Voluntarios por Venezuela.

Las Tienditas bridge is still blocked on the Venezuelan side under direction by the Maduro government, which also closed air and sea space to Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire for an indefinite period of time. At the last minute, they announced the closure of the border with Brazil. Shipments with aid have also reached these countries.

The road to February 23th has the following highlights:

 The recipients

Following the definition of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a group of Venezuelan NGOs declared in a December 2018 report that there is a Complex Humanitarian Emergency in the country. FAO translates it as “a serious humanitarian crisis that is often the result of a combination of political instability, conflict and violence, social inequalities and underlying poverty. They add: “Complex emergencies are fundamentally political in nature and can affect the cultural, civil, political and economic stability of societies, especially when aggravated by natural hazards and diseases such as the human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), which undermine livelihoods and accentuate poverty.”

If they enter Venezuela, the first batches of aid – nutritional supplements, medicines and medical and surgical supplies, as well as personal hygiene products – will go to 300,000 people at risk of “life or death and who require care for nutritional risk or for medical accompaniment,” said Miguel Pizarro, head of the Special Commission for the Follow-up of Complex Humanitarian Aid of the National Assembly, in an interview with Oscar Marcano for Prodavinci.

In a thread of tweets on February 9th, the Venezuelan congressman had said that this aid would be aimed at the most vulnerable population: “children from 0 to 5 years, pregnant women and elderly people at nutritional risk, people with chronic health conditions and hospital population in emergency situations.”

Julio Castro confirmed that the aid will be distributed in hospital. He is an internist and infectious disease medical doctor, and a member of the National Assembly’s technical advisory team on this issue. In an interview with Prodavinci’s Valentina Oropeza, Castro gave updated details on the recipients of the aid. They are “children under three years of age in the first thousand days of life; pregnant and lactating women; chronic diseases of high prevalence and some specific vulnerable groups, such as old people with other diseases; for example, an elderly person who has diabetes and hypertension. Those are the four focus groups.”

200,000 of the 300,000 people receiving the aid, Castro explained, are children with severe malnutrition, moderate malnutrition, or at risk of malnutrition. The other 100,000 are patients with chronic and infectious diseases who don’t have the medicines they need for treatment.

On the other hand, Castro told Luz Mely Reyes in a more recent interview that the families of malnourished children would also receive nutritional supplements. He added the aid contains kits in the form mobile hospitals.

The Venezuelan Observatory of Health published the NGOs report from last December, “Complex humanitarian emergency in Venezuela, right to food”. The paper concludes that the human right to food in the country is severely compromised, “especially in populations and communities livinh in extreme poverty due to the effects of hunger and malnutrition”. The NGO support their research with figures that are aligned with the findings of the National Survey of Living Conditions: 94% of the population is not able to make a a sufficient income to pay for a basic food and services basket; 64% of Venezuelans lost an average of 11 kilos of weight between 2016 and 2017; 80% of the country’s households live in food insecurity; the percentage of undernourished population in Venezuela rose from 5% to 11% from 2016 to 2018; 25,000 pregnant women do not receive prenatal care; 33% of children between the ages 0 and 2 in the poorest areas of the country have growth retardation.

Humanitarian experts have already warned that humanitarian aid does not solve all problems. Susana Rafalli said it even before Guaidó’s arrival were presented: “According to the pattern of economists and agricultural pundits, what is required is to apply adequate measures to buy and bring food, as well as economic measures to free up exchange controls, allocate foreign currency and structure prices,” she said in an interview with Prodavinci in 2017.

Julio Castro confirms it: humanitarian aid is not destined to solve all the health problems of a country, but it serves the most needy.

Miguel Pizarro wrote about it the thread of tweets. Humanitarian aid, he stated, “is not alms and much less foreign interference, nor is it the complete solution to the crisis. It is the opportunity to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who run the risk of dying because a dictatorship has destroyed the country.”

Neutrality vs. politicization

Experts and activists from humanitarian organizations have warned that humanitarian aid should, as a matter of principle, be neutral.

A group of international organizations grouped in the Forum of Humanitarian NGOs (ONGI) in Colombia issued a statement on February 20th, in which they recall that humanitarian aid must follow the principles of “impartiality, neutrality and independence” “The only criterion of humanitarian aid is to reach the people most needy. It should not have any political, religious, or racial character,” said Marc Jensen, a member of this forum, quoted by El Tiempo. He mentioned that he hopes that “the delivery will not be forced. Because humanitarian aid accompanied by military action is not adequate, and it entail the risk of doing much more harm than alleviating people’s needs.”

In Venezuela, experts who have been doing humanitarian work for years have been debating about this. Susana Rafali and Feliciano Reina told El Confidecial’s Alicia Hernández that humanitarian aid funds have been active in Venezuela “for two years,” with the help of civil organizations, international agencies and the European Union.

“To see the containers at the border, to see them on the social media of the main U.S. politicians, to see the exhibition of something that is so domestic… They’re using it. This is not the diplomacy of the European Union, for example. It is a humanitarian issue and we must make it arrive in a neutral way, protecting the right to life, not for saying somebody is a tyrant or to raise political agendas. You can’t mix politics with humanitarian aid,” Susana Raffalli said.

Andrei Serbin, international analyst from la Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales, makes a technical distinction: given that the entry of aid is counting on a possible fracture of the Venezuelan armed forces, he says, we should talk about international aid and not humanitarian aid. “In order to be humanitarian, it cannot have as its purpose the fulfillment of political or military objectives.”

Congressman Miguel Pizarro responds in the interview with Prodavinci: “I share the concern that the political repertoire today has the humanitarian issue at its center. But, what brought us here but the refusal and indolence of those who, for years, did nothing to prevent this tragedy despite being able to prevent it? To claim a right is not to politicize that right. In the end, we cannot take off our parliamentarians’ caps and say that we are something else. If so, we would be becoming the same thing we have criticized all our lives. That’s why I’m going back to where I started: the rarity of this political climate we are in today is the product of the merengue made by those in power.”

Officials of the Venezuelan Judicial Police (CICPC) raided the headquarters of the Manos Amigas por la Vida Foundation in Carabobo state on February 15, and took antiretroviral medications for HIV patients, which they had received in donations. Not long after,  Nicolás Maduro announced, as a response to the actions in Cúcuta, that 300 tons of “aid and assistance” from Russia would reach Venezuela, although so far Maduro’s government has denied that the emergency exists and has resisted to open a humanitarian channel for the country. “We have paid it with dignity, from Russia, from China, from Turkey, from the whole world, with the UN. With all the UN agencies we have technical assistance,” Maduro said, according to an AFP dispatch.

The Venezuela issue, humanitarian aid included,  is also present abroad in political campaigns. In Spain, it is –once more—a subject of debate in the pre campaign for the April 28 general elections. And in the United States, Donald Trump made it the focal point of his most recent Florida political rally, as he is looking for a re-election for 2020.

The concert and the “counter-concert”

Precisely, the Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz asked Donald Trump not to take over the Venezuelans feat: “Trump shoudn’t appropriate the struggle of the Venezuelan people,” he told El País.

Sanz and more than 30 other artists, including Juan Luis Guerra, Juanes, Paulina Rubio, Miguel Bosé, José Luis Rodríguez, Reinaldo Armas, will sing at the free concert Venezuela Live Aid on February 22 at the border bridge of Las Tienditas, on the Cúcuta side. English magnate Richard Branson is promoting the event that has the goal of raising 100 million dollars, according to its organizers.

Maduro’s team, for its part, announced a “two-day” replica concert on the Venezuelan side of the Las Tienditas bridge. But, at this hour, the Venezuelan government has not announced which artists will participate in the show.

“The two events will only be separated on by a 280-meter-long bridge that has been blocked for two weeks by the military with trucks, cargo containers, fuel tankers and other obstacles,” as pointed out in an AFP dispatch quoted by El Nacional.

So the Venezuela issue has also reached show business. Alejandro Sanz spoke with Juan Guaidó on an Instagram Live, earlier this month. He and other artists who will be present at the Cúcuta concert recorded a video saying Venezuelans “are not alone”. Guaidó published it on his Instagram account:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtW1sWrn7q0/?utm_source=ig_embed

Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s vocalist, is among the famous musicians who have issued opinions in favor of Maduro and, more recently against Branson, coming to the recurrent argument of the right of self-determination of the peoples”.