Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of crude in the world, but its economy has collapsed in recent years. Hunger has plagued the nation and, now, is killing children. The Venezuelan government knows this, but does not recognize it.
Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. But now, according to doctors in public hospitals, is charging an alarming amount of lives of minors. The economy began to collapse in 2014. Protests and riots over lack of food, unbearably long lines to get basic supplies, soldiers stationed outside bakeries and angry crowds looting stores have shaken several cities.
However, the numbers of deaths from malnutrition continue to be a well-kept secret by the Venezuelan government. During a five-month investigation by The New York Times, doctors in twenty-one public hospitals in seventeen states said their emergency rooms are crammed with severely malnourished children.
"Children are arriving with very precarious conditions of malnutrition," said Dr. Huníades Urbina Medina, president of the Venezuelan Society of Childcare and Pediatrics. He added that doctors are even seeing malnutrition as extreme as that which occurs in refugee camps; cases that, he said, were extremely rare before the economic collapse of the country.
For many poor families, the crisis has completely shaken their outlook. There are women who line up outside sterilization clinics to avoid getting pregnant from babies they will not be able to feed. Young children leave their homes and join gangs that dig everywhere for food: their bodies are scarred by knife fights against their rivals. Adults in crowds stir the trash of restaurants after they close. Many babies die because it is difficult to find -or be able to afford- formula for the bottle, even in emergency rooms. "But 2017 has been a terrible increase in malnourished patients," he said. "Of children who arrive to you infant and have the weight and size of a newborn"
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Before the Venezuelan economy began to collapse, almost all cases of child malnutrition in public hospitals were due to negligence or parental abuse. But between 2015 and 2016, as the crisis intensified, cases of severe child malnutrition tripled in the medical centers of the capital, according to the doctors. This year could be even worse.
The Venezuelan government has tried to cover up the seriousness of the crisis and has practically no health statistics. This creates a climate in which doctors sometimes fear registering cases and deaths linked to failures of public policy.
"Never in my life have I seen so many children with hunger," said Dr. Livia Machado, a private practice pediatrician who gives free consultations to children who have been hospitalized at the Domingo Luciani sanatorium in Caracas.
President Nicolás Maduro has acknowledged that some people go hungry in Venezuela, but has refused to receive international aid because he says the crisis is caused by an "economic war" driven by businessmen and foreign forces like the United States.
