Rumors surrounding Venezuelan Crisis

"Venezuelans on average have lost about 20 lbs since their economic crisis began. That is a lot of weight for a baby to lose. They are headed toward a North Korea style famine if they don't shape up, though they are probably more accepting of international aid than the Norks."

"If you go against world's leading Superpower, they will starve your children to death, while worshiping Jesus Christ the lord of sorrows."

"Venezuela's problems are cheap oil and a mismanaged currency."

Why did they make it cheap? Currency is in bad shape because of "foreign influences," sources tell NewsGossipBull.com

"I don't really know how oil gets priced. Supply and demand and speculation is some of it but I don't rule out conspiracies to spread the myth of imminent peak oil and high oil prices as the new normal in order to bust the budgets of oil dependent countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela."

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. But in the last three years its economy has collapsed.

Hunger has gripped the nation for years. Now, it’s killing children.

SAN CASIMIRO, Venezuela — Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death.

His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.

Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation. They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven — a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela.

When Kenyerber’s body was finally ready for viewing, his father, Carlos Aquino, a 37-year-old construction worker, began to weep uncontrollably. “How can this be?” he cried, hugging the coffin and speaking softly, as if to comfort his son in death. “Your papá will never see you again.”

Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say.

Venezuela has been shuddering since its economy began to collapse in 2014. Riots and protests over the lack of affordable food, excruciating long lines for basic provisions, soldiers posted outside bakeries and angry crowds ransacking grocery stores have rattled cities, providing a telling, public display of the depths of the crisis.

But deaths from malnutrition have remained a closely guarded secret by the Venezuelan government. In a five-month investigation by The New York Times, doctors at 21 public hospitals in 17 states across the country said that their emergency rooms were being overwhelmed by children with severe malnutrition — a condition they had rarely encountered before the economic crisis began.


By The New York Times

“Children are arriving with very precarious conditions of malnutrition,” said Dr. Huníades Urbina Medina, the president of the Venezuelan Society of Childcare and Pediatrics. He added that doctors were even seeing the kind of extreme malnutrition often found in refugee camps — cases that were highly unusual in oil-rich Venezuela before its economy fell to pieces.

For many low-income families, the crisis has completely redrawn the social landscape. Parents like Kenyerber’s mother go days without eating, shriveling to the weight of children themselves. Women line up at sterilization clinics to avoid having children they can’t feed. Young boys leave home and join street gangs to scavenge for scraps, their bodies bearing the scars of knife fights with competitors. Crowds of adults storm Dumpsters after restaurants close. Babies die because it is hard to find or afford infant formula, even in emergency rooms.

“Sometimes they die in your arms just from dehydration,” Dr. Milagros Hernández said in the emergency room of a children’s hospital in the northern city of Barquisimeto, noting that the hospital had started seeing an increase in malnourished patients at the end of 2016.

“But in 2017 the increase in malnourished patients has been terrible,” she added. “Children arrive with the same weight and height of a newborn.”

Before Venezuela’s economy started spiraling, doctors say, almost all of the child malnutrition cases they saw in public hospitals stemmed from neglect or abuse by parents. But as the economic crisis began to intensify in 2015 and 2016, the number of cases of severe malnutrition at the nation’s leading pediatric health center in the capital more than tripled, doctors say. This year looks even worse.


The Venezuelan government has tried to cover up the extent of the crisis by enforcing a near-total blackout of health statistics, and by creating a culture in which doctors are often afraid to register cases and deaths that may be associated with the government’s failures.

But the statistics that have come out are staggering. In the Ministry of Health’s 2015 annual report, the mortality rate for children under 4 weeks old had increased a hundredfold, from percent in 2012 to just over 2 percent. Maternal mortality had increased nearly fivefold in the same period.

For almost two years, the government did not publish a single epidemiological bulletin tracking statistics like infant mortality. Then in April of this year, a link suddenly appeared on the Health Ministry’s official website, leading to the unpublished bulletins. They showed that 11,446 children under the age of 1 had died in 2016 — a 30 percent increase in one year — as the economic crisis accelerated.

The new findings made national and international headlines before the government declared that the website had been hacked, and the reports were swiftly removed. The health minister was fired and the military was put in charge of monitoring the bulletins. No reports have been released since.

Doctors are censored in hospitals, too, often warned not to include malnutrition in children’s medical records.

“In some public hospitals, the clinical diagnosis of malnutrition has been prohibited,” Dr. Huníades Urbina said.

But doctors interviewed by The Times at nine of the 21 public hospitals said that they had kept at least some count. They encountered nearly 2,800 cases of child malnutrition in the last year alone, with starving children regularly brought to emergency rooms. Nearly 400 of the children died, the doctors said.

“Never in my life had I seen so many hungry children,” said Dr. Livia Machado, a pediatrician who gives free consultations at her private practice to children who had been hospitalized at Dr. Domingo Luciani Hospital in the capital, Caracas.

The hospital is one of the few still accepting malnourished infants for treatment. Other hospitals often turn them away, telling desperate parents that they do not have enough beds or medical supplies to treat their children. Nearly all of Venezuelan hospitals report shortages of basic provisions like baby formula.

President Nicolás Maduro has acknowledged that people are hungry in Venezuela, but he has refused to accept international aid, often saying that Venezuela’s economic problems are caused by foreign adversaries like the United States, which he says is waging an economic war against his country.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. But many economists contend that years of economic mismanagement set the stage for the current disaster. The damage was masked when oil prices were high, giving the government large resources. But when oil prices began a steep fall at the end of 2014, scarcities became common and food prices skyrocketed. Inflation could reach 2,300 percent next year, the International Monetary Fund warned in October.


“We have a people who are dying of hunger,” Luis Florido, a congressman who leads the National Assembly’s foreign policy committee, told lawmakers in November, calling the food crisis “a humanitarian emergency that all Venezuelans are living.”

‘So Many Children’

Kenyerber was born healthy: 6 pounds 7 ounces. But his mother, María Carolina Merchán, 29, was bitten by a mosquito and infected with a severe case of the Zika virus when Kenyerber was 3 months old. She had to be hospitalized, and doctors instructed her to stop breast feeding because of serious complications from her illness.

Unable to find or afford infant formula, the family improvised with whatever they could find: bottles of cream of rice or cornstarch, mixed with whole milk. It did not provide Kenyerber with the nutrients he needed.

At 9 months, his father found him listless in bed, with blood running from his nose. He rushed him to the overcrowded pediatric emergency room at Dr. Domingo Luciani hospital, where patients and beds spill out of rooms, into dingy hallways paced by armed soldiers.

Kleiver Enrique Hernández, 3 months old, was being treated for severe malnutrition a few beds down from Kenyerber. He too was born healthy — 8 pounds 2 ounces — but his mother, Kelly Hernández, could not breast-feed him, either.

Again, despite searching endlessly, Ms. Hernández and her boyfriend, César González, could not get infant formula for their son. It was not for lack of trying.

In online inventory searches of Locatel, one of the largest pharmacy chains in Venezuela, The Times found that only one of its 64 locations across the country reported having the infant formula doctors had prescribed for Kleiver in stock.

It is unlikely that Ms. Hernández could have afforded it anyway. Hyperinflation has shriveled wages paid in the local currency, bolívars, to a small fraction of what they were worth two years ago. A month’s worth of the formula Kleiver needed cost more than twice the entire monthly salary that Mr. González earned as an agricultural worker.

Formula shortages hit the hospitals, too. Doctors in the emergency room at Dr. Domingo Luciani hospital said they had no formula in stock to feed patients like Kenyerber and Kleiver. The 2016 National Survey of Hospitals found that 96 percent of Venezuelan hospitals reported not having all of the infant formula they needed to attend to patients. More than 63 percent reported having no formula at all.

With so few options, Kleiver’s mother warily prepared bottles of rice starch and water, occasionally with whole milk, when they could find it. It was not enough.

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