United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, arrived on Wednesday 19 July to Venezuela for a 3-day visit. On Thursday afternoon, the High Commissioner, human rights organizations and multiple victim groups met. In this space of one hour, 26 spokesmen were able to make requests to the High Commissioner. 20 of these interventions are registered in this document, which represents an overview of the activists’ demands for the human dignity of the country in a context characterized by the lack of democracy, increase in poverty and forced migration.
Below is one of such interventions.
Welcome high commissioner and extraordinary team:
Convite AC alongside organizations from eight cities in the country monthly monitors the shortage of medicine and investigates the existence or lack of thereof medicines to treat hypertension, diabetes, diarrhea, respiratory infections, seizures and depressive episodes. For the month of May the rate of shortage was 70.6% and reached 80.7% in the case of medicines to treat respiratory infections, seizures and depression.
The same study found that for the month of May the shortage of contraceptive methods was 83.3%, with the lowest being 40.3% for condoms; however, there was a 100% shortage of contraceptive methods by injection, patches, intrauterine devices and vaginal rings.
Elderly adults face the effects of the complex humanitarian emergency to an alarming extent. In a study of weight and size done by Convite in 2017, when the worst of the crisis had yet to be seen, found that adults were losing 1.3 kilos monthly. The annual pension in Venezuela is 40,000 Bs which, at the official exchange rate, equals 6.73 dollars a month, which is 22 cents daily. This constitutes a mathematical rate below the lowest of the poverty line.
Those elderly adults who receive a pension find themselves severely restricted when it comes to cashing their check including long lines in rough conditions, a restriction of the amount of paper bills that they receive and the added cost of requisites and commissions. All these situations have been reported to The Superintendence of the Institutions of the Banking Sector (SUDEBAN) and NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE. We have record of 13 deceased elderly adults in line to cash their pension in 2018 and 4 in 2017.
The drama of the elderly adults left behind in the country is getting worse. Four million Venezuelans have fled the country without their elders, leaving them behind alone, without medicine, a starving pension and in the worst country on the continent to age. This drama bears the name of women.
Elderly people tucked away in nursing homes are the unequivocal example of the description of the word FORGOTTEN.
Lastly High Commissioner, I want to bring forth the perils of those pensioned that are living outside of Venezuela in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay, countries in which the agreement of exchange of social security is valid and where more than 16,000 people have lived 40 months without cashing in their pension.
