Photography by Iván E. Reyes @IvanEReyes
This is how the coronavirus pandemic is lived in Venezuela. Yasmaira Méndez’s life changed in a month. This 24-year-old young woman works in a bakery in the wealthy municipality of Chacao in eastern Caracas. She lives in the west: in the Sucre parish, in one of the 10 areas in which Catia was divided, where the ruling Chavismo in Venezuela is trying to implement a strict confinement-like quarantine since April 13.
Yasmaira is one of the 25 million people living in Venezuela whose quality of life was further disrupted by the arrival of the pandemic, which had already been damaged by the complex humanitarian emergency, hyperinflation and precariousness of public services that for months, if not years, deny quality of life to the inhabitants of this country.
This catiense (demonym) is in charge of the bakery’s bar along with a group of female colleagues. Some of them are her neighbors in Nuevo Horizonte. They were all surprised when they were handed a “mobility pass” that the community councils of Catia began distributing to neighbors since Sunday, April 12.
It is a kind of ticket. This piece of paper allows them to leave their houses only four times a week. In her case, she is deprived of moving within the parish on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Yasmaira was calm on April 13 when the pass started being implemented. Although her schedule was changed due to the quarantine, she went to her job every other day.
But, on April 20, she changed her already disrupted routine again. Now she has to go to work only on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. She is not allowed to use the Caracas Metro (MRT) because she works for a private company and the subway only allows access to essential services workers as established in the national alarm decree issued by the Nicolás Maduro administration on March 13.
“Now, with the pandemic, they even change the way we work. We have three days of confinement in which we are not able to leave,” she told Efecto Cocuyo.
She spends at least 17,000 bolivares a day on bus fares and must ask her bosses for cash to get around. Since March 13, the banks of the country, both public and private are not operational. The branches are closed and ATMs do not dispense cash due to the quarantine imposed in Venezuela.
Yasmaira Méndez can only work three times a week
A half-hearted attempt
The Sucre parish in Caracas is the parish (district) with the largest population in the Venezuelan capital. The last census in Venezuela, in 2011, revealed that its inhabitants represented 17.8% of the total number of residents of Caracas.
It is Tuesday, April 21. The Catia Boulevard, near Sucre square, is in chaos. Informal vendors sell food, masks and spices. The benches are full of people, some vendors offer cigarettes and coffee.
Adle Hernández, director of Outreach and Community Relations of the Social Extension of the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB), explained it in her article “The dynamics of the barrio and the measures in the face of COVID-19.”
“The slum does not socially isolate itself not because it does not want to or does not understand, or does not collaborate; the neighborhood is not completely isolated because its subsistence depends on being with others: to obtain some income during the day, to eat, to get gas, to get the necessary water to wash hands in the correct way for 20 seconds; and in the course of this dynamic, people try to obey what is asked of them as best they can.”
An evangelical Christian with a speaker at full volume calls on those who walk in the area, including a lady trying to buy a gas cylinder, to repent and believe in God, to end the pandemic in Venezuela, which on April 23 involved 311 cases, 10 deaths and 126 people recovered.
With the mobility pass, Chavismo tries to establish general confinement in Catia, but so far it has not been able to do so.
People agglomerate during the few hours they can buy
Despite the fact that shops are closed three days a week, the other four in which they are open, the number of people on the streets of Catia is greater. Here, purchases are only allowed between 7:00 and 10:00 am.
This, far from being a solution, causes more people to be in front of large crowded supermarkets to try to buy food.
Mrs. Cecilia Martínez lives in La Silsa. While buying a “compuesto” (a bundle, in this case, made of chives and coriander) for 20,000 bolivares, she takes a short break on one of the benches of the boulevard. She complains about the price increases. A kilo of chicken costs 280,000 bolivares, one kilo of meat 480,000 bolivares and one kilo of mortadella is 498,000 bolivares.
“We are going to starve to death,” Martinez says, throwing out a premonition regarding the price increases that have taken place since the beginning of the quarantine in Venezuela.
She said it two days before the unofficial price of the dollar in Venezuela broke the barrier of 200 thousand bolivares. After that, the kilo of meat jumped from 480,000 bolivares to Bs. 780,000 and the monthly minimum wage of Venezuelans, which on April 30 still consists of 450,000 bolivares, went from $4 USD to just $2 USD.
Martínez’s words resonated the same day that the World Report on Food Crises 2020 was presented. In 2019, Venezuela experienced the fourth worst food crisis in the world. In other words, 9.3 million Venezuelans suffer from acute food insecurity; another 2.3 million suffer from severe food insecurity and 7 million suffer from moderate food insecurity.
Gentle on the boulevard, but heavy handed on the neighborhood
In Catia even the shoe stores were open on Tuesday, April 21. Clothing stores even offered foods like flour or pasta to try to make profits.
This takes place on the boulevard, because in the 10 areas into which the Sucre parish was divided, the reality is different.
National Bolivarian Police patrols or trucks pass by. Whoever is in front of their house, even with masks, are forced into those units and stay detained all night. They let them go at dawn at their risk. Thefts have not ceased in this town. A nurse who was getting there from her job in the pediatric area of a hospital in eastern Caracas was mugged. Three young men snatched her cell phone from her, despite constant police surveillance in the communities.
Those who want to buy food must go down to their sectors at 6:00 am, queue up for up to three hours in businesses and return in the few trucks (public transport) that work, given the difficulties to fill tanks with gasoline that reached Caracas with the coronavirus pandemic.
On April 22 the streets of Catia were crowded
The attempt of total confinement in Catia does not work for the Maduro administration. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, his government praised the few infections caused by the coronavirus pandemic in Venezuela and questioned the policies that are implemented in the United States, Brazil or Colombia.
On March 13, the salary of 2,200,000 bolivares that Yasmaira earned for her work at the bakery represented $28 USD, but 40 days later it is only equivalent to $11 USD. Her income is five times higher than the Venezuelan minimum wage (450,000 bolivares), which with a dollar rate at 200,000 bolivares is equivalent to just $2.5 USD a month.
Venezuela has been in recession for 5 years. Since 2014 the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell 70% and after having an economy of 350 billion USD, in 2019 it came to make only about 70 billion USD, according to the numbers of Consecomercio, the national commerce association.
Oil at $10 and gasoline shortage
The Venezuelan crash has a lot to do with low oil production. In 2018, the country’s daily production was at 1,354,000 barrels, according to secondary sources from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), but in March 2020 it was at 660,000 barrels per day, a reduction of 51.26% in the last two years.
The coronavirus pandemic was added to the low national oil production and the US sanctions on the commercialization of Venezuelan oil. Since the declaration of a coronavirus pandemic by the WHO, the price of the Venezuelan barrel fell to $10 on Monday, April 20, when West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark value for US oil, fell into negative values for the first time in history.
Since April 13, gasoline is rationed in Caracas with the peak and plate plan
Carlos Grujeles, a driver for the Trébol Blanco (white clover) line that takes passengers from Bellas Artes to San Bernardino Parish, has only been able to work twice in April. The gasoline shortage and the implementation of the peak and plate plan, the fuel supply according to the last digit of the plate number of his unit, instead of being a solution, has become a problem.
On his fifth attempt to fill up his 28-seat truck, he managed to get 40 liters of gasoline. That is not enough for the six rides he did frequently to San Bernardino. On April 22 he could only do three. The money was enough for “a pack of corn flour and pasta.” He went back home to wait a week to refuel.
But not only drivers must stay overnight in the 24 gas stations set up by the Comprehensive Defense Operations Zone (Zodi) Caracas, the largest command of the army located in the capital of the country that controls fuel distribution.
Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, food suppliers, diplomats, security forces and the media are some of the sectors that can obtain gasoline. That after spending up to 24 hours at a gas station.
The drivers denounce the illegal reselling of fuel by the military. The price is one dollar for each liter, and whoever can pay between 30 and 50 dollars to fill their tank, doesn’t have to queue.
In Petare they walk down from the slum to do the shopping
Petare is at the other end of Catia. This parish in the Sucre municipality, Miranda state, has 37 neighborhoods. And as in the west, they can only do shopping within a schedule that ranges from three to five hours.
The shops work between 7:00 and 10:00 am. Bakeries until 12 noon and pharmacies until 4:00 pm.
Everyone here, like Yasmaira in Catia, experienced a drastic change in the way they lived due to the coronavirus pandemic. The shops with restricted working hours, those who live from informal commerce and retail sales for their daily bread and those who must leave the hill and go to the roundabout to do the shopping. With fewer transport units, everything has become more expensive.
Social distancing is not obeyed when you must buy food in Petare
Carmen Hernández reactivated her old sale of homemade ice creams to earn at least the 20,000 bolivares in cash she needs to pay for the bus ride that she, her dauther or her husband would need when they go down from the neighborhood Juventud Bolivariana to do shopping, from which they go out walking and to which they return, with the bags where they carry their purchases, using the scarce public transport.
It takes Hernández and her family from 20 to 30 minutes to leave their house and get to the roundabout, it all depends on how fast they leave to avoid being surprised by the queues.
Everything has become more expensive, the prices multiplied at a much faster rate than the cases of the coronavirus pandemic in Venezuela.
A barber who became a coffee vendor says it accurately: “Here, you work as far as the law allows it.” His business is closed and he sells the aromatic drink or cigarettes to survive.
Between calls from police and guards with patrols and speakers, Petareños (people from Petare) and Catienses reluctantly comply with the schedules of restriction in the sale of food that lead them to agglomerate to buy whatever their pockets allow them.
In both sectors, starting at 10:00 in the morning, the police and guards walk around with megaphones to force the eviction of informal vendors, businesses to lower their santamarías (security roller shutters) and residents to return to their homes.
On April 14 in Petare, first a National Bolivarian Guard patrol stepped in with a siren on and a speaker warned: “Gentlemen, please, we are going to leave, the shops are already closed.” It stayed for several minutes and then gave way to a policeman who evacuated the place with a megaphone.
The Venezuelan tsunami
Feliciano Reyna described with a very graphic example what is happening in Venezuela. It is a country hit by an apocalyptic tsunami, like the one experienced by Asian countries in 2004 with the earthquake in the Indian Ocean.
With a country already hit by a complex humanitarian emergency since 2016, COVID-19 installed itself on March 13. And as if Venezuela were a human being, it attacked a weakened immune system with chronic conditions; that is, with the alert of being a more vulnerable patient who must survive at all costs, despite being in intensive care.
Reyna, defender of the right to health and founder of the NGO Acción Solidaria, warned of the arrival of a new tsunami that would devastate what little is left standing in Venezuela.
As the director of an NGO that has been working to provide humanitarian aid to chronic patients since 2015, he well knows what the consequences of political, partial and confrontational management are, among the factors of power that do not allow us to envision a unitary strategy to confront the pandemic.
The health sector is one of the hardest hit by this “Venezuelan tsunami”.
The last update of the Survey on National Hospitals revealed that between November 2018 and September 2019 the percentage of inoperativeness of the services in the monitored centers was equal to 58%.
In this period, the functioning of X-ray equipment did not exceed 40%; the laboratories were only active in 16% of hospitals and only 14% of the tomographs worked.
In the Santa Ana maternity hospital, relatives must wait on the street
They warned that these figures “affect the ability of hospitals to carry out from the most basic to the most complex studies. And this translates for the patient to be diagnosed at the wrong time, having to travel to other centers and pay for the studies out of their pockets, and even in some cases the consequences are fatal”.
Without protection to fight the coronavirus pandemic
On April 14, a doctor of internal medicine accompanied her sister at the Santa Ana maternity hospital in Caracas. She works at Pérez de León, one of the 46 sentinel hospitals set up by the Maduro government, to receive patients who are suspects of having COVID-19 or carriers of the disease.
A day before, members of Doctors Without Borders attended this last healthcare center to verify the functioning of the place. She was surprised to see the biosafety equipment of the visitors.
For the doctors at that hospital, only surgical gowns, gloves and face masks are available. Not a trace of biosafety suits, much less glasses to face the coronavirus pandemic.
“We do not have ideal suits, nor masks. There is some medical equipment that we have to share and ideally they should be personal. We have received suspect cases, but so far no patient has been isolated. ”
Prosecuted health personnel
She declined to reveal her name to avoid retaliation. In Trujillo a bioanalyst was charged with displaying the records of a patient with COVID-19 on her WhatsApp stories, and an obstetrician in Carora (Lara state) was imprisoned for 24 hours. The crime: sharing a WhatsApp story where you see how a protected politician goes to visit a hospital and how a doctor receives him: with the same description that the doctor of internal medicine stated.
Doctor Luis Araya was taken out of his office by soldiers of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (Dgcim) on April 15. A day later, after threats by the union of doctors in Lara to paralyze their work, Araya was half released: charged with an alleged hate crime and forced to go to court every 30 days when the quarantine ceases.
Mauro Zambrano, union leader in the health sector, presented a balance of the first month of isolation in Venezuela and the monitoring they carry out in 16 healthcare centers, both sentinels and general care.
Some data are discouraging: “Workers of hospitals like the Vargas hospital had to wear the same face mask for eight consecutive days, thus violating biosafety and hygiene measures, placing their health and that of their families at risk.”
High-risk employees and workers at risk
Venezuelan health personnel are also exposed to the coronavirus pandemic. The first doctor to become ill with COVID-19 was a resident of the Hospital Clinico Universitario de Caracas on March 29.
A nurse at a private hospital in Caracas became ill from having contact with isolated patients. Jorge Rodríguez, Maduro’s Minister of communication and information, said he was from Valles del Tuy, where he had also infected his brother.
On April 16, the spread of four workers from Barrio Adentro, the Cuban medical mission created by Hugo Chávez in 2004 was reported. They work at an Integral Diagnostic Center (CDI) in Guarenas, state of Miranda, where they were infected. They are two nurses, a male nurse and a dentist. They contracted the virus from a Cuban nurse.
But in the Venezuela of coronavirus, being a doctor is also a threat to Chavismo. On April 18, the attorney general appointed by the National Constituent Assembly, Tarek Willian Saab, reported the arrest and prosecution of an epidemiologist from the state of Nueva Esparta, Carmen Hernández.
In this state, the source of infection was a baseball academy that left at least 20 confirmed cases and which ultimately led to the apprehension of five people. Four of them related to academy and the fifth is Carmen Hernández, the regional epidemiologist.
“Article 54 of the Organic Law on National Security was applied to Carmen Hernández, an epidemiologist and person in charge of the regional epidemiological coordination of the state of Nueva Esparta,” said Saab at a press conference.
“For failing to comply with the obligation that he has as a public official to supply the data and information to the Health staff committee,” they left her prisoner.
Looting caused by starvation
As the days of quarantine for the coronavirus pandemic progress, this week in some cities of eastern Venezuela a wave of looting took place, which was preceded by protests for gasoline and food such as that of the fishermen of Araya.
In Cumanacoa and Río Caribe (Sucre); in Punta de Mata and Maturín (Monagas); but also in Upata (Bolívar) looting took place in the middle of this week. The lack of food and increasing cost of living took people out of their houses onto the streets.
On April 23, the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict (OVCS) explained: 41 days after the quarantine and confinement measures, protests for social rights continue throughout Venezuela. In the first three weeks of April, there are more than 500 protests across the country.
And in the midst of the conflict, the life of everyone in Venezuela, that of Yasmaira in Catia; Carmen’s in Petare; that of Carlos, the driver, that of health personnel and that of small-business owners was disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
