Venezuelan voices: The real-life stories beyond the protests
May 19, 2017
Venezuelans have taken to the streets in their tens of thousands over the past seven weeks in anti-government protests that have left at least 43 demonstrators dead and hundreds injured. They show no signs of abating.
But lurking behind the political protests is a deepening humanitarian crisis that gets less press: Malnutrition has risen sharply, maternal mortality jumped by 65 percent last year, infant mortality by 30 percent. The protests are just the tip of a much more alarming iceberg. The truth is that many of the worst-off Venezuelans are too poor and too hungry to protest, even if they wanted to.
Over the past two years, falling oil prices have sent Venezuela’s economy into freefall. The result: chronic shortages of food and medicines, rampant crime, and an inflation rate estimated to be 720 percent and rising.
The anger on the streets is prompted in part by the denial of President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government that there is a crisis (the health minister was sacked shortly after her department released the infant and maternal mortality figures) and its refusal to allow in international aid.
