By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Nov 6 2003 (IPS)

A young mentally retarded chef who has won 100 medals in swim meets, a car wash staffed exclusively by the deaf, and a physical education teacher with Down’s syndrome demonstrate the progress made in Venezuela regarding the insertion of the disabled in the labour market.

But there is still a long way to go before such exceptions become the norm in the public and private sectors.

Ricardo Enrique, 22, passed a demanding culinary course and works as a pastrycook at an exclusive restaurant on the eastside of Caracas. ”I work only with desserts to take care of my hands, because I know that if I get burnt, I could miss swim meets,” he said, offering IPS an exquisite dish of his own creation.

In an immaculate uniform, Ricardo welcomed the guests at a dinner held to raise funds to enable him to participate in the ParaPanAmerican games in Buenos Aires in December. ”My goal is to make it to the ParaOlympics in Greece” in September 2004, said the young man, who has a mental age of 12, according to his trainer, Waldon Parra.

In downtown Caracas, more and more taxi-drivers are taking their vehicles to a car wash staffed exclusively by the deaf, where they receive good service and good prices.

”I recruited them in a city square near here, where they would hang out together for hours, with nothing to do, because no one would hire them,” car wash owner Johnny Díaz told IPS.

”They’re terrific workers, hard-working and responsible, who put a big effort into doing a good job,” he said.

In a country where unemployment stands at 18 percent – a statistic that does not even include the large proportion of under-employed, or people working in the informal economy – ”these employees work with great pride, and have higher self-esteem now because they can help support their families. Some have even returned to their studies.

”I don’t give them special treatment, and this is no charity: they do their work, and they get paid according to the law, that’s all,” said Díaz.

In the western Venezuelan state of Mérida, a mineral water bottling firm employs youngsters with Down’s syndrome, and several fast-food restaurants in Caracas have hired people with Down’s syndrome to package hamburgers.

In the Hipopótamo and Las Lomitas preschools, in fashionable southeast Caracas, Alberto, a 21-year-old with Down’s syndrome, works as an assistant in the preschoolers’ physical education classes.

Alberto ”works in the area of gross motor skills, combined with games. He knows all of the children, he irradiates happiness, and he has become a leader for the children,” the owner of the preschools, Elisa Nadal, said in an interview with IPS.

”He works a total of three days a week, and is all smiles on payday,” she added.

”There are around 1.4 million disabled people” in this South American country of 24 million, Lenín Molina, the head of the governmental National Council for the Integration of Disabled Persons (CONAPI), told IPS.

The Venezuelan constitution, which was rewritten in 1999 on the initiative of left-leaning President Hugo Chávez, states that all people with disabilities or special needs ”have the right to the full and autonomous exercise of their abilities.”

It also says the state must guarantee the ”equalisation of opportunities and satisfactory working conditions” for the disabled, while promoting access to employment.

The new constitution ”has made great strides forward in helping the disabled to be seen as citizens, rather than as sort of social rejects,” said Molina, ”but we are still bogged down as to how to truly implement that constitutional precept in private and state companies.”

The wheelchair-bound Molina, who was left paraplegic by an accident he suffered as a young man, has taught for 30 years at the Central University school of journalism, and is the head of the Ibero-American network of non-g overnmental organisations working on behalf of the disabled.

”The first big task we have ahead of us is awareness-building, mainly among employers,” he said. ”In general, private businesses are not willing to hire the disabled, and they tend to ‘buy’ all of the derogatory terms, like ‘invalid’.”

”We are lacking a coherent government policy that would generate employment for people with disabilities, although since 1993 Venezuela has a law according to which two percent of the workforce of all companies or installations with more than 100 employees should be made up of people with disabilities,” said Molina.

Of course it is not a problem exclusive to Venezuela, he said, pointing out that ”no country in the region, with the exception of Cuba, abides by the provisions laid out by the United Nations in 2000 on the equalisation of opportunities for persons with disabilities.”

CONAPI would like Venezuela to establish ”something like they have in Spain, for example: legally binding standards for companies, which on one hand provide for sanctions for those who violate the law, and on the other, effective tax breaks and incentives for those companies” that employ the disabled, said Molina.

CONAPI and the Labour Ministry are discussing the creation of programmes that would help generate employment for the disabled, and a training centre for people with disabilities, through the government Institute of Educational Cooperation, which trains skilled workers.

Venezuela, one of the world’s leading oil exporters, has been in the grip of a devastating economic crisis for the last few years. Gross Domestic Product shrank eight percent last year, and is expected to shrink 12 percent this year.

Nevertheless, Molina is optimistic, ”because there are signs that we will see a recovery in 2004.”

”Within the next one or two years, we will have brought our legislation and programmes for the promotion of workforce insertion of people with disabilities completely up-to-date,” he predicted.

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