Security Council Meets on Threats to International Peace and Security. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Cecilia Russell
UNITED NATIONS & JOHANNESBURG, Jan 5 2026 (IPS)

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed deep concern about the immediate future of Venezuela.

In a statement read by Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo, Guterres told the Security Council’s emergency meeting he was deeply concerned about “possible intensification of the instability in the country, the potential impact on the region, and the precedent it may set for how relations between and among states are conducted.”

On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he was putting Venezuela under temporary American control following the capture of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Adela Flores, in a raid and whisking them to New York to face charges, including drug trafficking.

Guterres stated at the emergency Security Council meeting, which was set to discuss threats to international peace and security, that the situation in Venezuela has been a matter of regional and international concern for many years.

“Attention on the country only grew following the contested presidential elections in July 2024. The panel of electoral experts I appointed at the Venezuelan Government’s request to accompany the elections highlighted serious issues. We have consistently called for full transparency and the complete publication of the results of the elections.”

Yet, he said, it was necessary to respect international law.

“I have consistently stressed the imperative of full respect, by all, for international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, which provides the foundation for the maintenance of international peace and security.

“I remain deeply concerned that rules of international law have not been respected with regard to the 3 January military action.”

Guterres called on all Venezuelan actors to engage in an inclusive, democratic dialogue in which all sectors of society can determine their future.

Jeffrey Sachs, the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, urged the UN Security Council to declare an immediate cessation and desist from any explicit or implicit threats or use of force against Venezuela.

He also requested the council demand the United States terminate its naval quarantine and all related coercive military measures undertaken without Security Council authorization.

Merchy de Freitas, founder and executive director of Transparencia Venezuela, the national chapter of Transparency International, said the country ranked among the world’s most corrupt countries, with over 500 documented cases involving USD 72 billion, mostly public funds.

She said there was a symbiotic relationship between the Maduro regime and criminal organizations, which have exploited national parks and the Amazon for gold and other illicit activities. The crisis has led to a decrease in state income, affecting basic services and causing severe humanitarian issues, including a lack of electricity, food, and medical care.

“The government has captured all institutions, beginning with the justice institutions,” she said. “We need a transparent state that is accountable and that will guarantee the rule of law and human rights.”

De Freitas called for a transparent and accountable state, respect for human rights, and the release of political prisoners.

A representative from Columbia expressed concern over what it considers a “violation of international law and the UN Charter and expressed concern over the regional impact, including a potential migration crisis.

She emphasized the importance of respecting sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the principles of peaceful conflict resolution while expressing concerns over the regional impact, including potential migration crises, and calling for de-escalation and diplomatic solutions.

Russia and China, among others, condemned the United States’ action.

However, the United States informed the council that it had launched a “law enforcement operation” against Maduro and Flores, accusing them of “narcoterrorism and drug trafficking.”

Maduro, who was indicted by a New York grand jury, faces serious charges for his role in a conspiracy involving cocaine trafficking and international weapons trafficking, he told the council.

He justified the operation because Maduro’s presidency was illegitimate due to his manipulation of Venezuela’s electoral system and commented that even the UN had questioned his legitimacy. The United States also highlighted the destabilizing impact of Maduro’s regime, including the largest refugee crisis in the world, with over 8 million Venezuelans fleeing.

“Maduro and his cronies have partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narcoterrorists in the world for decades, facilitating the flood of illegal drugs coming into the United States,” the representative told the Security Council, reminding the council that the United Nations had documented the excesses of the Maduro government.

The action by the United States had taken place after Trump had exhausted diplomacy, he said.

“The United States will not waver in its actions to protect Americans from the scourge of narcoterrorism and seeks peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela.”

Venezuela’s representative denounced the events of January 3, 2026, as an illegitimate armed attack by the US government.

“The events of January 3 constitute a flagrant violation of the UN Charter perpetrated by the US government, in particular, the principal violation of the principle of sovereign equality of states, of the absolute prohibition of the use or threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” he said.

“Today, it is not only Venezuela sovereignty that is at stake, but also the credibility of international law, the authority of this organization, and the validity of the principle that no state can set itself up as a judge, jury, and executor of the world order.”

He denied the country was dysfunctional.

“Venezuela would like to inform this body and the international community that its institutions are functioning normally, that constitutional order has been preserved, and that the state exercises effective control over all of its territory in accordance with our Constitution.

While Spain said they did not recognize the Maduro presidency, they were concerned that the United States’ action would set a worrying precedent.

“We share the view that fighting organized crime in the region is a priority, but that fight can only be waged through international cooperation. We also share the view that it is a priority to defend human rights and fundamental freedoms in Venezuela,” the representative said, adding that it would “work to unite Venezuelans, men and women. Spain is committed to dialogue and peace, because force never brings more democracy.”

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Alicia Villamizar presents the findings of the Second Academic Report on Climate Change. Credit: Margaret López/IPS

By Margaret López
CARACAS, Dec 15 2025 (IPS)

A group of 55 researchers gathered and analyzed 1,260 bibliographic references to compile the Second Academic Report on Climate Change in Venezuela. Their final conclusion is that more local studies are still needed to record the direct impacts across different Venezuelan regions and, in particular, to provide data to design the adaptation plans necessary to address climate change.

“Vulnerability varies greatly across the country. If an adaptation policy is to be defined, it cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. Adaptation is tailor-made, which is why local data is so important,” warned Alicia Villamizar, general coordinator of the research carried out by the Academy of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Acfiman), in an interview with IPS.

The review of scientific papers, university research, books, global reports, and specialized databases on the impacts of climate change took four full years.

This research involved professionals from 25 different institutions, including the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB). It was presented at the Palace of Academies in early December.

The researchers highlighted the lack of historical and recent data on changes in temperature, precipitation, and sea level rise at the local level, three key elements for understanding climate change in the country.

They also reported the lack of scientific studies on the risk assessment of heat waves, droughts, and forest fires for different climate scenarios in Venezuela. Nor did they identify any recent research on the genetic improvement of crops to safeguard the country’s food security following changes in national temperature.

Corals Affected by High Temperatures

Among the findings of the report that are noteworthy is that Venezuela’s average temperature increased by 0.22°C per decade between 1980 and 2015.

The southern part of Lake Maracaibo (Zulia), the Paraguaná Peninsula (Falcón), and the western plains (Apure, Barinas, and Portuguesa), all located in western Venezuela, were the areas most affected by this temperature increase, which provides evidence of climate change.

Estrella Villamizar, coordinator of the first chapter of the report and researcher at the Institute of Zoology and Tropical Ecology at the UCV, highlighted the impact that this temperature increase had on Venezuelan coral reefs.

“There is not a single coral reef that has not been affected,” said Estrella Villamizar, a specialist in the study of marine ecosystems, during the public presentation of the results in Caracas.

Higher sea temperatures are another factor that has allowed the rapid expansion of the soft coral Unomia stolonifera in Venezuelan waters. This invasive species arrived from the Indian Ocean to the coasts of Anzoátegui and Sucre in eastern Venezuela and also to the waters of Aragua in the center of the country.

It is estimated that half of the seabed of Mochima National Park (Anzoátegui) is already covered with this soft coral, according to a report by the civil association Unomia Project.

The death of native corals in this area is a consequence of the colonization of this invasive species, which has been favored by climate change conditions. The rapid expansion of Unomia stolonifera also affects starfish, sponges, and marine worms.

More Economic Risks

The research also highlighted that climate change contributed to a reduction of between 0.97 percent and 1.30 percent in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) between 2010 and 2020, partly due to rising temperatures and increased rainfall.

Venezuela faced, for example, more than 20 flooding events between 2000 and 2019. The most direct consequences of these floods resulted in economic losses valued at more than USD 1 billion.

The GDP projection, in fact, is that Venezuela will lose another 10 points by 2030, due to rising sea levels that threaten port infrastructure, fishing activities, and tourism.

“The substantial value of this Second Academic Report is that it offers invaluable information for those who make decisions on city and national issues,” said agricultural engineer Joaquín Benítez, who participated in the project as a researcher on the sustainable development chapter, in an interview with IPS.

The main challenge with climate change in Venezuela, not surprisingly, is to get more attention from the government. The country still does not have a national law on climate change, a national climate strategy, or a national plan for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

That is why Alicia Villamizar repeated during the presentation that her goal is for this scientific report “not to remain confined to academia,” but rather to serve as a catalyst for more local scientific research and to strengthen the institutional muscle in charge of directing climate adaptation in Venezuela.

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Oil extraction in the Orinoco Belt, southeastern Venezuela. The crude extracted from this rich basin is very heavy and requires blending with diluent oil for refining—a process previously handled by U.S. company Chevron, which must now cease operations in the country. Credit: PDVSA

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 25 2025 (IPS)

Reduced to a marginal oil producer over the past decade, Venezuela has suffered another blow as United States president Donald Trump ordered punitive measures to blockade and further restrict the country’s oil exports.

Venezuelan crude will likely navigate the fringes of global oil trade and finance, flowing toward Asian markets as the government seeks to avoid financial suffocation—possibly without ruling out new negotiations with Washington."Revenues will drop significantly because PDVSA will struggle to produce, obtain diluents, and won’t have the capacity to invest in projects." — Francisco Monaldi

“Venezuela has been very hostile to the United States and the Freedoms which we espouse. Therefore, any Country that purchases Oil and/or Gas from Venezuela will be forced to pay a Tariff of 25% to the United States on any Trade they do with our Country,” Trump wrote on his media platform Truth Social on March 24.

Simultaneously, Trump revoked licenses allowing U.S. firms Chevron and Global Oil Terminals, Spain’s Repsol, France’s Maurel & Prom, India’s Reliance, and Italy’s Eni to operate in Venezuela.

The foreseeable outcome “will be a drop in oil production—possibly over 100,000 barrels per day—with lower revenues and difficulties in placing crude on the black market,” Francisco Monaldi, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute’s Center for Energy Studies, told IPS.

Venezuela, which once produced three million barrels (159 liters each) per day in the early 2000’s, has seen a decline since 2013, falling below 400,000 barrels in 2020.

Until the beginning of this century, Venezuela was a major oil producer and exporter, thanks to the vast reserves in the Maracaibo Lake basin in the west. Although underground reserves remain enormous, production has declined, and the country has lost its leading role in the global hydrocarbon market. Credit: Mdnava / Fe y Alegría

This is a stark contrast to its history as the world’s second-largest producer and top exporter a century ago, a co-founder of OPEC in 1960, and still home to the largest crude reserves—over 300 billion barrels.

The collapse of the industry and state-owned PDVSA resulted from a mix of dwindling investments, neglected maintenance, erratic management, and bad deals—all amid economic and social collapse and intense political strife.

Moreover, corruption has reached such heights that several former Energy Ministers and presidents of PDVSA have been imprisoned, while others are fugitives abroad. According to the Venezuelan chapter of Transparency International, the amounts that “evaporated” without ever reaching state coffers add up to tens of billions of dollars.

Additionally, Washington imposed escalating sanctions on Venezuelan political and military leaders, with severe effects on PDVSA’s supplies and operations, the Central Bank, and other state entities.

GDP shrank to a quarter of its early-2000s level, hyperinflation reached six digits, income-based poverty hit 90%, and eight million Venezuelans—one in four—left the country.

However, since 2022, Washington’s green light for Chevron and other foreign firms helped production recover to 760,000 barrels per day in 2023, 857,000 in 2024, and 913,000 in March 2025, according to OPEC’s secondary sources.

Chevron accounted for 25% of this output, with PDVSA handling the rest. The U.S. firm also facilitated the import of 50,000 barrels of diluent daily to blend with Venezuela’s heavy crude, In order to improve and facilitate refining.

“It is assumed PDVSA will take over Chevron’s fields, but a drop is inevitable,” Andrés Rojas, editor of Venezuelan oil journal Petroguía, told IPS.

An oil tanker docks at the Waidiao terminal in Zhejiang province, eastern China. The Asian giant is the primary destination for Venezuelan oil, and this flow may increase as Venezuela loses its U.S. market due to new sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump. Credit: Zhejiang Municipal Government

The impact 

Monaldi explains that of Venezuela’s 700,000 daily exportable barrels, half went to “licensed destinations” (mainly the United States, Europe, and India), while the rest went to China (as debt repayment) and Cuba.

Economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, head of Ecoanalítica, consulting firm, estimates Venezuela will lose over US$3 billion this year from Chevron’s withdrawal, leaving external revenues at no more than US$13 billion for its 29 million people.

Government “revenues will plummet because PDVSA will struggle to produce (due to shortages of materials and spare parts), secure diluents, and invest in projects,” Monaldi said.

The expert explains that PDVSA will have to return to the black market, using practices such as transferring crude oil at sea or in the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia to vessels different from those originally dispatched.

This way, the oil reaches its destination, usually China, labeled as being produced in Malaysia or another part of the world.

However, these distant and complicated routes have the dual effect of increasing costs—including freight and insurance—and reducing revenue, as the oil must be sold at discounts of 30% or more compared to prices on the regular market.

Meanwhile, the trade, economic, and financial shock triggered by Trump’s tariff storm this month is driving oil prices down, with current benchmarks like West Texas Intermediate (WTI) at US$63 and North Sea Brent at US$67 per barrel.

Oil transfers between tankers take place offshore or near international trade hubs, such as the Strait of Malacca in Asia. This method, though riskier and costlier, is used as a black-market mechanism to evade sanctions like those imposed by Washington on Venezuela. Credit: Verdemar

Black market challenges 

In April of this year, two oil tankers—the Bahamian-flagged Carina Voyager and the Marshall Islands-registered Dubai Attraction—loaded 500,000 and 350,000 barrels of crude, respectively, at Venezuelan terminals. The oil was initially meant to be transported by Chevron to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

However, the vessels had to turn around and return to Venezuelan ports after state-run PDVSA realized it would not be able to collect payment for the shipments due to Washington’s sanctions. The cargoes will now be diverted to Venezuela’s top Asian client: China.

“PDVSA has done this since 2019 with Russian and Iranian support, using two or three intermediaries to deliver the loads,” Rojas noted.

In addition to the higher costs stemming from intermediaries, longer distances, and increased risks, Rojas points out that Venezuelan crude is heavier than benchmark Brent and WTI oils, meaning its price per barrel is roughly US$10 lower.

Monaldi notes that even if China disregards Washington’s threat to hike tariffs on Venezuelan oil imports—or Malaysia, where much of this black-market trade flows—risk premiums will rise, and Venezuela will bear the brunt by receiving insufficient diluents for its heavy crudes.

The Carina Voyager, one of the Bahamian-flagged tankers chartered by Chevron in April to transport Venezuelan crude to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast, had to turn around and return its cargo. PDVSA made the decision after realizing payment would be impossible due to Trump’s sanctions. Credit: Sun Enterprises

“The situation is extremely complicated, and this will likely push the Venezuelan economy—which had been experiencing modest growth in recent years (2.6% in 2023 and 5.0% in 2024, according to the Venezuelan Finance Observatory)—back into recession, possibly as early as 2025,” the expert warns.

Monaldi adds that the recession will come alongside a sharp depreciation of the bolívar against the dollar (already over 50% since January) and, consequently, higher inflation, which Ecoanalítica estimates could reach 189% this year.

In this new game, even American oil importers lose out—they had benefited from cheaper Venezuelan crude, which allowed them to free up United States oil volumes for higher-priced exports to third countries, Rojas noted.

He also points out that Chevron’s withdrawal “hurts communities like Soledad” (a town of 35,000 in southeastern Venezuela), where a health center relied on support from the corporation as part of its social responsibility program.

And, as a final blow to Venezuela’s setbacks, two South American neighbors—once net importers of its oil—have now joined the thriving club of exporters welcomed by Washington: Brazil, which produces 3.4 million barrels per day, and Guyana, now pumping 650,000 barrels daily.

Venezuela's legislative National Assembly approves the Bolivar law to punish with unprecedented severity those who support or facilitate punitive measures against the country. Credit: AN

By Jorge Pastrán
WASHINGTON, Dec 18 2024 (IPS)

In Venezuela you can no longer say in public that the economic sanctions applied by the United States and other countries are appropriate, or even be suspected of considering any of the authorities illegitimate, because you can be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison and lose all your assets.

In late November, the ruling National Assembly passed the Simon Bolivar Organic Law (of superior rank) against the imperialist blockade and in defence of the Republic, the latest in a regulatory padlock closing civic space, according to human rights organisations.“We see a process of authoritarian learning. When we look at democratic setbacks, we see things that are repeated as patterns, such as the closure of civic space, of civil organisations, of journalism, of democratic political parties”: Carolina Jiménez Sandoval.

The powers of the Venezuelan state thus responded to United States’ and the European Union’s sanctions, and to the protests and denunciations of opponents and American and European governments, to the effect that a gigantic fraud was committed in the presidential election of 28 July this year.

The ruling Nicolás Maduro was proclaimed by the electoral and judicial powers as re-elected president for a third six-year term beginning on 10 January 2025, even though the opposition claims, by showing voting records, that it was their candidate Edmundo González who won, with at least 67% of the vote.

Speaking to IPS, several human rights defenders agreed that the country is following the example of Nicaragua, where laws and measures are driving hundreds of opponents into prison and exile, stripping them of their nationality and property, and suppressing critical voices by shutting down thousands of civil, religious and educational organisations.

“A red line has been crossed and the Nicaraguan path has been taken. Arbitrariness has been put in writing, in black and white, the repressive reality of the Venezuelan state, something even the military despots of the past did not do,” said lawyer Alí Daniels, director of the organisation Acceso a la Justicia, from Caracas.

The law adopted its long name as an indignant response to the US Bolivar Act, an acronym for Banning Operations and Leases with the Illegitimate Venezuelan Authoritarian Regime, designed to block most of that country’s business dealings with Venezuela.

The president of the non-governmental Washington Office on Latin America (Wola), Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, observed that “the closer we get to 10 January, the day when whoever won the 28 July election must be sworn in, we see more and more laws meant to stifling civic space.”

Other laws along these lines include: one to punish behaviour or messages deemed to incite hatred; another “against fascism, neo-fascism and similar expressions”; a reform to promptly elect 30,000 justices of the peace; and a law to control non-governmental organisations.

Demonstration in Caracas demanding respect for human rights. Credit: Civilis

Mere suspicion is enough

The Venezuelan Bolivar act considers that sanctions and other restrictive measures against the country “constitute a crime against humanity”, and lists conduct and actions that put the nation and its population at risk.

These include promoting, requesting or supporting punitive measures by foreign states or corporations, and “disregarding the public powers legitimately established in the Republic, their acts or their authorities.”

Those who have at any time “promoted, instigated, requested, invoked, favoured, supported or participated in the adoption or execution of measures” deemed harmful to the population or the authorities, will be barred from running for elected office for up to 60 years.

Any person who “promotes, instigates, solicits, invokes, favours, facilitates, supports or participates in the adoption or execution of unilateral coercive measures” against the population or the powers in Venezuela will be punished with 25 to 30 years in prison and fines equivalent to between US$100,000 and one million.

In the case of media and digital platforms, the punishment will be a heavy fine and the closure or denial of permits to operate.

The law highlights the creation of “a register that will include the identification of natural and legal persons, national or foreign, with respect to whom there is good reason to consider that they are involved in any of the actions contrary to the values and inalienable rights of the state.”

This registry is created to “impose restrictive, temporary economic measures of an administrative nature, aimed at mitigating the damage that their actions cause against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its population.”

Daniels tells IPS that “this means that a mere suspicion on the part of an official, with good reason to believe that a sanction is supported, is sufficient for a preventive freezing of a person’s assets, prohibiting them from buying, selling or acting in a money-making business.”

“Without prior trial, by an official’s decision, without knowing where to appeal against the entry in that register, the person is stripped of means of livelihood. Civil death returns,” he added.

Archive image of a national meeting of human rights defenders. Credit: Civicus

Other laws

The “anti-hate law” – without defining what is meant by it – has since 2018 prosecuted protesters, journalists, firefighters, political activists and human rights defenders on charges of directing messages inciting hatred towards the authorities.

This year, the state endowed itself with a law to punish fascism and similar expressions, a broad arc because it considers that “racism, chauvinism, classism, moral conservatism, neoliberalism and misogyny are common features of this stance.”

It has also reformed the justice of the peace law to promote the popular election of 30,000 local judges, under criticism from human rights organisations that see the process as a mechanism for the control of communities by pro-government activists and the promotion of informing on neighbours.

And, while the Bolivar act was being passed, the law on the control of NGOs and similar organisations was published, which NGOs have labelled an “anti-society law”, as it contains provisions that easily nullify their capacity for action and their very existence.

The law establishes a new registry with some 30 requirements, which are difficult for NGOs to meet, but they can only operate if authorised by the government, which can suspend them from operating or sanction them with fines in amounts that in practice are confiscatory.

“I think the application of the Bolívar law is going to be very discretionary, and if Maduro is sworn in again on Jan. 10, civic space will be almost completely closed and the social and democratic leadership will have to work underground,” sociologist Rafael Uzcátegui, director of the Venezuelan Laboratorio de Paz, which operates in Caracas, told IPS.

The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, have taken measures against dissent that are models of authoritarianism in the region. Human rights activists believe that in countries such as Venezuela and El Salvador their strategies and norms are being replicated by those who seek to remain in power indefinitely. Credit: Presidency of Nicaragua

The Nicaraguan path

Daniels also argues that with the Bolívar law, the government “is going back 160 years, when the Venezuelan Constitution after the Federal War (1859-1863) abolished the death penalty and life sentences. A punishment that lasts 60 years in practice is in perpetuity, exceeding the average life expectancy of an adult in Venezuela.”

Along with this, “although without going to the Nicaraguan extreme of stripping the alleged culprits of their nationality, punishments are imposed that can turn people into civilian zombies, driven into exile. As in Nicaragua”.

For Jiménez Sandoval “there are similarities with Nicaragua, a harsh and consolidated case. It has cancelled the legal personality of more than 3,000 organisations, including humanitarian entities, national and international human rights organisations and universities, through the application of very strict laws.”

“In these cases… we see a process of authoritarian learning. When we look at democratic setbacks, we see things that are repeated as patterns, such as the closure of civic space, of civil organisations, of journalism, of democratic political parties,” she told IPS.

To achieve this, “they use different strategies, such as co-opting legislatures to make laws that allow them to imprison and silence those who think differently, to avoid any kind of criticism, because, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal of authoritarianism is to remain in power indefinitely”, concluded Jiménez Sandoval.

Alejandro Álvarez says the Latin American region is dangerous for environmental defenders. Credit: Margaret López/IPS

By Margaret López
CARACAS, May 30 2024 (IPS)

Venezuela is one of the few countries outside the Escazú Agreement, a treaty in Latin America and the Caribbean ratified by 16 member countries that guarantees access to environmental information, public participation in environmental decisions, and environmental justice.

“The failure to sign the Escazú Agreement is a symptom of this general situation of lack of environmental rule of law in the country,” said Erick Camargo, researcher of the Observatory of Political Ecology, in an interview with IPS.

For the past seven years, the Observatory of Political Ecology has been part of a group asking the Venezuelan State to embrace this international treaty. The petition of civil organizations aims to ensure that the environment and threats such as illegal mining, deforestation, or the murder of indigenous defenders are not forgotten, amid a complex humanitarian emergency that this Caribbean country is experiencing.

What is the Escazú Agreement?

It is the first treaty on environment and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its full name is Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. Although it is better known by the name of the place where it was signed on March 4, 2018: Escazú, Costa Rica.

The Escazú Agreement ratifies that all Latin Americans have the right to know if the water they receive in their homes is potable, if the air they breathe daily is safe for their health, or if a community should have a veto over companies for activities such as mining, oil exploitation, or tourism in biodiverse areas.

Its 26 articles entered into force in 2021. This treaty is also a recognition of the role played by Latin American environmental defenders in the preservation of nature and the problem of violence experienced by these defenders in the region.

“Latin America is the most dangerous area in the world to defend environmental human rights. These are not only people who work for environmental organizations, but also environmental journalists and people from indigenous communities who defend the territory and habitat where they live”, explained Alejandro Alvarez, biologist and coordinator of the non-governmental organization Clima 21, in an interview with IPS.

Statistics compiled by Global Witness, an independent organization that monitors deaths in defense of the environment, speak of 1,335 environmental defenders murdered in Latin America between 2012 and 2022. That is, 70 percent of all killings of environmental defenders in that decade. In the Venezuelan case, 21 people were killed defending nature in the same period, most of them belonging to Indigenous communities.

For researcher Liliana Buitrago of the Observatory of Political Ecology, the central point of this treaty is that it helps to “make visible a fundamental narrative in the climate crisis (…) because environmental defenders are decisive actors to protect, fight, and stop environmental and ecological collapse.”

What benefits do Venezuela bring to this agreement?

As with other international environmental bodies, the Escazú Agreement provides for a Conference of the Parties (COP) to be held every year. At COP 3, its most recent edition held in Santiago, Chile, the Regional Action Plan on environmental human rights defenders was approved.

The implementation of this special plan for environmental defenders will take six years. This is the first multilateral agreement that requires States to ensure that the defense of the environment can take place in freedom and its implementation will strengthen the protection of environmental defenders in the Latin American region. This environmental protection plan is part of what Venezuelan organizations want to obtain with the country’s adhesion to this agreement.

“Venezuela has quite robust environmental legislation for the protection of its natural areas or its defenders, but it is neither complied with nor known. The importance in the Venezuelan case is that the Escazú Agreement would give us an international tool to put pressure on our state,” said Camargo.

If Venezuela were to adopt the Escazú Agreement in the coming year, this would give an international legal instrument to organized groups to demand greater security for indigenous peoples defending their territories in the Venezuelan Amazon. This is an area that is now threatened with deforestation for the establishment of new illegal mining sites for the extraction of gold, according to the independent organization SOS Orinoco.

Another benefit would be the establishment of an updated environmental information system. Such a public and accessible environmental system should include, for example, key data on the impacts of climate change in the country as well as a list of the most polluted areas, as established in Article 6 of the Escazú Agreement.

Transparency in the environmental field, not in vain, is one of the most common requests from Venezuelan organizations such as Clima 21, the Venezuelan Society of Ecology, the Observatory of Political Ecology, and Espacio Publico.

“There is no guarantee that the Venezuelan state will comply with environmental commitments. Many international agreements were signed and the standards have not been met, but their signature is already a step. The signing of the Escazú Agreement would show a certain willingness to be transparent in environmental management and, therefore, it would be good to sign it,” explained Carlos Correa, executive director of Espacio Público, in an interview with IPS.

Now, the Venezuelan government has 10 months ahead of it to evaluate its position and join the next COP of the Escazú Agreement as another of the countries in the region that are truly committed to the defense of nature amid the climate crisis.

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Excerpt:

Maracaibo, next to the lake of the same name and the capital of Zulia, one of the regions hardest hit by the electricity crisis in Venezuela, is incubating a citizen initiative so that homes could be equipped with solar panels. Its example has spread to other regions of the country. CREDIT: Uria

By Humberto Márquez
MARACAIBO, Venezuela , Mar 25 2024 (IPS)

Sweating profusely, unable to sleep because of the heat, fed up with years of blackouts several times a day, many residents of Venezuela’s torrid northwest want to cover the roofs and balconies of their homes with solar panels, and are asking the government to import them massively and cheaply from China.

“It is a proposal to break out of the quagmire immediately, to close the gap between supply and demand for electricity, 60 percent of which in Venezuela goes to residential consumption,” engineer Lenin Cardozo, one of the main promoters of the Zulia Solar and Venezuela Solar citizen initiatives, told IPS."The solution to the electricity problem no longer lies in thermal plants, which in Venezuela we continue to repair while they are being closed down in other parts of the world, but in new sources and technologies, such as solar power." -- Lenin Cardozo

The northwestern state of Zulia, of which Maracaibo is the capital, produced Venezuela’s great oil wealth throughout the 20th century but has become, along with the neighboring Andes region, the Cinderella of the grid that supplies electricity, generated mainly in the distant southeast of the country, bordering Brazil.

Zulia Solar emerged last year as an association to foment solutions to the lack of electricity suffered by millions of inhabitants of the region. And so far in 2024, replicas have emerged in twenty other states, with aspirations of becoming a national movement: Venezuela Solar.

Its president, lawyer Vileana Meleán, said that “the novelty is that this time the citizens are organized and we are coordinating among ourselves to present the government with this solution that arises from civil society, with a three-point proposal.”

The first point is for the government to massively import solar panels from China, the world’s leading producer – with which Caracas has developed strong commercial and political ties – in order to obtain advantageous prices, and for it to organize a distribution system that makes them affordable to households interested in installing them.

The second is that, in order to lower prices, panels, batteries and other components of solar energy systems should be made exempt from various taxes, such as customs duties and the value added tax.

And the third point calls for the creation of a public and private financing policy, with soft loans, so that families of modest means can purchase the panels and other materials required for the new installation.

Power outages, in the form of sudden blackouts, surprise sectors of the cities of western Venezuela, such as the torrid city of Maracaibo. Local residents are fed up with suffering heat without the possibility of air conditioning or fans, the spoilage of food and damage to their household appliances. CREDIT: Transparencia Venezuela

The reason for the desperation

“When the electricity cuts off, the water goes out, the pumps don’t work. The food in the refrigerator spoils. During the day it is 40 or 42 degrees Celsius, but the thermal sensation reaches 47 degrees,” teacher Rita Zarate told IPS one afternoon in the hallway of her home in the working-class La Pomona neighborhood of Maracaibo.

In the last 24 hours the electricity had been cut three times, lasting between three and four hours each time.

For her family – mother, siblings, children, nieces and nephews – “the worst thing is not being able to sleep when the blackouts happen at night and in the early morning hours. In the bedroom, the heat is unbearable; outside, there are clouds of mosquitoes,” which swarm people in the house when the air conditioning or electric fans are turned off.

A sleepless night, trying to sleep when a breeze blows in the courtyard, keeping the elderly and little ones hydrated, and trying to get transportation to work at daybreak, which might not be available because the blackouts paralyze the fuel pumps and the owners of private vehicles spend hours waiting for the power to come back on so they can fill their tanks.

Zárate said that “it is the same for the children at school: classes two or three days a week, half a day, if they can run the fans. Or in the playground. Sometimes their parents leave them at home, other times the heat gets so bad that we have to send them back.”

Internet to study or to do work, to get administrative procedures done in offices, to operate ATMs in banks, to walk at night under street lights? These are options that are vanishing for those who live on the shores of Lake Maracaibo.

“In the last century Maracaibo was jokingly called ‘the coldest city in Venezuela’ because there was air conditioning everywhere. That’s not true anymore, they only work off and on now,” Luis Ramírez, director of the graduate program in quality systems at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab), based in Caracas, told IPS.

He said that many homes in Zulia and the other 22 states outside Caracas have small gasoline-powered generators, but due to the scarcity of fuel – paradoxically, in the country that boasts the largest oil reserves on the planet – they are used less and less.

Zárate remains hopeful that change will come. But with regard to solar panels, he said that “I’ve heard about them, but it sounds like a distant solution,” and added that “one thing is for sure: with our income (every adult in his family earns less than 60 dollars a month) we won’t be able to afford them.”

Workers in a solar panel factory in China, by far the world’s largest producer. The Zulia and Venezuela Solar associations are asking the government to use its political and commercial ties with Beijing to negotiate a massive import of solar panels, and to make them affordable by eliminating taxes and granting soft loans. CREDIT: Xataka

Problems and hopes

Meleán proposed to her supporters in Zulia Solar and Venezuela Solar “to hold on now more tightly to the hope” that the acquisition and installation of solar panels will become widespread, based on a speech by President Nicolás Maduro, who is seeking reelection on Jul. 28 to a third six-year term.

At a Mar. 13 campaign rally, Maduro said that “the social movements have proposed a 2025-2030 plan for solar energy to reach the communal councils, the homes, the urban developments. It is one of the great solutions for the 21st century.”

At the end of the 20th century, Venezuela had a nominal installed generation capacity of 34,000 megawatt hours (MWh), including 18,000 MWh in thermal plants and 16,000 MWh in hydroelectric plants, and the peak demand of 18,000 MWh was reached in 1982.

From that year on, economic crises followed one after the other, reducing demand and the operability of the facilities. In the second decade of the 21st century, the country experienced a recession that cut GDP by four-fifths, while power plants and grids deteriorated until they generated no more than 10,000 MWh.

Experts put current demand at about 12,000 MWh, and the gap between supply and demand has led to energy rationing based on outages that affect almost the entire country – with the exception of Caracas – but especially the west, the region most distant from the southeastern Guri hydroelectric power plant, which generates two-thirds of the electricity consumed.

Zulia is barely surviving on what it receives from the Guri power plant and a dozen thermal power plants, which have deteriorated after being designed to be gas-fired and instead use diesel, contributing to their inefficiency and decline.

Cardozo said “the solution to the electricity problem no longer lies in thermal plants, which in Venezuela we continue to repair while they are being closed down in other parts of the world, but in new sources and technologies, such as solar power.”

Two thirds of Venezuela’s electricity depends on the Guri hydroelectric power plant in the southeast of the country. The distance and the poor state of the transmission and distribution networks result in supply failures in the western part of the country, fueling the search for alternatives such as solar panels in homes. CREDIT: Corpoelec

Venezuela “needs to incorporate technologies such as solar power, as an alternative to cover the gap between supply and demand in the short term, and with decentralized initiatives until large projects can move forward,” he said.

He added that a solar panel that costs 30 or 50 dollars in China, for example, depending on its capacity, sells for 10 times that in Venezuela, due to the costs and taxes along the supply chain.

Hence Venezuela Solar’s proposal for the government to intervene with massive purchases from its giant Asian partner, to abolish the taxes on their import and commercialization, and to facilitate financing for households.

Cardozo stressed that constant technological advances will make it possible not only to reduce the cost but also the size and complexity of domestic solar installations.

He estimated that a household could produce enough power for essential consumption with two 500-watt panels, and could run an air conditioner with four more, at a cost of about 1,000 dollars.

That would be the result if the government fully embraces Venezuela Solar’s proposals. The Zulia Solar group is preparing a pilot test in Maracaibo, with 400 houses that would have panels on their roofs and 100 apartments that would have panels on their balconies.

Solar panels supply energy to a health center in El Cruce, a remote village in the state of Zulia, in the far western part of the country, bordering Colombia. In the recent past, small hybrid wind and solar systems have been installed in isolated communities, but most have been lost due to lack of maintenance. CREDIT: ICRC

Not everything is positive

Representatives of companies that in the last three years have installed solar panels in homes and businesses in Venezuelan cities estimate costs of 4,000 dollars or more for an installation that meets the basic needs of a home.

In this country of 29 million inhabitants, the average salary is around 130 dollars per month, according to consulting firms. Measured by income level, 82 percent of households live in poverty and more than 50 percent in critical poverty, according to the Ucab Living Conditions Survey, released this month.

Ramírez pointed out that Maracaibo was not only the artificially coldest city in the country, but also the one with the highest electricity consumption per person, “and that is why aiming at a mass solution with solar panels on roofs and balconies requires a kind of prior census to estimate the real amount of equipment needed.”

Another expert, Alejandro López-González, told IPS that “Venezuela’s electricity problem will not be solved with solar panels on the roofs of homes in its big cities. It is not possible, because of our climate, which demands a high level of air conditioning.”

“If we turn to a complementary development of renewable energies, the ideal would be large solar and wind farms, because they provide higher energy intensity, for a greater capacity of use, and with a moderately centralized distribution system,” said López-González.

He argued that while the installation of panels in homes also complements local or regional grids, it falls short of solving the electricity crisis.

On the other hand, he noted that the assembly of solar panels began 14 years ago in Venezuela, in a state-owned plant that has worked intermittently but which could be reopened, while other factories could be built, if an agreement is reached with China for production and not only for imports.

In his book “Renewable Energíes in Venezuela. Experiences and lessons for a sustainable future”, López-González compares the country’s solar and wind potential.

This country’s solar power potential is among the highest in Latin America, with an average of 5.35 kilowatt hours per square meter per day (5.35 kWh/m2), close to the highest, in Chile (5.75) and Bolivia (5.42), according to studies by the Venezuelan University of Los Andes, based in the western Andean state of Mérida.

With respect to wind energy, in the northwest of the country alone, the potential reaches 12,000 MWh – similar to the capacity of Guri -, favored by trade winds with high levels of constancy, direction and speed, up to eight meters per second.

Venezuela also has the potential to develop solar farms and wind farms on its Caribbean islands and northeastern mainland coast to add thousands of MWh, which could limit thermal plants to a complementary status.

Between 10 and 15 years ago, the government installed up to 50 MWh of wind power generation and more than 2,000 small hybrid systems – solar and wind – through the “Sembrando luz” program, mainly in remote indigenous and peasant communities, which has been abandoned for the past decade.

Currently there are some isolated installations in several cities – mainly businesses – and small hybrid systems on livestock farms or large plantations, to ensure the refrigeration of products or to operate water wells.

Against this backdrop, with constant blackouts and as the country heads towards a new presidential election on Jul. 28, Venezuela and Zulia Solar activists are betting that their proposals will prosper.

“The country is beginning to rethink other ways to address its electricity security problem. The value and strategic use of solar energy has been incorporated into the public agenda as an immediate solution to overcome the current electricity crisis,” said Cardozo.

An armed forces helicopter flies over the area of La Corona, which will be covered by a plastic blanket, on the Humboldt Peak in the Andes. It is the last glacier in Venezuela and will possibly disappear in less than two years. CREDIT: Harrison Ruiz / Minec

By Humberto Márquez
MÉRIDA, Venezuela, Mar 4 2024 (IPS)

Venezuela has undertaken the task of covering the remains of its last glacier, La Corona, on Humboldt Peak at 4,900 meters above sea level in the Andes mountains in the southwest of the country, with plastic “blankets” to slow the inevitable end of this icy patch of its mountain landscape and source of legends.

“We are not going to change the rhythm of nature, but we’re trying to curb the loss of the strip of glacier that we have left, for research and contributions that can be useful for other Andean countries where glaciers are also receding,” Toro Belisario, director of the Ministry of Ecosocialism (Minec) in the southwestern Andean state of Mérida, told IPS."A couple of dying hectares is all that remains of the nearly 1,000 hectares of glaciers that Venezuela had in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida at the beginning of the 20th century. They are the first victims of global warming." -- Julio César Centeno

The 1.8-hectare remains of the glacier will be covered with 80-meter-long polypropylene geotextile “blankets” brought from Italy in 35 rolls weighing 80 kilos each, which will be lifted by armed forces helicopters to the camp on the Humboldt Peak.

Some academics are opposed to the project, claiming that it has not been properly studied and that it is a vain effort to resist climate change and poses environmental risks for mountain species and rural and urban communities that could be polluted by plastic waste.

Belisario acknowledged that at the rate at which the glacier is retreating, one hectare per year, it has little life left, under the burden of climate change and the impact of the El Niño weather phenomenon blowing warm winds over the Pacific Ocean that alter the temperature in the region.

On the other hand, he defended the usefulness of the data that the initiative and its monitoring can provide month after month, for Venezuela and neighbors such as Peru, where numerous communities depend on glaciers as a source of water.

Perpetual snow disappeared decades ago from Bolívar Peak, Venezuela’s highest mountain at 4978 meters above sea level. Other glaciers in the Venezuelan Andes also melted during the 20th century. CREDIT: JC Centeno Chair

Environmental expert Julio César Centeno, a professor at the University of the Andes (ULA) in Mérida, told IPS that “the most that can be expected from the initiative is to prolong for a couple more years the final ordeal of the tiny, dying portion of the glacier that remains.”

Centeno and other ULA researchers warned in a press release that “it could cause environmental and ecological damage to the glacier and surrounding areas of the Andes highlands, as well as potentially affecting neighboring populations, due to air and water pollution from micro and nano plastics.”

The criticism asserts that Minec has failed to comply with current legislation, in terms of broad and informed consultation with local communities, presentation of an environmental impact study available to the public, and working together with concerned institutions, such as the university.

A century of retreat

“A couple of dying hectares is all that remains of the nearly 1,000 hectares of glaciers that Venezuela had in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida at the beginning of the 20th century. They are the first victims of global warming,” Centeno said.

This mountain range is in the center of the Venezuelan Andes – a 450 kilometer mountainous strip – with “perpetual snow” on its high peaks, Bolivar – 4978 meters above sea level, the highest in the country – La Concha, Toro, Humboldt and Bonpland.

La Corona glacier, between the Humboldt and Bonpland peaks, once covered 400 hectares, and even hosted a national ski championship. It has lost more than 99 percent of its original size, largely due to global warming. CREDIT: JC Centeno Chair

All of them have shrunk over the years, but in 1956 a national ski championship was held in the mountains. However, at the end of the last century only the La Corona glacier remained, on the Humboldt Peak, which with 400 hectares had also covered part of the Bonpland mountain, before losing 99.7 percent of its original extension.

Centeno explained that in countries such as Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, glaciers are being covered with plastic blankets to reflect solar radiation and reduce energy absorption, but only during the summer months and especially in ski resorts. The costs are charged to the users.

There are also cases in Chile, China and Russia, and in most cases the glaciers to be covered are not only in latitudes far from the tropics but at lower altitudes than in Mérida, with more exposure to wind, sun and rain, which provide harsher conditions for the geotextile coverings.

This led ULA experts to warn of greater risks of deterioration of the tarps, and ruptures or tears leading to the spread of micro and nano plastics that the air and water would carry to agricultural and urban communities, such as the city of Mérida at the foot of the Sierra, with a population of around 300,000 people.

View of the city of Mérida, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. For centuries the regional capital has had an intense mythical, utilitarian and artistic link with its mountains. CREDIT: Espasa Mérida

Five white eagles

Since its foundation in 1558, the city has had a close relationship with its snow-capped mountains, ranging from enraptured contemplation to the utilitarian source of income provided by the highest cable car in the world, reaching from the city to 4765 meters above sea level in the Sierra.

In literature, the best-known reference is “The Five White Eagles”, which dates back to 1895, in which the humanist Tulio Febres Cordero (1860-1938) wrote down a legend of the Mirripuyes Indians, one of the groups that lived in the area when the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century.

The legend has it that five huge white eagles with silver wings flew over the mountains and Caribay, the first woman, daughter of the sun and the moon, fell in love with them and wanted the birds’ feathers to adorn her head.

Caribay ran along the ridges chasing the shadows of the birds but, when she was about to reach them, the eagles dug their talons into the cliffs and turned to stone, forming the five masses of ice that crowned the Sierra.

Since then, according to the legend, the occasional snowfalls are simply the awakening of the eagles, and the whistling of the wind in the highlands is an echo of the sad, monotonous song of Caribay as she fails to reach her silver trophy.

The governor of the state of Mérida, Jehyson Guzmán (R) receives the rolls of polystyrene, purchased in Italy, with which the La Corona glacier will be partially covered. Environmental academics are alert to the risk of eventual deterioration becoming a source of plastic pollution. CREDIT: Harrison Ruiz / Minec

Political presence

In justifying the plastic blanket project, Belisario said that “because of what this legend represents for the cosmovision of people from Mérida, we must not allow the glacier to disappear without contributing what we can to its study, and to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change.”

Centeno lamented that the eagles “no longer flap their wings, and their feathers no longer glitter. We all believed that because of their grandeur they were indestructible. They were swallowed by human indifference.”

In conversation with IPS, Ana Medina, a high school teacher in Mérida, and Yajaira Méndez, a shopkeeper in the municipal market, agreed that at home young people “must have once studied the legend of the white eagles” but that they are hardly aware of the end of the glacier.

“The people of Mérida love their mountains but have no information, and the glacier covering is not a topic that is talked about on a daily basis,” Euro Lobo, a veteran journalist in the city, told IPS.

Centeno said there may be political interest, in this year in which the country will hold a presidential election and it is expected that the current President Nicolás Maduro will seek reelection for a third six-year term.

“Perhaps the government wants to show that it is interested in saving as much as possible of the jewel that represents the last glacier for the city and the country,” said Centeno.

This monument to the Five White Eagles is on the outskirts of the city of Mérida. A legend written down in the late 19th century by writer Tulio Febres Cordero is a cultural icon. CREDIT: Samuel Hurtado / IAM Venezuela

Operation Protection

The governor of the state of Mérida, Jehyson Guzmán, of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and General Ruben Belzares, the area’s military chief, announced on Feb. 21 that the new phase of the “Operation Protection of the Humboldt Peak Glacier” began.

“This is about rescuing the last glacier in Venezuela, the last stretch of ice that nature donated in its landscapes to the Mérida territory. We are involved in the struggle to rescue, preserve and maintain it as far as possible,” said Belzares.

He pointed out that a helicopter has been prepared to transport material and equipment, and reconnaissance flights have been carried out near the summit.

Guzmán said that the first camp has been set up and its 26 members are ready to begin work as soon as weather conditions permit, since there was unusual snowfall for the end of February.

Since December the region has had high temperatures, “generating higher pressure on the glacier. That is why the deployment is important, because at this accelerated rate of heat at the end of the year we may not have any glacier left,” said Guzmán.

He reported that in the Sierra Nevada all types of burning and logging have been prohibited, as well as climbing with spiked shoes.

He also specified that the geotextile blankets will not be placed directly on the entire glacier, but in the surrounding areas where the ice sheet is weakening, where melting has been the most accelerated.

The final flapping of the wings of the last of the eagles will occur under a polystyrene blanket.

Suicide rates doubled in Venezuela during the harshest years of its humanitarian crisis. Males between the ages of 30 and 50, a productive age when it is very hard to be left without employment and income, are a group particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted violence. CREDIT: Ihpi

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Nov 28 2023 (IPS)

In the wee hours of one morning in early November, Ernesto, 50, swallowed several glasses of a cocktail of drugs and alcohol in the apartment where he lived alone in the Venezuelan capital, ending a life tormented by declining health and lack of resources to cope as he would have liked.

In the last message to his relatives, which they showed to IPS, he wrote that “I can’t stand what’s happening to my eyes, I can’t afford an ophthalmologist, my molars are falling out, it hurts to eat, I can’t afford a dentist after years of being able to pay my expenses, now my dreams, plans, goals are disappearing…”"The suicide rate fluctuates at the pace of the complex humanitarian emergency," said Paez, because "as the macro economy deteriorates, so does the family's ability to access food, services, recreation and medicine. This leads to mental disorders associated with suicidal behavior." -- Gustavo Páez

Years ago Ernesto, a fictitious name at the request of his family, was a successful salesman in various fields, a breadwinner for family members, a supporter of causes he found just. In his last note, he scribbled rather than wrote: “I did what I could, for my family and my country, but I will not continue being dead in life.”

The cascade of crises that have placed Venezuela in a complex humanitarian emergency have given rise to many complicated cases like Ernesto’s, reflected in an increase in suicides, especially in the sectors most vulnerable to lack of resources and to uncertainty and hopelessness.

The suicide rate “doubled between 2018 and 2022 compared to 2015, and it is very likely that the complex humanitarian emergency has been a determining factor in the increase,” demographer Gustavo Páez, of the non-governmental Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), told IPS.

This country of just over 28 million people went from a rate of 3.8 suicides per 100,000 people to 9.3 in 2018, with slight declines to 8.2 in 2019 and 7.7 in 2022, according to the OVV.

The annual average number of cases registered in the last four years is 2,260.

Rossana García Mujica, a clinical psychologist and professor at the public Central University of Venezuela, told IPS that these rates, although lower than the world average of 10.5 per 100,000 inhabitants and low in relation to other countries in the region, may nevertheless conceal underreporting.

The expert pointed out that “added to our complex humanitarian crisis, the last official yearbook (on the issue) came out in 2014,” and said that the decrease in the rate “could be due to the apparent economic improvement, but 2023 has been a difficult year and most probably these figures will not remain steady.”

A man carries a few items in his market bag in Caracas. The situation of poverty, of being unemployed and without the possibility of bringing home enough food and other products is recognized as a determining cause of crises leading to suicide. CREDIT: Provea

Humanitarian emergency

The HumVenezuela platform, made up of dozens of civil society organizations, says the crisis in the country classifies as a complex humanitarian emergency due to the combined erosion of the economic, institutional and social structures that guarantee the life, security, liberties and well-being of the population.

Starting in 2013 Venezuela suffered eight consecutive years of deep recession that cost four-fifths of its GDP, more than two years of hyperinflation, and collapsed local currency and wages, health and basic services in much of the country.

The multidimensional crisis also triggered the migration of more than seven million Venezuelans, according to United Nations figures.

In 2021 and 2022 there was a slight recovery in the economy, especially in consumption, partly due to the influx of remittances from hundreds of thousands of migrants, which came to a standstill this year.

The suicide rate “fluctuates at the pace of the complex humanitarian emergency,” said Paez, because “as the macro economy deteriorates, so does the family’s ability to access food, services, recreation and medicine. This leads to mental disorders associated with suicidal behavior.”

R. was an impoverished young woman who recorded a video that she posted on the social networks. She lived in the interior of the country, coming every month to Caracas to seek chemotherapy treatment in medicine banks provided by the government. She said that the last time, like other times, “they sent me from one end of the city to the other.”

“They were providing chemo until three in the afternoon. I arrived 15 minutes late. They refused to give it to me. I went to sleep at a relative’s house. I climbed about 200 steps (the steep hills in Caracas are crowded with poor neighborhoods). I’m so tired, my legs hurt, I give up, I don’t want to fight anymore,” she said in a quiet voice.

Paez said that another reason that may influence frustration and depression leading to self-harming behaviors is the grief in families due to migration, associated with the humanitarian emergency and impacting millions of families.

Clinical psychologists observe an increase in anxiety and depression disorders associated with suicidal behavior in adults. Among young people, self-injury and eating disorders are frequent. CREDIT: The Conversation

Ages and networks

In Venezuela “the economic issue, for those over 30 and especially for men between 40 and 50, is a determining factor,” psychologist Yorelis Acosta, who works with groups and individuals vulnerable to depression and fear, told IPS.

Acosta, who also teaches at UCV, said that “self-harm or the decision to take one’s life is closely related to ‘I don’t have a job’, ‘I’m out of work’, or ‘I have a disease and I can’t afford my treatment’.”

“During economic crises, suicides go up,” she said.

García Mujica said that “when we stop to look at which are our most vulnerable groups, men between 30 and 64 years old and young people between 15 and 24 lead the way.”

“In my practice I have observed a subjective increase in anxiety disorders and depression in adults, both closely associated with suicide and self-injury in young people, along with eating disorders,” said García Mujica.

Along with suicide, “self-harm is a way of coping with emotional pain, sadness, anger and stress that could have to do with intolerance of frustration and the immediacy associated with social networks,” said the expert.

“In my opinion, apart from our complex humanitarian crisis, we do not escape the problems also inherent to globalization and we have a very severe problem at the family level of face-to-face communication,” she added.

In this regard, she said that “it seems that family life takes place more on the phone than live, leaving the field open for adolescents to be nourished more by social networks than by real interactions.”

Between 2019 and 2022, of the cases of suicides reported in the media, 81 percent involved men and 19 percent women, according to the OVV; between 50 and 57 percent were adults between 30 and 64 years of age.

Teen suicide, meanwhile, has increased: there were 20 cases in 2020, 34 in 2021 and 49 in 2022. And 17 of the victims were under the age of 12.

View of an elevated viaduct (bridge) linking two parts of the Andean state of Merida. Authorities protect its sides with metal nets, to prevent it from being used by people to commit suicide, a phenomenon in which this mountainous region stands out since the beginning of the century. CREDIT: Government of Merida

Suicide in the mountains

One particularity is that Mérida, one of Venezuela’s 23 states, located in the Andes highlands in the southwest of the country, which has abundant agriculture and is home to some 900,000 people, has had the highest suicide rates for 20 years, reaching a peak of 22 per 100,000 in 2018.

“One of the reasons may be the character of the Merideños, especially in rural areas. They are introverted, quiet Andean people, who have a hard time letting things out, they bottle up a lot of negative feelings and thoughts or family conflicts,” said Paez.

Paez, coordinator of the OVV in Merida, also mentioned as a probable cause the widespread consumption of alcohol, and “in this state specialized in agriculture, the easy access to agrochemicals, often used to commit suicide.”

In the country 86 percent of the suicides registered last year by the OVV were carried out by hanging, poisoning or shooting.

Mérida continues to have the highest rate, 8.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by the Capital District (west of Caracas) with 7.6, and Táchira, another Andean state, with 6.9.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are at least 700,000 suicide deaths per year worldwide, with the most affected territories being the Danish island of Greenland (53.3 per 100,000 inhabitants), Lesotho in southern Africa (42.2) and Guyana on the northern tip of South America (32.6)

In the Americas, the countries with the highest rates, after Guyana, are Suriname (24.1), Uruguay (21.2), Cuba (14.5), the United States (14.1), Canada (10.7), Haiti (9.6), Chile (9.0) and Argentina (8.4); and the lowest rates are in the small Caribbean island states of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and Grenada (0.4 to 0.7 per 100,000 inhabitants).

Another aspect of the multidimensional crisis in Venezuela is the severe lack of face-to-face and family communication. According to some specialists, it seems that family life takes place more on the phone than live, leaving the field open for teenagers to feed more on social networks than on real interactions. CREDIT: The Conversation

Waiting for the government to take action

The experts consulted agree that in order to curb the rise in suicides, it is necessary to strengthen public health systems – “they are in crisis, if you call to make an appointment, you have to wait several months,” said Acosta – develop prevention programs and identify vulnerable groups or individuals with greater precision.

Paez added the need for the government to produce and maintain “updated and relevant statistics, disaggregated nationally and regionally by age, sex and other data that identify vulnerable groups and areas,” and more education “so that the issue is no longer stigmatized and taboo.”

García Mujica pointed out that “we need to direct our resources towards rescuing family values and preventing domestic violence in order to protect one of the most vulnerable groups, which are young people.”

“It is vital to take into account any comments regarding taking one’s own life and refer them to a specialist. In addition, we need to train more people in psychological first aid, so that the public is aware of the early signs of suicidal behavior,” added García Mujica.

These early signs may be followed by what become farewell messages received too late, a piece of paper or a video, traces of a humanitarian crisis.

A pregnant teenage girl sits in a Caracas plaza. Teenage pregnancy often leads to dropping out of school or turning women into heads of single-parent households at a very early age, curtailing their possibilities for personal growth and fomenting multigenerational poverty. CREDIT: Avesa

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Nov 2 2023 (IPS)

Hemmed in by poverty, with barely two days of school a week, and often at risk of unwanted pregnancy or the uncertain prospect of emigration, young women and adolescents are among the main victims of the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

“Yes, my boyfriend and I have sex less often or for example he pulls out so as not to risk pregnancy, because buying contraceptives is expensive and we can’t always afford it,” Anita, a 22-year-old computer science student, told IPS from the west-central city of Barquisimeto."Instead of education being the gateway to the labor market (for women), dropping out of school at a young age means a very high risk of teenage pregnancy." -- Luis Pedro España

A pack of three condoms costs at least four dollars, a month of birth control pills more than 10 dollars, an intrauterine device about 40 dollars (plus the medical cost of its implantation), and in the country the minimum wage is four dollars a month and the average monthly salary barely exceeds 130 dollars.

A survey by the Women’s Peacebuilding Network found in September that 42 percent of Venezuelan women between the ages of 18 and 24 do not use birth control, and one of the reasons is the high cost in relation to their meager incomes.

The Venezuelan Association for Alternative Sex Education reported in a study in April that only three out of 10 women of reproductive age use contraceptive methods in this country.

“The lack of contraceptives and access to sexual and reproductive health is of great concern in the case of impoverished adolescent girls, who most need to avoid early pregnancy that could keep them out of the classroom,” said María Laura Chang, editor of the report by the Women’s Peacebuilding Network.

Students at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas take part in a protest against sexual abuse and aggression. Sexist violence stands out in the national context of poverty and scarce access to resources and education on sexual and reproductive health. CREDIT: Mairet Chourio / Efecto Cocuyo

Omnipresent poverty

As a result, “the feminization of poverty has been prolonged, as young women gain more dependents and less time to devote to their economic well-being, education and self-improvement,” Chang added in an interview with IPS.

“All age groups are affected by poverty, lack of income and opportunities. Because of the education crisis, the women most at risk are adolescents,” sociologist Luis Pedro España, head of poverty studies at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab) in Caracas, told IPS.

Every year Ucab conducts a Survey of Living Conditions of Venezuelans (Encovi), which found that in 2022 income poverty affected 81.5 percent of the country’s 28.3 million inhabitants, extreme poverty affected 53.3 percent, and multidimensional poverty (employment, services, health, education and income) 50.5 percent.

España highlighted the impact of the educational crisis that the country is going through “because schools only receive students twice a week, which makes adolescent girls more likely to drop out.”

The reduction from five to only two days of classes per week in many public schools and institutes is mainly due to the lack of teachers, who have left the classrooms – in the three year period of 2019-2021 alone a quarter of them left – due to low salaries, lack of transportation, deterioration of infrastructure and other resources, as well as high student dropout rates.

Women are a majority during an enrollment day at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas. University studies are an avenue for personal growth, but graduates, both men and women, suffer from the lack of opportunities due to poorly paid jobs in the midst of Venezuela’s economic crisis. CREDIT: M. Sardá / El Ucabista

According to official figures, there are 29,400 schools in the country, of which 24,400 are public, serving 6.4 million students, and 5,000 are private, serving 1.2 million students. Figures from universities and civil society organizations estimate the number of students dropping out of school at around 1.5 million in the last five years.

In the survey carried out by the Women’s Peacebuilding Network, 58 percent of the women respondents stated that the main reason for missing classes was because of their school’s suspension of activities.

For women, “instead of education being the gateway to the labor market, dropping out of school at a young age means a very high risk of teenage pregnancy,” España stressed.

The expert said that “an additional element that correlates with poverty is that of single-parent households that result from early pregnancy and are headed by a young woman who is not sufficiently trained for work, so that poverty is likely to continue to be the plight of her descendants.”

Young women run a street vendor’s stall in Caracas. Girls who drop out of school also expand the ranks of the informal economy. It is part of the landscape of poverty in which the majority of Venezuela’s population is embedded, following a decade marked by economic collapse, with a combination of recession and hyperinflation. CREDIT: U. Montenegro / Venezuela Red.us

Disappointment and violence

Another consequence is the disappointment in the lack of opportunities even for young women who complete their higher studies, due to the prolonged economic crisis, during which, for example, the number of factories shrank from 13,000 in 1999 to 2,600 in 2020, according to the Venezuelan Confederation of Industrialists (Conindustria).

In seven of the last 10 years a recession has reduced the country’s GDP by four-fifths, and during at least three years of hyperinflation the value of the local currency and the value of salaries and pensions were decimated.

“I have studied for more than 18 years to end up applying for jobs where they want to pay me 150 or at most 200 dollars a month. With that I can’t even pay for my passport (which costs 216 dollars),” Mariela, a recent graduate in administration from a private university, told IPS.

Sitting on a sofa in the middle-class apartment where she lives with her parents, Mariela rattles off a list of grievances to IPS: she is tired of getting up so early to go to school because of the precarious public transportation; there are no good jobs in the country; going abroad is risky or unaffordable; electricity, water and internet fail in her house for several hours almost every day.

To top it off, “I am one of the few who registered in the Electoral Registry. Many of my fellow students did not. They are not interested in participating in politics at all,” said Mariela who, like other young women who spoke to IPS, asked not to disclose her last name.

In its September survey, the Women’s Peacebuilding Network found that only half of those over 18 (the minimum voting age) and under 25 were registered on the electoral roll, and even fewer were determined to vote in the presidential election scheduled for 2024.

Of this age group, 19 percent engaged in some community activity and 81 percent in none. Of the latter, 60 percent mentioned the lack of economic stimulus as an obstacle, and 55 percent mentioned the difficulty of transportation to get around.

Another issue faced by young and adolescent girls is gender-based violence.

Of 237 femicides or gender-based murders documented in 2022 by the Digital Observatory of Femicides, of the NGO Centre for Justice and Peace, 69 involved women between 16 and 27 years old.

In the Network’s survey, 38 percent of the women interviewed said they had been victims of sexist violence, mainly psychological but also physical. Of the respondents, 24 percent said they were victims of economic violence, both those over and under the age of 24.

In addition, 12 percent of the total number of women surveyed reported having suffered sexual violence, but in the 18 to 24 year-old segment the percentage doubled to 24 percent, reflecting the greater vulnerability of young women to this kind of violence.

Young Venezuelan women rest after the perilous journey across the Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama. Migration has marked the lives of Venezuelan families in the last decade, during which millions of people have left the country. CREDIT: Gema Cortés / IOM

Time to emigrate

Almost eight million people have left the country, especially since 2015, according to United Nations agencies. In 2018, Encovi reported, 57 percent of those migrating were between 15 and 29 years old, a percentage that decreased to 42 percent in 2022. For every 100 female migrants there are 116 males.

Migrants and asylum seekers are highly vulnerable to trafficking and sexual exploitation, and most of the victims of these practices detected in countries in the region, such as Colombia, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago and the neighboring Dutch Caribbean islands, are Venezuelan.

Last year, civil society organizations reported the rescue of 1,390 Venezuelan victims of this type of crime abroad. Young women are a particularly fragile segment of the population and are sought by traffickers – often with deceitful offers of employment – to subject them to sexual and labor exploitation.

In the Network’s survey, 54 percent of young women between the ages of 18 and 25 said that a member of their family had migrated: 23 percent said it was their mother, father or both, and most reported that they have brothers or sisters who have left the country.

The report that accompanied the survey highlights that for young women and adolescents the separation from their loved ones has had a significant emotional impact, and has made them face new responsibilities, such as caring for younger siblings or attending to new domestic chores, with an impact on their personal development.

The Network’s study proposes the design of government programs and policies aimed at overcoming the shortcomings faced by youth and adolescents, support services for victims of gender violence, and an appeal to international cooperation to curb gangs dedicated to human trafficking.

España said that “it is essential to strengthen schools, so that women in their teenage and young adult years do not have children prematurely and can empower themselves, enter the labor market and become independent, without depending on support from their parents or partners.”

“Unfortunately, policies and measures are not being developed to mitigate the immense damage being done by reducing the number of school days,” he argued.

On residential streets of Caracas with little traffic it is possible to see cars that have been abandoned by their owners for years. They probably migrated from Venezuela or cannot afford to repair and sell their vehicles. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 23 2023 (IPS)

Diego has just enrolled to study journalism at a university in the Venezuelan capital and, with 2,000 dollars that his family members managed to gather, has bought his first car, a small 2007 Ford that can take him to class from his home in the neighboring Caribbean port city of La Guaira.

Tomás, an experienced physiotherapist who sold Diego the car, is leaving for Spain where a job awaits him without delay, “so I’m quickly selling off things that will give me money to settle there, such as furniture, household goods and appliances, but for now I sold only one of my two cars,” he told IPS."The vehicle fleet in Venezuela - a country that now has 28 million inhabitants - is about 4.1 million vehicles, with an average age of 22 years, and 25 percent of them are out of service. The loss of purchasing power of the owners has caused most of them to delay the maintenance of their vehicles and the replacement of the spare parts that suffer wear and tear, such as tires, brakes, shock absorbers and oil." -- Omar Bautista

“This Ford Fiesta was my first car, I loved it very much, but it doesn’t make sense for me to hold on to two vehicles. I’m keeping a 2011 pickup truck that is in good condition, just in case I don’t do well and I have to return,” added the professional who, like other sources who spoke to IPS, asked not to disclose his last name “for safety reasons.”

The migration of almost eight million Venezuelans in the last 10 years, and the general impoverishment of the population, have led to the deterioration of what was once a shiny fleet of vehicles, with one out of every four vehicles left standing now due to lack of maintenance and leaving much of the rest aging and on the way to the junkyards.

In the basements of parking lots, and in the streets of towns and cities, thousands and thousands of vehicles are permanently parked under layers of dust and oblivion, because their owners have left or because they do not have the money to buy spare parts and pay the costs of repairs.

Along the streets of any Venezuelan city can be seen old rundown vehicles with no sign that the necessary repairs will be made. The impoverishment of the population is at the root of this decline. CREDIT: RrSs

Aging vehicle fleet

Omar Bautista, president of the Chamber of Venezuelan Automotive Manufacturers, told IPS that “the vehicle fleet in Venezuela – a country that now has 28 million inhabitants – is about 4.1 million vehicles, with an average age of 22 years, and 25 percent of them are out of service.”

“The loss of purchasing power of the owners has caused most of them to delay the maintenance of their vehicles and the replacement of the spare parts that suffer wear and tear, such as tires, brakes, shock absorbers and oil,” Bautista said.

Moreover, in contrast to the immense oil wealth in its subsoil, gasoline in Venezuela is scarce and, after more than half a century being the cheapest in the world, it is now sold at half a dollar per liter, a cost difficult to afford for most owners of private vehicles or public transportation.

The country needs some 300,000 barrels of fuel per day and for several years it has had less than 160,000 barrels, according to oil economist Rafael Quiroz, who added that interruptions in the work of Venezuela’s refineries are frequent.

There is almost no residential building that does not have at least one vehicle in storage waiting for its owners to return from abroad. They are part of the 1.5 million vehicles that are permanently parked in the country. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Not enough money

The minimum wage in Venezuela is four dollars a month. Most workers receive up to 50 dollars in non-wage compensation for food, and the average income according to consulting firms is around 130 dollars a month.

Luisa Hernández, a retired teacher, earns a little more giving private English classes, but “the situation at home is very difficult. I can’t afford to pay for the repair of my Toyota Corolla, but a mechanic friend agreed to do the work, and I can pay him in installments,” she told IPS.

Mechanics have their finger on the pulse of the situation. “People leave and the cars often sit idle for years, and then the owners end up selling them, from abroad. Quite a few of those I have gone to pick up and have fixed them, to sell them,” Daniel, who runs a garage in the capital’s middle-class east side, told IPS.

He said that “many people do not sell their cars before leaving the country, thinking that they’re just going abroad to ‘see how it goes’. But they stay there and then decide to sell their vehicle before it further deteriorates and depreciates.”

Another mechanic, Eduardo González, told IPS that “There are people who go away and leave their cars in storage and from abroad they contact us so that from time to time we can check them and do some maintenance. Or they entrust their vehicle to a relative. There are people who travel and come back, but most of them end up selling.”

This situation “has favored buyers, who can get cars at a low price. But the problems come later, because that very used car will require spare parts and maintenance, and that is expensive and often the parts are difficult to get,” added González.

The same difficulty is also a concern for owners of cabs, buses and private vans that transport passengers, as well as cargo trucks.

“At least half of the truck fleet in the region is affected by the shortage and scarcity of spare parts,” said Jonathan Durrelle, president of the Chamber of Cargo Transportation of Carabobo, an industrial state in the center of the country.

Large and small buses for passenger transport in Venezuelan cities, including Caracas, as well as cargo vehicles, also suffer from the lack of sufficient revenue, as well as spare parts, to keep them in proper working condition. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Industries have closed down

Elías Besis, from the Chamber of Spare Parts Importers, attributed this to the closure of companies that “years ago manufactured 62 percent of the spare parts needed in the country, and now that production has plunged to two percent.”

Thousands of manufacturing companies closed down in Venezuela during the eight years (2013-2020) in which the country was in deep recession, suffering a loss of four-fifths of its GDP according to economic consulting firms.

Financial and banking activity has also declined, as has the vehicle loan portfolio, which peaked at 2.3 billion dollars in 2008 and plummeted to just 227,000 dollars by late 2022, according to economist Manuel Sutherland.

Vehicle assembly plants, of which there were a dozen until recently, also closed their doors. In addition to selling to hundreds of dealerships, they used to export vehicles to the Andean and Caribbean markets.

Their production peaks were recorded in 1978, with 182,000 new vehicles – Venezuela then had 14 million inhabitants and 2.5 million vehicles – and in 2007, when 172,000 cars were assembled.

In 2022 only 75 vehicles – trucks and buses – were assembled, and in the first six months of this year just 22.

Newer vans and cars drive through middle and upper class neighborhoods, but are part of the “bubble,” the small segment of the population less impacted by the deep economic crisis that Venezuela has suffered over the last decade. CREDIT: Motorpasión

Farewell to the bonanza

The result of this scenario is the aging and non-renewal of the vehicles circulating on Venezuela’s roads.

The new ones, Daniel pointed out, “are SUVs, crossovers and off-road vehicles that cost a lot of money and can only be bought by those who live in the bubble,” the term popularly used to refer to the segment of high-level officials and businesspersons whose finances are still booming in the midst of the crisis.

In addition, in view of the almost total closure of automotive plants, individuals are opting to import new vehicles directly from the United States, favored by the elimination of tariffs for the importation of most models.

For that reason, said Bautista, “there is no shortage of new vehicles, what there is is a shortage of consumers with the necessary purchasing power and conditions to buy new vehicles.”

These consumers were part of the hard-hit middle class – nine out of 10 families in that socioeconomic category had fallen below the middle class by 2020 according to the consulting firm Anova – and they no longer buy new or newer cars because they have swelled the legion of migrants, selling or leaving behind their main assets.

Since the days of the oil boom (1950-1980), Venezuelans developed a sort of sentimental relationship with their vehicles, associating them with comfort and enjoyment that favored cheap gasoline and a network of paved roads that made it easier to travel to places of recreation.

In middle class and even lower middle class families, it was quite common to change cars every two years and to give one to their children when they turned 18. They were helped by credit facilities, and were encouraged to buy cars in cities where public transportation has always fallen short.

They have had to say goodbye to their easy past on wheels, like migrants have said farewell to their country and homeland. Or at least “see you later”.

A view of Caracas from the south side of the narrow valley where it sits, dotted with houses and residential buildings where full occupancy was the norm until a few years ago. As a result of the massive migration of young people and adults, more and more homes are left unoccupied or inhabited only by the elderly and young children. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 4 2023 (IPS)

Gladys swore she would not cry in front of her small children, but she still had to wipe away a couple of tears when she turned her head and looked, perhaps for the last time, at her dream house on Margarita Island in Venezuela, from where she migrated, driven by a lack of income and by fear.

“It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours (she works in administration, her husband is a mechanic, and they have two boys), but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate,” she told IPS from Miami, Florida in the U.S.

Due to the economic, social and political crisis, which gave rise to a complex humanitarian emergency, 7.7 million Venezuelans, according to United Nations agencies, have migrated from this country, the vast majority in the last decade, and the flow is not slowing down, especially to other countries in the region."It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours, but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate." -- Gladys

The family of Gladys, who like other people who talked to IPS preferred not to give her last name, tried their luck in Colombia, Panama and Spain, before finally settling in the United States, “and the worry about the house followed us like a shadow, but fortunately we made a deal with an enterprising young man who takes care of it, improves it and pays a modest rent.”

There are thousands like her. Migrants try not to leave their homes empty and abandoned, because they could lose them. For this reason, since most migrants are adults in their most productive age and young people, relatives of other ages remain in the homes, giving Venezuela the appearance of being a country of elderly people and children.

“I have to close up my home,” said Juan Manuel Flores, from San Antonio de Los Altos, a satellite city of Caracas with many middle class houses. “The neighbors will take care of it. It took us more than five years to build it and it cost between 150,000 and 200,000 dollars. Now I can’t get more than 60,000 dollars for it. We are not just going to give it away for that price.”

Flores, a teacher at a school where he earns less than 200 dollars a month, is preparing to travel to Spain, where his wife and adult daughters have gone ahead of him. “I will return to Venezuela when the country and its economy improve, and housing prices will rise again,” he told IPS, although without much conviction.

Solitude eats away at houses and buildings even in sought-after areas of the residential and commercial municipality of Chacao, in eastern Caracas. The real estate and construction market is suffering in Venezuela from the general economic crisis and in particular from the oversupply of housing created by those leaving the country. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Why not rent out their house? “Because the laws and the authorities always favor the tenant, and if they have children it is impossible to get them out when the lease is up, whether they pay the rent or not, and they end up staying in the house for years,” said Nancy, a pastry chef, also from San Antonio, who left a niece in charge of her apartment when she moved to Brazil last year.

A survey of migrants in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, released in October 2022 by the Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants in Venezuela (R4V), led by United Nations agencies, showed that only 23 percent considered the homes they left behind in their country to be safe.

Selling is also not an option in most cases, because the magnitude of the exodus over the last decade has so depressed demand that the most that can be obtained for a property is 15 or 20 percent of the value it had 15 years ago, if you are lucky. So selling a home even if you want to is a long, difficult process that provides meager results.

Those who have no other choice say that they are not selling their home but “giving it away” for whatever they can get, with great regret, mostly to internal migrants from other parts of the country, who “take refuge” in Caracas because outside the capital there are recurrent power outages, and scarcity of water and fuel, in addition to other shortages.

“Real estate deteriorates, ceases to serve those who need it and remains an important asset that produces nothing for the owner, for example a migrant who needs to pay rent as soon as they arrive in another country,” Roberto Orta, president of the Venezuelan Real Estate Chamber, told IPS.

The businessman said “this is an issue that, we have proposed, should be addressed with political will in order to reform the laws that constrain the real estate market, to benefit both landlords and tenants. Up to 250,000 homes could be freed up in five years.”

A view of the working-class neighborhood of 23 de Enero on the west side of Caracas. In low-income barrios, closed, empty houses are almost non-existent, as those who decide to emigrate look for relatives to move in, to avoid the risk of the homes being invaded or robbed. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

A trade is born

In the residential buildings located in Caracas and other cities, closing up an apartment and moving outside the country is not the same as leaving a house abandoned to solitude and neglect, because the neighbors, for their own safety and in order to pay the common expenses, keep watch and take care to prevent strangers from occupying the empty apartments.

But houses, especially middle-class homes, are an attractive and easy target for crime and even for people who want to occupy them by de facto means. That is why a new profession has appeared: the home caretaker.

“I have taken care of three houses in housing developments in the southeast (of Caracas), it’s the way I make ends meet,” said Daniel, who also works as a self-employed gardener. “I would go to one house twice a week, three times a week to another, and every day to another.”

He explains that in the last house “the owners were Portuguese business owners who went away and left three dogs. I would go to a pet food store to pick up the food, feed the dogs, check around the house and that was it.”

Family friends of the owners have now taken charge of the dogs and Daniel no longer receives payment for taking care of them. “I don’t have an account in dollars, I was paid through a restaurant friend of the owners, who does have an offshore account,” he said.

To pay for caretakers from abroad, intermediaries are indispensable, since in Venezuela, whose currency has been made nearly worthless by the economic crisis, there is a de facto dollarization, without agreement from the U.S. authorities, who also use sanctions to block the transactions of government bodies.

Daniel is saving up to join one of the groups forming in Antímano, the working-class neighborhood where he lives in the southwest of the capital, to migrate as well. He said that “I didn’t leave a few weeks ago because I hadn’t sold my motorcycle yet, otherwise right now I would be in the Darien,” the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama that thousands of migrants cross every day.

A more successful caretaker is Arturo, who is in charge of two houses with large living rooms, corridors, yards, a swimming pool and parking area. He is paid a modest fee to care for and maintain the homes, but is authorized to rent them out for social gatherings and parties.

“In both cases the owners are people with good incomes, they left with their children to study abroad and plan to return in a few years if conditions in the country change. They would like to find their homes as they left them,” he said.

When he rents out the property for a day or a night, guests can use the yards, swimming pool and even awnings, tables and chairs. But Arturo closes off access to the more private parts of the house and hires assistants to watch out for damages or disturbances. “I live well, I keep up the houses and each one brings me about 3,000 dollars in profits per month,” Arturo said.

President Nicolás Maduro delivers a batch of houses in the northwestern state of Falcón, which form part of the 4.6 million homes that the government claims to have built and provided to Venezuelan families since 2013. The figure is questioned by organizations dedicated to monitoring economic and social rights. CREDIT: Minhvi

No empty houses in the shantytowns

In the shantytowns of the cities and towns of this country – which has a population of 33.7 million according to government figures and 28 million according to university studies – the situation is different and there are hardly any empty or unoccupied houses.

“In the shantytowns, no house is left empty. The very next day someone can invade it, occupy it, or take what is left inside by those who left, furniture or household goods. Someone stays in charge, the grandfather or in-laws, a trusted neighbor, or a relative is brought from the interior of the country,” explained Alejandra, from the Gramoven area.

She lives in a shantytown of informally constructed dwellings in the northwest of Caracas, similar to the ones that cover most of the many hills and hollows occupied by the capital’s most disadvantaged inhabitants.

“Many people leave, the young people emigrate, my children want to leave through the Darien jungle. But nobody leaves their house empty. If you do, you lose it,” Alejandra said.

In Santa Bárbara del Zulia, on the hot plains south of western Lake Maracaibo, “the situation is the same,” Julio, a bricklayer who migrated to Colombia for four years and has returned to care for his elderly parents, told IPS.

“You can’t leave your house alone in these towns,” said Julio. “When my parents went to Maracaibo and Caracas for medical treatment, they went and came back quickly, because the Community Council warned them not to leave their house empty for too long, because they would not be able to ward off people who wanted to occupy it.”

The Community Councils are committees set up by the government to represent and manage community affairs – such as the distribution of bags of subsidized food to poor families – and they channel decisions by the government.

“But people are leaving anyway. It’s something that won’t stop as long as people here earn only a pittance and can’t even eat properly (the minimum wage and official pensions in Venezuela are equivalent to four dollars a month). People care about their houses, but food has to come first,” said Julio.

View of a row of houses practically abandoned by most of their inhabitants in a town in eastern Venezuela. Migration from the countryside and small towns to large cities and oil producing areas marked the 20th century in Venezuela. And today, migration from this country mainly to other Latin American nations has become a regional crisis. CREDIT: VV

A matter for the government and the business community

While the plight of people leaving their homes continues to drag on, the government of President Nicolás Maduro announces more or less twice a year the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes, in a program initiated by his late predecessor Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), called “Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission”.

According to official figures, since 2011, 4.6 million homes have been built and delivered by the Mission, mostly residential complexes to which the president goes to personally hand over the keys of one or more houses to their new inhabitants.

In accordance with the Mission, the occupants are tenants, not owners, so they cannot sell the homes. If they leave, the home can be reassigned to new tenants. To avoid this, those who choose to move to another city or country first look for relatives who can move into the house, and thus keep it.

However, the official figures on the number of homes built is not borne out by anecdotal evidence, to judge by the myriad of informal self-built houses still occupied in the slums, and by reports from business and civil society organizations.

The Chamber of Construction reports that the sector has decreased 96 percent in the last 10 years, and that its members employ 20,000 workers, down from 1.2 million in better times, while cement companies are working at 10 percent of their capacity and the steel industry at seven percent.

The civil society organization Provea, which specializes in the study of economic, social and cultural rights, has compared and contrasted the figures of the Housing Mission – which have not been audited, according to Provea – with independent studies, and reached the conclusion that the government has built and delivered only 130,856 housing units in 10 years.

In 1955 the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva (1908-1985) published his famous novel “Casas Muertas” (Dead Houses), describing the decline of Ortiz, a town in the central plains, caused by the loss of its population due to malaria and emigration to the big cities and oil production centers.

The flow of Venezuelan emigration in this century has not been enough to turn this into a country of dead houses. But its many closed doors bear witness to a collapse that has pushed millions of its inhabitants abroad, as do the small number of lights that are lit at night in the buildings of Caracas and other cities.

The shortages of days in the classroom and teachers, and the poverty of their schools and living conditions, provide for a very poor education for Venezuela's children and augur a significant lag for their performance in adult life and for the country's development. CREDIT: El Ucabista

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

Hundreds of thousands of children and young people, and thousands of their teachers, drop out of regular schooling in Venezuela year after year, and most of those who remain go to the classroom only two or three days a week, highlighting the abysmal backwardness of education in the country.

“Why continue studying, to graduate unemployed and earn a pittance? We prefer to get into a trade, make money, help our parents; there are a lot of needs at home,” Edgar, 19, who with his brother Ernesto, 18, has been gardening in homes in southeastern Caracas for three years, told IPS."The education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years." -- Luisa Pernalete

A study this year by the non-governmental organization Con la Escuela (With the School), in seven of Venezuela’s 24 states -including the five most populated- found that 22 percent of students skip classes to help their parents, and in the 15-17 age group this is the case for 45 percent of girls.

In the school where teacher Rita Castillo worked, in La Pomona, a shantytown in the torrid western city of Maracaibo, “for many days in a row there is no running water, there are blackouts, and it’s impossible to use the fans to cool off the classrooms,” she told IPS.

The classes in the school are divided into 17 to 25 children each: the first three grades of primary school attend on Mondays and Tuesdays, the next three grades on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and Fridays make up for whoever missed class the previous days. That is in the mornings; secondary school students attend during the hot afternoons.

These are the first steps towards the definitive dropout of students: 1.2 million in the three years prior to 2021 and another 190,000 in the 2021-2022 school year, with 2022-2023 still to be estimated, with no signs of a reversal in the trend.

“The dropout rate is also high in secondary schools in Caracas, and the students who remain often pass from one year to the next without having received, for example, a single physics or chemistry class, due to the shortage of teachers,” Lucila Zambrano, a math teacher in public schools in the populous western part of the capital, told IPS.

Authorities in the education districts are increasingly calling on retired teachers to return to work, “but who is going to return to earn for 25, 20 or less dollars a month?” Isabel Labrador, a retired teacher from Colón, a small town in the southwestern state of Táchira, told IPS.

Currently, the monthly food basket costs 526 dollars, according to the Documentation and Analysis Center of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers.

The infrastructure and equipment of many schools is seriously affected in different areas of Venezuela, and its recovery is essential as a space not only for students to obtain knowledge but also for the socialization and coexistence of students, teachers and representatives. CREDIT: E. Carvajal / CPV

Teachers held colorful street protests in the first few months of 2023, demanding decent salaries and other benefits acquired by their collective bargaining agreement, and these demands remain unheeded as the school year ends this July.

Teachers earning ridiculously small salaries, high school dropout rates, rundown infrastructure, lack of services, loss of quality and a marked lag in the education of children and young people are the predominant characteristics of Venezuelan public education today.

But “the education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years,” Luisa Pernalete, a trainer and researcher at the Fe y Alegría educational institution for decades, told IPS.

Numbers in red

In the current school year, enrollment in kindergarten, primary and secondary education totaled 7.7 million, said Education Minister Yelitze Santaella, in this country which according to the National Institute of Statistics has 33.7 million inhabitants, but only 28.7 million according to university studies.

The difference in the numbers may be due to the migration of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade, according to United Nations agencies – a figure that the government of President Nicolás Maduro considers exaggerated, although it has not provided an alternative number.

The attraction or the need to migrate, in the face of the complex humanitarian emergency – whose material basis begins with the loss of four-fifths of GDP in the period 2013-2021 – also mark the desertion of students and teachers.

In the three-year period ending in 2021 alone, 166,000 teachers (25 percent of the total) and 1.2 million students (15 percent of the number enrolled at the time), dropped out, according to a study by the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab) in Caracas, ranked as the top higher education center in the country.

Con la Escuela estimates that at least 40 percent of the teachers who have quit have already emigrated to other countries.

Educational coverage among the population aged three to 17 years continues to decline: 1.5 million children and adolescents between those ages were left out of the education system in the 2021-2022 period. The hardest hit group is children between three and five years of age, where coverage amounts to just 56 percent.

Public school teachers, whose basic salary barely exceeds 20 dollars per month, have held massive protests in Caracas and other cities in the country demanding a living wage and compliance with the provisions of their collective bargaining agreement. CREDIT: M. Chourio / Efecto Cocuyo

According to official figures, there are 29,400 educational institutions in the country, of which 24,400 are public, with 6.4 million students and 542,000 teachers; and 5,000 are private, with 1.2 million students and 121,000 teachers.

They cover three years of early education, six years of primary school and five years of secondary school. It was decreed 153 years ago that primary education should be free and compulsory.

According to Ucab and Con la Escuela, 85 percent of public schools do not have internet, 69 percent have acute shortages of electricity and 45 percent do not have running water. There are also deficiencies in health services (93 percent), laboratories (79 percent) and theater or music rooms (85 percent).

Surveying 79 public schools in seven states, Con la Escuela found that 52 percent of the bathrooms are in poor condition, 35 percent of the schools do not have enough bathrooms, and two percent have no bathrooms.

In 19 percent of the schools classes have been suspended due to the damage to the toilets, and 34 percent do not have sewage pipes.

“Water is the service that generates the most suspension of classes in Venezuela,” Pernalete said. “Classes can be held without electricity in the school, but you can’t do without water, and if the service fails in the community or in the whole town, then it’s hard for teachers to go to work or the families don’t send their children to school.”

The backpack decorated with the tricolor Venezuelan flag, which is given to primary school students in the country’s public schools, is often carried by immigrants, such as these walking along a Colombian highway, as many students and teachers, in addition to dropping out of school, go abroad. CREDIT: JRS

Con la Escuela also found that 36 percent of the classrooms are insufficient for the number of youngsters enrolled, 44 percent of the schools have classrooms in poor condition and 50 percent reported desks in poor condition.

Moreover, the Ucab investigation found “ghost schools”, which appear in the Education Ministry figures but are actually only empty shells.

“We have gone to the field with the list of these schools and we have found that they no longer exist. There are just four walls standing,” said Eduardo Cantera, director of Ucab’s Center for Educational Innovation.

From precariousness to backwardness

If the salary of a new teacher in a public school is 20 dollars a month, those who are five levels higher in the ranks do not earn much more, just 30 or 35 dollars, although they do receive some bonuses that are not part of the salary.

In Caracas, private schools – which serve from kindergarten to the end of high school – a teacher earns about 100, maybe 200 or more dollars, depending on seniority, hours of work, and the families’ ability to pay.

The drop in wages cuts across the entire labor spectrum. The basic minimum is around five dollars a month, although there are food bonuses, and the average salary of formal sector workers is around 100 dollars.

It is a difficult figure to reach for many of those who work in the informal sector of the economy – 60 percent of the country’s workers according to the Survey of Living Conditions that Ucab carried out in 2022 among 2,300 households across the country.

A view of the María Auxiliadora school in a middle and upper-middle class area of Caracas. In private education, families must make extraordinary contributions to improve teachers’ salaries and thus hold onto them. CREDIT: Oema

It is a consequence of the gigantic setback of the Venezuelan economy – GDP shrank by four-fifths between 2013 and 2021 – compounded by almost three years of hyperinflation between 2017 and 2020, and depreciation that liquefied the value of the local currency, the bolivar, and led to a costly de facto dollarization.

Although public education is formally free, parents must contribute a few dollars each month to help maintain the schools. In private schools, prices are raised under the guise of extraordinary fees – the only way to obtain funds that make it possible for them to hold onto their teachers.

Pernalete says that in the interior of the country many teachers have to walk up to an hour to get to school -there is no public transportation or they can’t afford to take it-, not to mention the lack of water or electricity in their homes, or the absence of or the poor quality of internet connection, if they can afford it, or the lack of other technological resources.

And if they do have internet, that’s not always the case for their students.

Damelis, a domestic worker who lives in a poor neighborhood in Los Teques, a city neighboring Caracas, has three children in school. Some teachers, she told IPS, assign homework through a WhatsApp group, but in her home no one has a computer, internet or smartphone.

What is the result? The initial reading assessment test that Ucab recently administered to 1,028 third grade students nationwide showed high oral and reading comprehension (82 and 85 percent, respectively), but low reading aloud and decoding skills (43 and 53 percent).

More than 40 percent of the students only read 64 words per minute or less, when they should read 85 or more. Con la Escuela applied the test to 364 students in Caracas and the neighboring state of Miranda, and the children only read 48 words per minute.

There is also discouragement among teachers. The main public teaching university in the country has almost no applicants. In the School of Education at Ucab, the first two years have been closed due to a lack of students, despite the fact that the university offers scholarships to those who want to train as teachers.

What can be done? “The physical recovery of schools should be one of the first steps to guarantee their fundamental function: to serve as a center for socialization and meeting of teachers, students and representatives around the teaching-learning process,” said Cantera.

“Otherwise, the consequences will be very serious for the country’s development,” he said.

Labrador said she observes “a gradual privatization of education, it is no longer truly free,” and the disparity between public and private education is increasing inequality in a country where in the second half of the 20th century public education stood out as the most powerful lever for social ascent.

Pernalete said it is a matter of complying with the 1999 Constitution, which stipulates that workers’ salaries must be sufficient to live on and establishes the government’s commitment to the right to education, as it states that education and work are the means for the realization of the government’s goals.

A photo of journalists dedicated to covering the agendas of nearby communities, like these ones in a town in Colombia, is uncommon in poor areas of Latin American countries, where millions of people have no access to information of local interest. CREDIT: Chasquis Foundation

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jun 14 2023 (IPS)

Without the means to receive information about what is happening around them, millions of Latin Americans who live in poor remote rural or impoverished urban areas inhabit veritable news deserts, according to an increasing number of studies conducted by journalistic organizations in the region.

There are, for example, 29 million people in Brazil, 10 million in Colombia, seven million in Venezuela and up to three-quarters of the Argentine territory without access to journalism due to the absence of media outlets, or because the few existing local outlets are dedicated to entertainment, rather than news.“When we talk about information deserts, we are also talking about what a robust media ecosystem implies: that there are not only enough media outlets, but also pluralism.” -- Jonathan Bock

“When we talk about information deserts, we are also talking about what a robust media ecosystem implies: that there are not only enough media outlets, but also pluralism,” said Jonathan Bock, director of the Colombian Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP).

This plurality must encompass “the topics that are covered, diversity of formats, media that address different audiences. A healthy ecosystem,” Bock added in a conversation with IPS from the Colombian capital.

A Jun. 7 forum organized by the Venezuelan branch of the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) displayed atlases and maps on news deserts in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, based on research by organizations of journalists and academics from those countries.

Even without extrapolating from the results of these assessments, it is possible to estimate that news deserts affect a good part of the region, judging by the structural deficiencies of the population, and by conflictive situations in the media and journalism in nations such as those of Central America and the Andes.

“The social and geographical marginalization found in parts of our countries means that important segments of the population are in these news deserts. For example, indigenous populations lacking media outlets in their languages,” Andrés Cañizález, founder and director of the Venezuelan observatory Medianálisis, told IPS.

Journalistic organizations from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela show maps or atlases that indicate, using colors, the most and least deserted areas in terms of access to news in their respective countries. CREDIT: IPS

Atlases and statistics

A study by the Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA), coordinated by Irene Benito, took a census of 560 areas in that country and considered 47.9 percent of them news deserts, 25.2 percent in “semi-desert” conditions, 17.1 percent as “semi-forests”, and 9.8 percent as “forests”, or areas with an abundance of media outlets and news.

“As in other Latin American nations, in many areas there are media outlets and journalists, but there is no quality coverage. They deal with other things, not the interests of their communities, while the propaganda apparatus of the powers-that-be is in overly robust health,” Benito said in the IPYS forum.

In Brazil, the most recent News Atlas, released in March, recorded the existence of 13,734 media outlets in that country of 208 million inhabitants, but not a single one in 312 of its 5,568 municipalities. These 312 municipalities are home to 29.3 million people with no access to local news.

Although hundreds of online media outlets emerge every year “and now more municipalities have at least one or two media outlets, many are not independent or are biased, because they depend on the city government or religious movements,” said Cristina Zahar, from the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ARAJI).

In a third of Colombia, where 10 of the country’s 50 million inhabitants live – many areas far from the big cities – there are no mass media, and in another third, home to 16 million people, the existing media outlets are dedicated to entertainment, according to FLIP’s Cartography of Information.

In Venezuela, seven million people live in municipalities where there are no media outlets, and that figure rises to 15 million – in a country of 28 million people – if municipalities with only one or two media outlets, considered “semi-deserts”, are included, according to IPYS.

Unlike other countries, “the situation has worsened, with the massive closure of radio stations ordered by the government – at least 81 in 2022 alone, and 285 since 2003 – with radio being the medium that has the greatest penetration in remote areas,” Daniela Alvarado, head of freedom of information at IPYS, told IPS.

Remote rural areas far from the main cities and often in border regions are among the most affected by deficient infrastructure and lack of media outlets that enable local residents access to general information about their local environment and possibilities of participation in decisions that concern them. CREDIT: ECLAC

Exclusion, once again

In the case of Colombia, one cause for the breadth of news deserts is violence, “war, one of whose strategic aims is to pressure or close down news, journalism that can reveal, report, warn and monitor what happens in areas of conflict,” said Bock.

In 45 years of armed conflict in Colombia, 165 journalists were murdered, “strategic killings, because they reported on things, and became symbols,” Bock stressed.

“But it also has to do with a different kind of exclusion, of weak economies and little interest on the part of politics and government institutions in promoting independent and plural journalism, seen in some contexts as the enemy, and with society getting used to it and not demanding” independent reporting, the Colombian analyst said.

Another thing that has happened in countries in the region is that “traditional media, and many new digital outlets, emerged and are concentrated where there was already an audience and sources of advertising, which is combined with pre-existing inequalities to create an abyss between big cities and small towns and the countryside,” said Cañizález.

In news deserts, infrastructure failures abound and there are absences or deficiencies in internet services, with providers that do not access these territories, aggravating the situation of local inhabitants who often only have simple mobile phones and cannot obtain news and information through digital or social networks.

However, news deserts are not exclusive to rural, remote or border areas; in cities themselves there is a dearth of local media outlets, or the outlets have their own agendas on issues in poor urban communities, which are also impacted by the crises that face journalism in general.

This is the case of Venezuela, which “is caught up in a complex and continuous economic, political and social crisis that has led to the deterioration of its media ecosystem,” Alvarado said, adding that it also faces “a communicational hegemony (on the part of the State) that is manifested in censorship and self-censorship.”

Newspapers and television stations were driven to shut down, by government decision or suffocated due to lack of paper and advertising, or their sale paved the way for their closure; or, as in the case of many radio stations, closure is a constant looming threat. Online media suffer from internet cuts and harassment of their journalists.

Even in urban areas, such as this one in Caracas, the adverse climate of news deserts has an impact, for example with the closure of print media outlets caused by political decisions or economic crises, which forces traditional kiosks to subsist by replacing newspapers, which are no longer available, with candy and snacks. CREDIT: Public domain

What can be done?

“The challenge seems immeasurable, but we are not sitting quietly by, we must not give up on what is our right as a community public service,” said Benito.

The State “should promote, at least in the area of ​​its competence, which is radio, television and internet, inclusive policies throughout the nation’s territory, guaranteeing basic rights, including the right to communication and information for all citizens,” stated Cañizález.

Zahar said that “sustainability is the challenge,” due to the difficulties many new media outlets, local or not, face in supporting themselves, and the advantages of digital media “that have fewer barriers to entry, can experiment with formats and financing mechanisms, and make quick changes.”

Bock said “we must think about the financing of journalism where there are fragile economies, see it as a public service but an independent one, to address the training of people practicing journalism in those places.”

Together with the support of the government and the international community, “models could be developed in which the big media sponsor local media in very small places or where there is clearly a news desert,” Cañizález said.

“But that’s still not even discussed in a number of our countries,” he said. “It is an issue that concerns journalism but has not drawn public attention. The debate is still very much confined to reporters.”

Young women from the Brazilian state of Bahia attend an informational campaign which also hands out menstrual hygiene products. Poverty and the lack of adequate information on this subject affect millions of girls, adolescents and adult women. CREDIT: Government of Bahia

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 26 2023 (IPS)

Menstrual hygiene management is elusive for millions of poor women and girls in Latin America, who suffer because their living conditions make it difficult or impossible for them to access resources and services that could make menstruation a simple normal part of life.

“When my period comes, I miss class for three or four days. My family can’t afford to buy the sanitary napkins that my sister and I need. We use cloths for the blood, although they give me an uncomfortable rash,” says Omaira*, a 15-year-old high school student.

From her low-income neighborhood of Brisas del Sur, in Ciudad Guayana, 500 kilometers southeast of Caracas, she speaks to IPS by phone: “We can’t buy pills to relieve our pain either. And my period is irregular, it doesn’t come every month, but there are no medical services here for me to go and treat that.”

In Venezuela, “one in four women does not have menstrual hygiene products and they improvise unhygienic alternatives, such as old clothes, cloths, cardboard or toilet paper to make pads that function as sanitary napkins,” activist Natasha Saturno, with the Solidarity Action NGO, tells IPS.

“The big problem with these improvised products is that they can cause, at best, discomfort and embarrassment, and at worst, infections that compromise their health,” says Saturno, director of enforceability of rights at the NGO that conducts health assistance and documentation programs and surveys.

Campaigns that adult and young women have carried out in Mexico and Colombia demanding the right to menstrual health managed to get the authorities to eliminate the value added tax on essential feminine hygiene products. CREDIT: Nora Hinojo/UN Mexico

Universal problem, comprehensive approach

Is this a local, focalized problem? Not at all: “On any given day, more than 300 million women worldwide are menstruating.  In total, an estimated 500 million lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management (MHM),” states a World Bank study.

“Today more than ever we need to bring visibility to the situation of women and girls who do not have access to and education about menstrual hygiene. Communication makes the difference,” said Hugo González, representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Peru.

UNFPA says there is broad agreement on what girls and women need for good menstrual health, and argues that comprehensive approaches that combine education with infrastructure and with products and efforts to combat stigma are most successful in achieving good menstrual health and hygiene.

The essential elements are: safe, acceptable, and reliable supplies to manage menstruation; privacy for changing the materials; safe and private washing facilities; and information to make appropriate decisions.

UNFPA’s theme this year for international Menstrual Hygiene Day, which is celebrated every May 28, is “Making menstruation a normal fact of life by 2030”, the target date for compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the international community at the United Nations.

United Nations Population Fund workers prepare packages of menstrual hygiene items for women from poor communities in Central America. The cost of some of these products makes them unaffordable for many families. CREDIT: UNFPA

The pink tax

Nine out of 31 countries in the region consider menstrual hygiene products essential, which makes them exempt from value added tax or reduced VAT, according to the study “Sexist Taxes in Latin America” ​​by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

After a “Tax-free Menstruation” campaign, in 2018 Colombia became the first country in the Americas to eliminate VAT – 16 percent – on menstrual hygiene products. Its neighbor Venezuela still charges 16 percent VAT, and Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay charge VAT between 18 and 22 percent on such products.

Colombia was joined by Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico – where street demonstrations were held against charging VAT on menstrual products – Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Other countries have reduced VAT, such as Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, while in Brazil VAT differs between states and averages 7 percent.

The so-called “pink tax” obviously affects the price of menstrual hygiene products such as disposable and reusable sanitary pads and menstrual cups, which becomes especially burdensome in countries with high inflation and depreciated currencies, such as Argentina and Venezuela.

According to the average price of the cheapest brands, ten disposable sanitary pads can cost just under a dollar in Mexico, 1.50 dollar in Argentina or Brazil, 1.60 dollar in Colombia, Peru or Venezuela, and almost two dollars in Costa Rica.

“It’s an important problem,” Saturno points out, “in a country like Venezuela, where the majority of the population lives in poverty and the minimum wage – although it has been increased with some stipends – is still just five dollars a month.”

Adult women, young women and girls participate in a session to share information and experiences organized by the Colombian association Menstruating Princesses, which emphasizes the importance of education to combat taboos and make menstruation a normal, stress-free experience. CREDIT: Menstruating Princesses

Hostile environment, scarce education

“If you often can’t buy sanitary pads, that’s the smallest problem. The worst thing is the shame you feel if you go to work and the cloth fails to keep your clothes free of blood, or if you catch an infection,” Nancy *, who at the age of 45 has been an informal sector worker in numerous occupations and trades in Caracas, told IPS.“Poverty causes women and adolescent girls to miss days of secondary school or work because they do not have the supplies they need when they menstruate. It becomes a vicious circle, because their academic or work performance is affected, hindering their chances of developing their full potential and earning a better income.” -- Natasha Saturno

The mother of four young people lives in Gramoven, a poor neighborhood in the northwest of the capital. Her two unmarried daughters, ages 18 and 22, have had experiences similar to Nancy’s on their way to school, in the neighborhood, on the bus, and on the subway.

“The thing is, the period is not seen as something natural, boys and men see it as something dirty, at work they sometimes do not understand that if you are in pain you have to stay at home,” said Nancy. “And when you work for yourself, you have to go out no matter what, because if you don’t go out, no money comes in.”

Saturno says that “poverty causes women and adolescent girls to miss days of secondary school or work because they do not have the supplies they need when they menstruate.”

“It becomes a vicious circle, because their academic or work performance is affected, hindering their chances of developing their full potential and earning a better income,” she adds.

But the problem “goes far beyond materials, it does not end just because someone obtains the products; it includes education and decent working conditions for women,” psychologist Carolina Ramírez, who runs the educational NGO Menstruating Princesses in the Colombian city of Medellín, tells IPS.

For this reason, “we do not use the term ‘menstrual poverty’ and speak instead of menstrual dignity, vindicating the need for society, schools, workplaces and States to promote education about menstruation and combat illiteracy in that area,” says Ramírez.

To illustrate, she mentions the widespread rejection of using tampons and cups “because of the old taboo that the vulva shouldn’t be touched, that the vagina shouldn’t be looked at,” in addition to the fact that many areas and communities in Latin American countries not only lack spaces or tools to sterilize products but often do not have clean water.

A concern raised by both Saturno and Ramírez is the great vulnerability of migrant women in the region – which has received a flood of six million people from Venezuela over the last 10 years, for example – in terms of menstrual and general health, as well as safety.

Another worrying issue is women in most Latin American prisons, which are unable to provide adequate menstrual hygiene, since they do not have access to disposable products or the possibility to sterilize reusable supplies.

Throughout the region, “greater efforts are required to break down taboos that violate fundamental rights to health, education, work, and freedom of movement, so that menstruation can be a stress-free human experience,” Ramírez says.

*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the interviewees.

Excerpt:

LGBTIQ+ activists in Caracas protest outside the National Electoral Council, in charge of the civil registry, demanding enforcement of the legal statute that authorizes a change of name for trans, intersex or non-binary people. The agency has delayed compliance with the law for years. CREDIT: Observatory of Violence

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 30 2023 (IPS)

The vulnerability and struggles of the LGBTIQ+ community in Venezuela were once again highlighted when the Supreme Court finally annulled the military code statute that punished, with one to three years in prison, members of the military who committed ” acts against nature.”

The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court ruled that the statute, in force since the last century, “is contrary to the fundamental postulate of progressivity in terms of guaranteeing human rights,” and also “lacks sufficient legal clarity and precision with regard to the conduct it was intended to punish.”

The statute, in the Code of Military Justice, was the only one that still punished homosexuality with jail in Venezuela, and it was overturned on Feb. 16."In Venezuela LGBTIQ+ people (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, intersex, queers and others) must still fight for the right to identity, to equal marriage, to non-discrimination in education, health and housing.” -- Tamara Adrián

However, “in Venezuela LGBTIQ+ people (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, intersex, queers and others) must still fight for the right to identity, to equal marriage, to non-discrimination in education, healthcare and housing,” transgender activist Tamara Adrián told IPS.

Even the procedure followed to overturn the statute, the second paragraph of article 565 of the Military Code, was an illustration of the continued disdain towards the LGBTIQ+ minority.

Activist Richelle Briceño reminded IPS that civil society organizations had been demanding the annulment of the statute for seven years, receiving no response from the Supreme Court.

“All of a sudden, the Ombudsman’s Office (in Venezuela all branches of power are in the hands of the ruling party) asked the court to overturn that part of the article and in less than 24 hours the decision was made, on Feb. 16,” Briceño observed.

In addition, the Ombudsman’s Office argued that the statute was not used in the last 20 years, but Briceño said that around the year 2016 there were several documented cases.

Different NGOs see the legal ruling as linked with the presentation, the following day, of reports to the United Nations Human Rights Council of serious violations on this question in Venezuela, including the non-recognition of the rights of the LGBTIQ+ community.

In the Venezuelan armed forces, homosexual conduct or acts “against nature” were still punishable by prison sentences of one to three years, until the statute was finally overturned by the Supreme Court in February. CREDIT: Mippci

Many pending issues

In Venezuela, “according to current medical protocols, blood donations by people who have sexual relations with people of the same sex are not even accepted,” Natasha Saturno, with the Acción Solidaria NGO, which specializes in health assistance and supplies, told IPS.

“Forty days ago they operated on my son. I brought a dozen blood donors, they were all asked this question, and several were turned away,” she said.

If these restrictions still exist, even further away are the hopes of the LGBTIQ+ community to obtain identity documents that reflect their gender option, to same-sex unions or equal marriage, or to outlaw all forms of discrimination, Saturno said.

Adrián said that “recognizing gender identity or equal marriage with both spouses enjoying the right to exercise maternity or paternity are achievements that are advancing or expanding throughout Latin America, and Venezuela, which has moved forward in civil rights since the 19th century, is now among the laggards.”

The activist, founder in 2022 of the political party United for Dignity, highlighted the progress made on this issue in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, “with only Guyana, Paraguay, Suriname and Venezuela lagging behind in South America.”

With regard to identity, since 2009 the Civil Registry Law states that “everyone may change their own name, only once, when they are subjected to public ridicule (…) or it does not correspond to their gender, thus affecting the free development of their personality.”

But the rule is not enforced in the case of trans, intersex and non-binary people, with countless procedural obstacles in the way, which is why, frustrated by meaningless paperwork, LGBTIQ+ groups have protested before the Supreme Court, the Ombudsman’s Office and the National Electoral Council, which the civil registry falls under.

Adrián maintained that “we are guided by the opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which in 2017 recognized the right to identity as essential for the development of personality and non-discrimination in areas such as labor, health and education.”

A demonstration by the LGBTIQ+ community outside the Supreme Court in Caracas demanded the right to same-sex marriage, which is legal in many parts of Latin America but remains a distant dream in Venezuela. CREDIT: Acvi

Victims of violence

LGBTIQ+ people in Venezuela “suffer numerous forms of discrimination and violence, from the family sphere to public spaces,” said Yendri Velásquez, of the recently created Venezuelan Observatory of Violence against this community.

It manifests itself “in psychological violence, very present in the family sphere, beatings, denial of identity, access and use of public spaces – from restaurants to parks -, extortion, bullying based on gender expression, employment discrimination and even murder,” Velásquez said.

He pointed out that in 2021 there were 21 murders of people “just for being gay or lesbian,” and that in the second half of 2022 the Observatory recorded 10 “murders or cases of very serious injuries” with a total of 11 gay, lesbian or transgender victims.

The activists are advocating for norms and policies that help eradicate hate crimes and hate speech, as well as online violence, because through social networks they receive messages as serious as “die”, “kill yourself”, “I hope they kill you” or “you shouldn’t be alive.”

The organizations share these fears and are protesting that the legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, is drafting a law that would curtail and severely restrict the independence and work of non-governmental organizations.

Marches for the rights of the LGBTIQ+ community and against discrimination are growing in size in Venezuela, and groups of European residents and diplomats have even joined in on some occasions. CREDIT: EU

Healthcare as well

For the LGBTIQ+ community, healthcare is a critical issue, in the context of a complex humanitarian emergency that, among other effects, has led to the collapse of health services, with most hospitals suffering from infrastructure and maintenance failures, lack of equipment and supplies, and the migration of health professionals.

Adrián said “there are barriers to entry into health centers, both public and private, for people who are trans or intersex, for their stay in hospitals – sometimes they are treated in the corridors – and for adherence to the treatments.”

An additional problem is that hormones have not been available in Venezuela for 10 years, and users who resort to uncontrolled imports are exposing themselves to significant health risks.

The community was greatly affected by the AIDS epidemic, although in 2001 civil society organizations managed to get the Supreme Court to make it obligatory for the government to provide antiretroviral drugs free of charge.

They were available for years, although Saturno points out that the supply became intermittent starting in 2012.

That year marked the start of the current economic and migration crisis suffered by this oil-producing country of 28 million people, with the loss of four-fifths of GDP and the migration of seven million Venezuelans.

Currently, deliveries are made regularly, according to the NGOs dedicated to monitoring the question, although usually with only one of the treatment schemes prescribed by the Pan American Health Organization, “and not everyone can take the same treatment,” Saturno said.

Some 88,000 HIV/AIDS patients are registered in Venezuela’s master plan on HIV/AIDS that the government and United Nations agencies support. But according to NGO projections, there could be as many as 200,000 HIV-positive people in the country.

The activists also note that the climate marked by the denial of identity and rights for individuals and couples, discrimination, harassment, violence and work handicap, plus health issues, push LGBTIQ+ people to form part of the flow of migrants that has spread across the hemisphere.

Eliana and Carla, two Venezuelan sisters who came to Chile without legal documents through the border town of Colchane, complained about the lack of clear procedures to regularize their immigration status. The lack of papers causes problems when it comes to accessing healthcare and social security and to bringing children and siblings to Chile for family reunification. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Mar 27 2023 (IPS)

The Chilean government tightened controls on the northern border to curtail the influx of migrants, especially Venezuelans, along a 1,030-km stretch of border with Bolivia and Peru.

Some 600 military personnel joined the police force to reinforce control, initially for a period of three months.

Left-wing President Gabriel Boric, in office for a year, visited Colchane, a small town in the Andean highlands, on Mar. 15 to talk with the 1,800 local residents, most of whom are Aymara indigenous people."It was very hard. I wouldn't want to go through that ever again. The border is very dangerous, there is tremendous insecurity. You experience hunger, cold, thirst and many other things on the journey.” -- Carla

Undocumented migrants coming to this country enter mainly through that town, triggering social tension and growing expressions of xenophobia, although also drawing shows of solidarity and support from society.

“We have decided to take responsibility for the neglect and lack of equipment and have launched a plan to improve infrastructure and living conditions on the northern border,” said the president.

He said the area was receiving “absolutely uncontrolled migration” that brought the total number of immigrants to 1.4 million, equivalent to seven percent of the current population of this long, narrow Andean country.

The military will have adequate accommodation and will be equipped with thermal cameras and satellite communication systems to double the detection capacity and monitor uncontrolled areas.

The aim, said Boric, is “to contain and reduce irregular migration, but in particular to combat criminal organizations that take advantage of these flows and of people’s needs, to commit crimes such as human, drug and arms trafficking.”

Chile’s border with Peru is 169 kilometers, and with Bolivia 861.

Boric said it was important to “not open the door to hate speech,” just days after a 22-year-old Venezuelan who was proven to be drunk was arrested and charged for allegedly running over and killing a police officer, sparking a wave of xenophobia.

The president also announced that in the next six months he would present a “national migration policy in accordance with the new challenges facing the country,” which in recent decades has become a growing destination for migrants from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and in the last decade for Haitians and especially Venezuelans.

Hundreds of Venezuelans gather early every day in front of the Venezuelan consulate in the municipality of Providencia, in Santiago, to apply for the documents that would allow them to move forward in the regularization of their migration status and that of their family, and make it possible for them to to legally bring in relatives. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), since 2013 more than 7.13 million people have fled Venezuela, the majority to other Latin American countries, in one of the largest international displacement crises in the world.

Minister of the Interior and Public Security Carolina Tohá confirmed that there was a list of more than 20,000 reportedly undocumented migrants to be deported.

“When President Boric took office, there were already 20,000 people facing pending deportation orders,” she said.

Two draft laws are making their way through the legislature aimed at expediting deportations for immigrants convicted of drug crimes.

The National Migration Service informed IPS that “in 2022, 1,070 people were deported, which represented a 19 percent increase from the 913 deportations carried out in 2021.”

It also stated that “of the almost 500,000 pending applications (for regularization of immigration status), in the entire year of 2022 until January 2023, more than 365,000 have received a favorable response.”

“About 265,000 involved Temporary Residence applications, which will gradually become applications for Permanent Residence,” the National Migration Service added.

Erika Vargas and José González are Venezuelan immigrants who came to Chile legally and only have to regularize their children’s citizenship status to complete the process and gain peace of mind. They said they have only suffered sporadic misunderstandings because of the use of different idioms or vocabulary. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Marginal conditions for undocumented migrants

A survey of “campamentos”, the term given to slums in Chile, found 39,567 migrant families living in them, representing 34.7 percent of the total.

The number of migrants coming in through unauthorized border crossings has mushroomed from 2,905 in 2017, to 56,586 in 2021 and to 13,928 in the first quarter alone of 2022 – figures that do not take into account migrants under 18 years of age, according to the Catholic Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM).

Macarena Rodriguez, chair of the SJM board of directors, told IPS that the influx of migrants through unauthorized border crossings “is not synonymous with people fleeing from justice,” but with people escaping poor life opportunities in other countries.

That is the case of two Venezuelan sisters, Eliana, 36, and Carla, 33, who have traumatic memories of their entry through Colchane, on separate trips, coming by land from Venezuela.

“I came with a ‘travel advisor’ (smuggler or coyote). In Bolivia it was complicated because of many groups that operate there. They kidnapped us in a border area. We were locked up for six or seven days waiting for that person to pay to get us released,” said Eliana.

She came to Chile in September 2021 after living in Peru for almost three years.

“We paid that person to take us to Santiago on a trip without complications. The normal journey is three to four days from Peru, but it took me 15,” she told IPS.

Carla traveled with her eight-year-old son Eduardo and arrived in Chile 15 months ago.

“It was very hard. I wouldn’t want to go through that ever again. The border is very dangerous, there is tremendous insecurity. You experience hunger, cold, thirst and many other things on the journey,” she said.

Immigrants of various nationalities go daily to the offices of the National Migration Service, on San Antonio street in Santiago, where they are attended if they have made an online appointment. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The sisters both work in Santiago and live in a small rented room in the municipality of Quinta Normal, on the west side of the Chilean capital, for which they pay 312 dollars a month.

“It was difficult to find a school. I thought it was like in Venezuela where you just register your child with his birth certificate. But here they ask for an identity document and educational records,” said Carla, who, like her sister, only wanted to be identified by her first name.

They have both adapted, but they complain about the lack of a protocol to regularize their situation.

“I would like to stay. I am in the process of bringing my daughter, who stayed in Venezuela, but it has become very difficult because I don’t have papers,” Carla said.

“I miss my family and the beaches. I am from the East, where it’s all coastline. There are beaches and islands there, it’s spectacular,” she added.

Eliana said “Chile is a country that opens its doors. There is a lot of work. We have never experienced hunger here, or gone without a place to sleep.”

She wants to bring another sister and her three children to Chile.

“I would like to make a life here, but it is difficult without papers,” she said. “With papers it would be easier to get health coverage, for example. I tried to legalize my status, but there are many hurdles. There is no set procedure with clear steps to follow.”

Another Venezuelan Erika Vargas, 42, originally from the western Andean state of Táchira in that country, lives with her husband and four children in Rancagua, 90 kilometers south of Santiago. She came to Chile five years ago.

“My husband came a year earlier and sent me a permit to travel with the children,” she told IPS.

“We’re doing fine…the children have documents and now we are in the process of getting permanent residency,” she explained while lining up at the Venezuelan consulate in the capital.

Her husband José González, 40, came from the eastern Venezuelan state of Anzoátegui thanks to a “democracy visa” created by former President Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022).

“I’m a civil engineer and I have a degree in public accounting, and I work in logistics in a mining company,” he said. “My wife came a year ago, she works in education. We all came legally.”

González lamented that he could not practice his profession because “to get my degrees recognized I would have to pay about six million pesos (7,500 dollars).”

What the experts say

The SJM’s Macarena Rodríguez said the presence of the military in the north “is aimed at preventing or reducing the influx of people with criminal records and the entry of weapons.”

“It’s a temporary measure that will be in place as long as the military is there, but it doesn’t address the root of the problem, which is providing care for these people,” she told IPS.

According to Rodríguez, the movement of troops is designed to attack the security crisis rather than forming part of a public policy regarding mobility.

“If you came in by means of an unauthorized crossing, which is the case with the majority, you have no way to regularize your situation… it doesn’t matter if you have a work contract or ties to Chile,” she said.

Located in front of the Venezuelan consulate, in the Santiago municipality of Providencia, Rincón Venezolano offers a popular menu of typical products from that country. Venezuelan food businesses and restaurants are making their way into the landscape of the capital and other Chilean cities. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Germán Campos-Herrera, an academic at the Diego Portales University, said the deployment of military troops forms part of “an institutional framework that guarantees that the use of firearms is restricted to cases where people’s lives are endangered.”
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He believes, however, that elements such as “a much stricter control of those who enter and leave and knowing who are the migrants who commit crimes and are in an irregular situation” are missing.

Rodríguez said “We had not experienced these levels of exodus in the region. None of the countries of the Southern Cone (of South America) have experienced this before.”

That is why Boric wants to talk with Bolivia and Venezuela and raised the issue at the 28th Ibero-American Summit, held in Santo Domingo on Mar. 24.

“There have been positive signals, from both Bolivian and Venezuelan authorities. They are willing to talk and it is an opportunity that we have to take advantage of,” said Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren.

“It was not a central theme of the Summit, but it was an opportunity to have contact with the authorities of both countries, express concern and make progress in a forum, towards contact and dialogue,” he added.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants await a solution to their lack of papers, and they praise positive examples, such as the Temporary Work Residence granted by Colombia.

“We could regularize ours status and contribute to the State,” commented Eliana, one of the Venezuelan sisters.

The National Migration Service told IPS that it is developing a project to connect visa applications with the National Employment Service.

“Every year there are unfilled vacancies available in agriculture, transportation or construction. With this project we not only seek to make the flow of migration more orderly but to regulate it and make our migration policy more economically rational,” the National Migration Service said.

Jehyson Guzmán, the governor of the state of Mérida, in the Venezuelan Andes, delivers a solar panel installation to the rural community of El Anís that will benefit dozens of families. Parliament is preparing, meanwhile, new legislation to try to promote these alternative energies in the country. CREDIT: Government of Mérida

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 21 2023 (IPS)

The installation of solar panels in a remote village in ​​the Andes highlands in late February marked a second incursion by the Venezuelan government into the field of solar energy, previously uncharted territory in this country that for a century was a leading global oil producer.

The governor of the Andean state of Mérida, Jehyson Guzmán, inaugurated the 135 solar panels that will initially serve 17 families in the El Anís village near the town of Lagunillas, 600 kilometers southwest of Caracas, and will later provide electricity to a total of 2,500 people, in neighboring communities as well.

“They’re presenting it as something new, but they probably brought materials from a facility they had in the area around PDVSA (the state-owned oil company), where an industrial-scale project failed and was abandoned,” alternative energy expert Alejandro López-González told IPS."Compared to an average cost of 0.20 dollars per kilowatt-hour in other Latin American countries, in Venezuela people pay 0.002 dollars….and a cultural issue is that Venezuelans are not used to saving energy and many people, between 30 and 40 percent of users, simply do not pay for electricity." -- Luis Ramírez

López-González also pointed out that the government program “Sembrando Luz”, developed by Venezuelan and Cuban engineers, installed close to 2,300 small solar power systems, mainly in rural and indigenous communities, between 2005 and 2012.

Venezuela was then governed by the late Hugo Chávez (1999-2013). During his time in office the country went through a cycle of oil wealth, followed by the collapse of the oil industry and numerous infrastructure and service projects, such as alternative electricity, most of which were abandoned half-complete.

There are also wind farms on the peninsulas of Paraguaná and Guajira, in the northwest – where the trade winds are constant, strong and fast – and adding more than 100 wind turbines could contribute up to 150 Mwh to the local grid in one of the areas hardest-hit by blackouts so far this century.

Wind turbines began to be installed starting in 2006 in Paraguaná and 2011 in La Guajira, and more than 400 million dollars were invested, with the idea of ​​supplying numerous indigenous communities mainly of the Wayúu people.

But the installation of more wind turbines and equipment was delayed, the project fell by the wayside, many materials were stolen to be sold as scrap, and by 2018 the then minister of electric power, Luis Motta, gave it up for lost.

A similar fate befell hundreds of small solar energy projects – in some cases accompanied by wind power – in peasant and indigenous communities, which would have “benefited up to 200,000 people throughout the country but were put out of service due to lack of maintenance and attention,” lamented López-González.

Actually, before “Sembrando luz”, there were specific and especially rural initiatives for solar and wind energy – for example, to dig water wells in the plains of the Orinoco – organized by individuals, universities and some public entities.

The green roof of the postgraduate studies building at the Andrés Bello Catholic University blocks excess heat from some of the classrooms and serves as the basis for the installation of solar panels that provide electricity to various parts of campus. In the background can be seen the poor neighborhood of Antímano, in western Caracas. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez/IPS

The universities’ turn

Now the initiatives are reaching urban areas, among individuals in cities hard-hit by long power cuts, such as the hot city of Maracaibo in the northwest, the country’s oil capital, commercial establishments, health centers, and an exemplary installation in the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), in Caracas.

UCAB “decided to incorporate ecology and sustainability into programs, practices, the management of its 32-hectare campus where there are some 5,000 students in various disciplines, as an experiment and contribution to environmental science in the country,” Joaquín Benítez, director of Environmental Sustainability, told IPS.

Thus, since 2019, the roof of the postgraduate studies building has been transformed into a green roof, with an 800-square-meter garden of low-lying succulent plants that store water.

Several classrooms under that roof, where temperatures at 3:00 p.m. local time reached 31 degrees Celsius for most of the year in 2013, now have an average temperature of 25 degrees, Benítez said.

The garden was followed by the installation of 30 solar panels along the edge of the roof, plus a backup wind generator, to support research and study projects, provide energy to part of the building and feed the watering device for the plants.

Enough energy is generated to serve a house for five people, with three bedrooms on two floors, two bathrooms and a small garden, Benítez said.

Solar panels were installed at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University, in the capital of Venezuela. While waiting for large projects, installations like these are gaining ground in homes, farms and businesses, sometimes combined with the use of the national power grid or diesel-fueled plants. CREDIT: UCAB

Learning from failures

But a panel installation in a home, farm or small business, even if it is only complementary to the national electrical grid or used to power only a few appliances, costs from 4,000 dollars up to five times that amount. This is a huge sum in a country where the majority of the population is living in poverty and the monthly minimum wage is less than six dollars.

However, hundreds of private solar power installations have sprung up, often in combination with diesel-fired plants – and also small wind turbines – in areas of the west and the central and eastern plains, with a handful of companies dedicated to installation and maintenance.

The electricity crisis has been part of an economic depression and social and political crisis that has pushed more than seven million Venezuelans to leave the country in the last decade under President Nicolás Maduro, reducing the population to an estimated 28 million inhabitants.

The northwestern oil and ranching state of Zulia alone, covering 63,000 square kilometers and home to five million people, suffered 37,000 power failures last year, according to the Committee of People Affected by Blackouts.

Outages across the country totaled 233,000 last year and 196,000 in 2021. Four years ago, in March 2019, a blackout left almost all of Venezuela, including much of Caracas, without power for between 72 and 100 continuous hours.

The country is supplied by the Guri hydroelectric complex in the southeast, with an installed capacity of 12,000 Mwh in three dams, and which covers two thirds of the national demand. Another 30 percent comes from thermal plants, and the rest from small distributed generation plants.

In total, the country’s installed capacity, which should have reached 34,000 Mwh according to the investments made over decades, barely reaches 24,000 Mwh, since much of the infrastructure is rundown, as are the distribution networks.

The supply deficit would be even worse were it not for the collapse of the economy, as the country’s GDP plunged by up to 80 percent between 2013 and 2021, and demand, which stood at around 19,000 Mwh in 2013, had dropped to 11,000 Mwh in 2019.

The Cecosesola central cooperative health center in the western Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto installed solar panels to power some of its services and raise awareness about the importance of clean energy. Years ago solar installations were made in remote rural areas, but recently they are making their way into cities. CREDIT: Cecosesola

Paying little or nothing

Renewable energy expert Luis Ramírez reminded IPS that electricity in Venezuela, in the hands of the State, is subsidized up to 99 percent.

“Compared to an average cost of 0.20 dollars per kilowatt-hour in other Latin American countries, in Venezuela people pay 0.002 dollars,” said Ramírez, who is also director of the graduate program in quality systems at UCAB.

However, since 2022 the rates for public services, such as water, electricity, cooking gas, gasoline, highway use and garbage collection have begun to rise in different regions of the country.

In addition, “a cultural issue is that Venezuelans are not used to saving energy and many people, between 30 and 40 percent of users, simply do not pay for electricity,” Ramírez explained.

The inhabitants of poor neighborhoods and shantytowns in Caracas and other cities connect themselves to the grid freely, and in small towns in the interior small business establishments often do the same.

This discourages investments in the sector and in particular in renewable energies, which often have higher installation and start-up costs than plants powered by fossil energy.

Pending policies, laws, initiatives and financing to establish solar or wind farms, hydroelectric power generated in the gigantic complex of Lake Guri, which feeds the Caroní River in the southeast of the country, remains the source that sustains two thirds of electricity consumption in Venezuela. CREDIT: Corpoelec

From law to potential

Publications from the Ministry of Electric Power indicate that an additional 500 Mwh are expected to be installed in the west of the country, mainly from renewable energies, but without specifying a timeframe, amounts to be invested or sources of financing.

In the legislature, controlled by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the drafting of a renewable energy law was proposed since 2021, to stimulate and organize the sector, but the question has not been given priority by parliament or the government.

The experts consulted by IPS agree that the drafts of that law mainly repeat provisions already present in the current Organic Law on Electricity Service, without adding new aspects such as establishing a renewable energy research institute to help develop the industry, Ramírez said.

According to López-González, the fact that the electricity law enacted in 2010 still lacks regulations to specify policies in measures and technical and operational decisions shows the State’s disdain for ensuring compliance and promoting the development of the sector.

He said the new steps such as the small installation in the Andes and the announcements that a new law is being prepared are “an effort to publicize what is nothing more than a residual development, no more than zombies of abandoned projects.”

Venezuela’s solar potential is one of the highest in Latin America, with an average of 5.35 kilowatt hours per square meter per day (5.35 Kwh/m2), close to the highest in Chile (5.75) and Bolivia (5.42), according to studies by the Department of Sciences of the Universitiy de Los Andes, in the southwest of the country.

In the northern coastal region along the Caribbean Sea, the information collected in meteorological stations shows an even greater potential: between 5.8 and 7.3 Kwh/m2.

In the north, where the most populated and industrialized centers of the country are located, the potential of 12,000 Mwh awaits better times, López-González said. “We can have a wind Guri,” he said, making a comparison with the largest of the dams in the southeastern hydroelectric complex.

Venezuela, a leading oil producer for a century, which still has the largest reserves in the world (300 billion barrels, mostly unconventional), also has the potential to belong to the club of countries that are self-sufficient in renewable energy.

But this membership is still just a spot on the distant horizon.

The National Assembly of Venezuela, overwhelmingly pro-government since most of the opposition boycotted the elections, approved in a first reading a draft law that would make it necessary for NGOs to obtain authorization from the executive branch in order to function. CREDIT: National Assembly

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 27 2023 (IPS)

The Venezuelan parliament, in the hands of the ruling party, is moving towards passing a law to control non-governmental organizations (NGOs) so that, in practice, they could not exist independently.

The new law “not only puts at risk the work of helping victims of human rights violations, but also all the humanitarian and social assistance work carried out by independent organizations,” Rafael Uzcátegui, coordinator of the human rights group Provea, one of the oldest and renowned NGOs in the country, told IPS.

Ali Daniels, a lawyer who is the director of the NGO Access to Justice, was also emphatic when he told IPS that the law “is contradictory and, by design, is made to be breached, since it is impossible to meet the 20 requirements and 12 sub-requirements that it imposes on civil society organizations.”

The bill, entitled the Law for the Control, Regularization, Action and Financing of Non-Governmental and Related Organizations, was approved without dissent at first reading as a whole in the single-chamber legislature on Jan. 24. It must now be debated article by article in order to be passed.

In the current legislature – which has 277 members, many more than the 165 provided for by the 1999 constitution – the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies hold 256 seats, and the rest are in the hands of groups that refused to take part in the boycott of the 2020 legislative elections called by the main opposition party.

The memorandum for the draft law states that it is inspired by a similar law passed in Bolivia in 2013, and highlights that NGOs “depend almost exclusively on ‘aid’ from Western governments, which generally goes to countries of geopolitical importance and is linked to an interventionist framework.”

Diosdado Cabello, the number two in the PSUV under President Nicolás Maduro and the president of the National Assembly, said that through NGOs opposition groups “conspire against the country. They are not non-governmental organizations. They do not depend on the Venezuelan state, but on the gringo (US) government; they are instruments of imperialism.”

The new law will “put an end to their easy life,” he said.

The PSUV not only has control over the executive and legislative branches, but also the judiciary, the electoral commission, the public prosecutor’s office, the comptroller’s office and the ombudsman’s office. In addition, it has staunch support from the armed forces.

The main opposition parties have been intervened by the judiciary, several of their leaders are in exile or disqualified from running for office, and press, radio and television outlets that provide anything but officially sanctioned news have practically been driven to extinction.

In addition, there are 270 political prisoners in the country (150 members of the military and 120 civilians), according to the daily registry kept by the human rights NGO Foro Penal.

In this context, different NGOs and the bishops of the Catholic Church stand out as critical and independent voices.

NGO programs to assist the needy with food and medicine in Venezuela, a country in the grip of a severe socioeconomic crisis, would be affected if they must meet the numerous requisites laid out in a draft law, warns a statement signed by more than 400 organizations. CREDIT: Alimenta la Solidaridad

Nearly a month after the bill was approved in first reading, it has not yet been officially presented, and the text that was leaked from parliament is setting off alarm bells among civil society organizations.

More than 400 organizations, including several from abroad such as Amnesty International, Civil Rights Defenders, Transparency International, Poder Ciudadano of Argentina, Chile Transparente and the Center for Rights and Development of Peru, produced a document expressing their alarm and rejection of the draft law.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, who visited Caracas two days after the preliminary approval of the draft law, said that when he talked to the authorities “I reiterated the importance of guaranteeing the civic space, and I called for a broad consultative process on the law.”

Hands tied

NGOs complain that, first of all, the new law will declare illegal any existing non-profit association, organization or foundation that fails to adapt to the new provisions, even though this violates the principle of non-retroactivity.

In addition to entities defined as NGOs, the law will also apply to charitable or educational foundations, chambers or other business associations and even social clubs – in other words, any kind of civil association.

It creates a long list of requirements and requisites, including mandatory registration and constant renewals, “without setting a time limit or clear evaluation criteria, or providing any guarantee of due process in case of denial.”

Daniels also said the new law requires a sworn statement of assets from the members, representatives and workers of each NGO, together with detailed information on how they obtain and use funds.

In addition, the new law states that organizations must not only register, but also must obtain express authorization from the government, which could thus decide which ones can and cannot operate.

The draft law on NGOS will affect programs carried out by foundations such as the Catholic Fe y Alegría, which for years has run a network of schools in rural areas and poor neighborhoods, as well as a network of educational radio stations. CREDIT: Fe y Alegría

In the event that the authorities suspect any irregularity, it must open an investigation, and by doing so it can suspend operations of the organization, by means of a precautionary measure.

NGOs are generically prohibited from carrying out political activities, which makes it possible to accuse them in cases of defense of rights or criticism of the State.

The sanctions for failing to comply with requirements include fines of up to 12,000 dollars, “which in Venezuela’s current crisis no NGO can comply with without closing down,” Daniels said. Criminal action can also be taken against the organizations.

Carlos Ayala Corao, former chair of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the new law “violates the national and international legal system, and seeks to control society.”

Why now?

According to Uzcátegui, the law is the result of a years-long government policy of confronting NGOs, “in first place because we have been effective in attracting the attention of international mechanisms for the protection of human rights.”

“An investigation by the International Criminal Court, unprecedented in this continent, has been launched into possible crimes against humanity (by Venezuelan authorities), a major blow to Maduro’s international image,” Uzcátegui said.

The ICC is carrying out a preliminary investigation into accusations against the president and other political and military leaders, after complaints brought by families of their alleged responsibility in the death of demonstrators in protests, of opponents or military dissidents in interrogations, torture and other crimes.

Complaints from human rights groups, which are studied in investigations by entities such as the International Criminal Court, could have influenced the decision to draft a new law to prevent “political” aspects in the activities of NGOs. CREDIT: Civilisv

Venezuela experienced massive protests, some bloodily repressed, in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and so far in 2023 there have been dozens of demonstrations by public sector workers and pensioners, since the minimum wage and millions of pensions are equivalent to less than six dollars a month.

The head of Provea added that so far this year there have been dozens of workers’ protests against low wages and tiny pensions, “and the authorities are trying to curb this scenario of conflict with the actors of democratic society.”

He also said the new law could be another chess piece in the intermittent negotiations between the government and the opposition, “as are the political prisoners,” ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.

The consequences

If the law is passed, “it will prevent the work of critical voices, of support for victims of rights violations, but the most terrible consequences will not be experienced by the organizations but by the people who are the beneficiaries of our activities,” Uzcátegui stressed.

Daniels said the draft law does not cover companies such as banks, for example, but it does cover their chambers, which are civil associations, or the entities that run schools or soup kitchens, many of them in the neediest areas, and which have registered and act as foundations.

“This is the case of the community soup kitchens run by Caritas (a Catholic organization), or free medicine banks run by the NGOs Convite and Acción Solidaria, or the network of community schools run by Fe y Alegría (created by the Catholic Jesuit order),” Uzcátegui added.

More than 90 organizations called on Colombian President Gustavo Petro (L), seen at a border meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro on Feb. 16, to lobby for the NGO bill to be scrapped. CREDIT: Presidency of Venezuela

Consequences at an international level are also likely, given that most NGOs turn to international donors to finance their activities, and because various international entities do not act directly in the country but do so through NGOs that have become their local partners.

It will also influence the regional political game by following the path taken by Nicaragua, which has outlawed thousands of organizations, and “we are alerting neighboring countries that the crisis in Venezuela will expand and with it emigration, including activists from NGOs seeking refuge,” said Uzcátegui.

During Maduro’s 10 years in the presidency, marked by an acute economic crisis, with a drop of up to 80 percent of GDP and prolonged hyperinflation, more than seven million Venezuelans – almost a quarter of the population – have left the country, mainly to neighboring nations.

More than 90 organizations presented a letter to Colombian President Gustavo Petro, asking him to intervene by making an effort to get the law dismissed and to help persuade the government not to undermine free association as a human right.

Uzcátegui says final approval of the draft law will drive the United States and Europe to impose harsher sanctions on Venezuela.

Thus, “the hardships of the populace and the conflict will increase, when what we Venezuelans need are spaces for dialogue and understanding,” argued the head of Provea.

Headquarters in Caracas of the state-owned National Telecommunications Commission, which has closed more than 100 radio stations this year for not complying with the requirements it has established, which NGOs criticize for eliminating windows of expression and information for communities. CREDIT: Conatel

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 9 2023 (IPS)

More than 100 radio stations were shut down by the Venezuelan government this year, accentuating the collapse of the media and further undermining the already meager capacity of citizens to stay informed.

In Venezuela’s provinces, “radio stations had become the last or only window for citizens to stay informed, and now they are being rapidly lost,” journalism professor Mariela Torrealba, co-founder of the media observatory Medianálisis, told IPS."We have a populatce that is not only impoverished, but deeply uninformed, with access mainly to the official media line, fertile ground for hoaxes or disinformation campaigns, and without the capacity to build public opinion references with other people.” -- Marianela Torrealba

The wave of closures carried out by the state-owned National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) comes at the end of what the journalists’ unions call an “information desert” – a long decade of measures that have reduced the space for the rights of expression and information, in a country governed since 1999 by a self-styled leftist government with a gradual authoritarian drift.

Most of the stations closed this year are small private or community enterprises that did not meet all the requirements set by Conatel to maintain their permits, and they were often stations with programming segments that were critical of the national or local authorities.

Venezuela, a country of 28.5 million people, most of whom live in the north near the Caribbean Sea, had more than 100 printed newspapers a decade ago. But over 70 closed down because during years of exchange controls and state monopoly of foreign currency, it became more and more difficult to import printing paper.

Several of the main national newspapers, as well as the private television news station, were sold to firms that changed their editorial line. Radio stations critical of the government, such as the pioneer Radio Caracas Radio, founded in 1930, were unable to renew their operating licenses.

A number of media outlets moved to the internet, without achieving the audiences or readership of the past, and hundreds of journalists and other media workers who lost their jobs in the cascade of downsizing of media outlets other than state-owned ones also migrated to other countries or occupations.

Venezuela has lived through a decade of crisis marked by a recession that reduced its gross domestic product by up to 75 percent, several years of hyperinflation and sharp depreciation of its currency, harsh political clashes and social crisis, which pushed more than seven million Venezuelans to leave the country.

Journalists and other press workers take part in a protest in the plains area of Venezuela over the closure of radio stations. Most of the stations forced off the air operated in western and central states of the country. CREDIT: Sntp

Poor and uninformed

Torrealba said her organization holds small events with the public in the interior of the country who are asked how they stay informed, and “very few say through the media. Most of them say they use the social networks, but in a patchy manner because of weak internet access or lack of electricity.”

For example, in Yaritagua, a city in the center-west of the country, with a population of about 100,000 and an agricultural environment, 40 people, mostly older adults, were surveyed by activists in a soup kitchen in December.

Only three had email, and 14 said they had cell phones, but almost all of those devices actually belonged to a child, grandchild or neighbor.

“We have a populatce that is not only impoverished, but deeply uninformed, with access mainly to the official media line, fertile ground for hoaxes or disinformation campaigns, and without the capacity to build public opinion references with other people,” Torrealba said.

Radio Caracas Radio, a pioneer station with an editorial line critical of the government, had to go off the air in 2019 because the authorities refused to renew the frequency concession that it had used uninterruptedly since 1930. Every year dozens of radio stations in Venezuela are shut down. CREDIT: RCR

Goodbye information, hello music

Ricardo Tarazona, head of the National Union of Press Workers in Yaracuy, a small central-western state with some 700,000 inhabitants, told IPS that in his state “the closure of radio stations continues, with at least five this year, after 14 stations were shut down in 2014.”

“Seven of the 14 recuperated their signals and reopened, but without the news, opinion and community reporting spaces that they had before, and they dedicate themselves now to playing music and to advertising,” said Tarazona.

The remaining stations “are constantly called upon to chain themselves to the signal of VTV,” the government television station, “and no longer give space to producers and communicators dedicated to reflecting the voices of the communities,” he added.

Carlos Correa, director of the NGO Espacio Público, a defender of freedom of expression and the right to information, told IPS that many private radio stations “without needing to be told to do so by an official body, stick to the information provided by government TV.”

This is one of the explanations why the mandatory radio and television broadcasts that President Nicolás Maduro gave intensively, up to several times a week, during the first few years after he took office in 2013, have diminished. In practice, they are hardly necessary anymore.

View of the city of Maracaibo and the 8.7 km bridge that crosses the lake that bears its name. It is the capital of the western oil-producing state of Zulia, the most populated in the country, where 33 radio stations were closed this year. CREDIT: Megaconstrucciones

Dollars and ratings

Correa described this year’s shutdown of radio stations as part of a broader movement of groups aspiring to open radio stations and even networks of stations, and also blamed the influence of regional or municipal political leaders who wish to have their own media outlets or stations that are favorable to them.

Radio advertising, which plummeted in the second decade of this century along with the Venezuelan economy as a whole, has revived along with commercial activity, mainly in the context of a rebound in the Venezuelan economy of up to 12 percent this year, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The Venezuelan Chamber of the Broadcasting Industry issued a statement saying that “practically all of the radio stations closed by Conatel are clandestine,” and harm legally registered stations because they interfere with their signal.

One difficulty that dozens of radio stations have not been able to overcome, two radio broadcasters told IPS anonymously, is that Conatel sets numerous requirements and delays the evaluation of the documents presented by those requesting to regularize the use of their radio frequency.

They said that owners of closed radio stations often refrain from publicly voicing their criticism and complaints, waiting for Conatel to lift the punishment.

Correa pointed out that the technical study that radio stations are required to produce is estimated to cost between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars, a figure that is easy to cover for a station with resources but too costly for a small provincial one.

Espacio Público and other NGOs, as well as the National Journalists Association and the Press Workers Union, have criticized the fact that administrative procedures outweigh the need to guarantee the right to pluralistic information in the official evaluation of radio stations.

With the closure of radio stations, several thousands of workers have been left unemployed. For example, when Sonora 107.7 FM, which had been broadcasting for 20 years in the city of Araure, in the west-central plains of the country, went off the air on Dec. 12, 25 people lost their jobs.

Estimating the size of lost audiences is more difficult, but for example in the oil-producing state of Zulia (in the northwest bordering Colombia), home to nearly five million inhabitants and with a regional governor who is in the opposition, 33 radio stations were closed this year.

Marianela Balbi, of the Press and Society Institute, warned in a recent university forum that “total and partial news deserts have formed in regions where nearly 14 million Venezuelans live.”

The United Nations and the Organization of American States’ rapporteurs for freedom of expression also issued a joint statement on Aug. 30 warning about the situation of the media and journalists in Venezuela.

“The government-ordered closure of media outlets and/or seizure of their equipment increasingly limit citizens’ access to reliable information from independent sources, while accentuating a general atmosphere of self-censorship among the media,” they said in their statement.

A riverside park in Boa Vista, which would probably disappear with the construction of the Bem Querer hydroelectric plant, 120 kilometers downstream on the Branco River. The projection is that the reservoir would flood part of the capital of the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil , Dec 21 2022 (IPS)

“Roraima did not have a Caribbean character; now it does, because of its growing relations with Venezuela and Guyana,” said Haroldo Amoras, a professor of economics at the Federal University of this state in the extreme north of Brazil.

The oil that the U.S. company ExxonMobil discovered off the coast of Guyana since 2015 generates wealth that will cross borders and extend to Roraima, already linked to Venezuela by energy and migration issues, predicted the economist, the former secretary of planning in the local government from 2004 to 2014.

Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state, which forms part of the Amazon rainforest, is unique for sharing a border with these two South American countries on the Caribbean Sea and because 19 percent of its 224,300 square kilometers of territory is covered by grasslands, in contrast to the image of the lush green Amazon jungle.

It is also the only one of Brazil’s 26 states not connected to the national power grid, SIN, which provides electricity shared by almost the entire country. This energy isolation means the power supply has been unstable and has caused uncertainty in the search for solutions in the face of sometimes clashing interests.

From 2001 to 2019 it relied on imported electricity from Venezuela, from the Guri hydroelectric plant, whose decline led to frequent blackouts until the suspension of the contract two years before it was scheduled to end.

The closure of this source of electricity forced the state to accelerate the operation of old and new diesel, natural gas and biomass thermoelectric power plants. It also helped fuel the proliferation of solar power plants and the debate on cleaner and less expensive alternatives.

Alfredo Cruz would lose the restaurant and home he inherited from his great-grandfather, who registered the property in 1912. The Bem Querer reservoir would lead to the relocation of many riverside dwellers and would even flood part of the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Roraima, Boa Vista, 120 kilometers upriver. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In search of energy alternatives

Against this backdrop, the Roraima Renewable Energies Forum emerged, promoted by the non-governmental Socio-environmental Institute (ISA) and the Climate and Society Institute (ICS) and involving members of the business community, engineers from the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) and individuals, indigenous leaders and other stakeholders.

The objectives range from influencing sectoral policies and stimulating renewable sources in the local market to monitoring government decisions for isolated systems, such as the one in Roraima, as well as proposing measures to reduce the costs and environmental damage of such systems.

“Not everyone (in the Forum) is opposed to the construction of the Bem Querer hydroelectric plant, but there is a consensus that there is a lack of information to evaluate its benefits for society and whether they justify the huge investment in the project,” biologist Ciro Campos, an ISA analyst and one of the Forum’s coordinators, told IPS.

Bem Querer, a power plant with the capacity to generate 650 megawatts, three times the demand of Roraima, is the solution advocated by the central government to guarantee a local power supply while providing the surplus to the rest of the country.

For this reason, the project is presented as inseparable from the transmission line between Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas with a population of 2.2 million, and Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, population 437,000. The line involves 721 kilometers of cables that would connect Roraima to the national grid.

Indigenous people in the northern Brazilian state of Roraima are striving to install solar plants in their villages and are studying how to take advantage of the winds in their territories, which are considered favorable for wind energy. Their aim is to prevent the construction of Bem Querer and other hydroelectric plants that would affect indigenous lands, according to Edinho Macuxi, coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“In its design, Bem Querer looks towards Manaus, not Roraima,” Campos complained, ruling out a necessary link between the power plant and the transmission line. “We could connect to the SIN, but with a safe and autonomous model, not dependent on the national system” and subject to negative effects for the environment and development, he argued.

Hydroelectric damage

The plant would dam the Branco River, the state’s main water source, to form a 519-square-kilometer reservoir, according to the governmental Energy Research Company (EPE). It would even flood part of Boa Vista, some 120 kilometers upstream.

The hydropower plant would both meet the goal of covering the state’s entire demand for electricity and abolish the use of fossil fuels, diesel and natural gas, which account for 79 percent of the energy consumed in the state, according to the distribution company, Roraima Energia.

But it would have severe environmental and social impacts. “It would make the riparian forests disappear,” which are almost unique in the extensive savannah area, locally called “lavrado,” of grasses and sparse trees, said Reinaldo Imbrozio, a forestry engineer with the National Institute of Amazonian Research (Inpa).

A view of the Branco River, five kilometers above where its waters would be dammed if the controversial Bem Querer hydroelectric plant is built, which would generate enough electricity to meet the entire demand of the Brazilian state of Roraima as well as a surplus for export, but would have environmental and social impacts magnified by the flatness of the basin that requires a very large reservoir. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition to the flooding of parts of Boa Vista, the flooding of the Branco and Cauamé rivers, which surround the city, will directly affect nine indigenous territories and will have an indirect impact on others, complained Edinho Macuxi, general coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), which represents 465 communities of 10 native peoples.

The CIR, together with ISA and the ICS, built two solar energy projects in the villages and carried out studies on the wind potential, already recognized in the indigenous territories of northern Roraima.

“The main objective of our initiatives is to prove to the central government that we don’t need Bem Querer or other hydroelectric projects…that represent less land and more confusion, more energy and less food for us,” he stressed to IPS at CIR headquarters.

“We will have to leave, said the engineers who were here for the studies of the river,” said Alfredo Cruz, owner of a restaurant on the banks of the Branco River, about five kilometers upstream from the site chosen for the dam. At that spot visitors can swim in the dry season, when the water level in the river is low.

Economics Professor Haroldo Amoras says the state of Roraima is becoming more Caribbean, because its economy is increasingly linked to its neighboring countries to the north of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela, which, in addition to being importers, are the route to the Caribbean for Roraima’s agricultural and agro-industrial products. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The rapids there show the slight slope of the rocky riverbed. It is a flat river, without waterfalls, which means a larger reservoir. The heavy flow would be used to generate electricity in a run-of-river power plant.

Cruz inherited his restaurant and house from his great-grandfather. The title to the land dates back to 1912, he said. But they will be left under water if the hydroelectric plant is built, even though they are now located several meters above the normal level of the river, he lamented.

Riverside dwellers, fishermen and indigenous people will suffer the effects, Imbozio told IPS. The property of large landowners and people who own mansions will also be flooded, but they have been guaranteed good compensation, he added.

What the Forum’s Campos proposes is the promotion of renewable sources, without giving up diesel and natural gas thermoelectric plants for the time being, but reducing their share in the mix in the long term, and ruling out the Bem Querer dam, which he said is too costly and harmful.

Energy issues will influence the future of Roraima, according to Professor Amoras. The most environmentally viable hydroelectric plants, such as one suggested on the Cotingo River, in the northeast of the state, with a high water fall, including a canyon, are banned because they are located in indigenous territory, he said.

The participation of civil society is important for the Brazilian state of Roraima to make progress towards sustainable energy alternatives that can reduce diesel consumption, offer energy security and avoid the impacts of hydroelectric dams, according to Ciro Campos, an analyst with the non-governmental Socio-environmental Institute. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Oil wealth, route to the Caribbean

In the neighboring countries, oil wealth opens a market for Brazilian exports and, through their ports, access to the Caribbean. The Guyanese economy will grow 48 percent this year, according to the World Bank.

Roraima’s exports have grown significantly in recent years, although they reached just a few tens of millions of dollars last year.

Guyana’s small population of 790,000, the unpaved road connecting it to Roraima and the fact that the language there is English make doing business with Guyana difficult, but relations are expanding thanks to oil money.

This will pave the way to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), whose scale does not attract transnational corporations, but will interest Roraima companies, said Fabio Martinez, deputy secretary of planning in the Roraima state government.

Venezuela expanded its imports from Roraima, of local products or from other parts of Brazil, because U.S. embargoes restricted trade via ports and thus favored sales across the land border, he said.

“The liberalization of trade with the United States and Colombia will now affect our exports, but a recovery of the Venezuelan economy and the rise of oil can compensate for the losses,” Martinez said.

Roraima is a new agricultural frontier in Brazil and its soybean production is growing rapidly. But “we want to export products with added value, to develop agribusiness,” said Martinez.

That will require more energy, which in Roraima is subsidized, costing consumers in the rest of Brazil two billion reais (380 million dollars) a year. If the state is connected to the national grid through the transmission line from Manaus, there will be “more availability, but electricity will become more expensive in Roraima,” he warned.

The World Food Program has been active in Venezuela since last year, delivering bags of food to families of schoolchildren in some poor areas, such as remote areas accessed by river in the Arismedi municipality, in the southwestern plains state of Barinas. CREDIT: Gabriel Gómez/WFP

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Dec 15 2022 (IPS)

The social crisis and humanitarian emergency in Venezuela became international headline news again once the government and the opposition, bitter adversaries for two decades, agreed to direct three billion dollars in state funds held abroad to social programs.

When the pact was signed on Nov. 26, renowned nutritionist Susana Raffalli published a photograph of the legs of a girl whose height is eight centimeters shorter than what is appropriate for her age. “I measured her today. Her growth has been irreversibly stunted,” she said.

“Between the first announcement of the social roundtable (meetings to that purpose were already held in 2014) and the one signed today in Mexico, a generation of Venezuelans like her was born. The agreement is not a trophy. It is a commitment to hope,” Raffalli stated.

The Social Agreement signed in Mexico “is an important contribution, which could mean urgent aid for children, the elderly, the disabled and indigenous people, whose situation is extremely critical,” Roberto Patiño, founder of Alimenta la Solidaridad, a network of soup kitchens for children, told IPS.

The resources involved in the agreement are Venezuelan state funds frozen in the United States and European nations that in 2019 refused to accept the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro, in power since 2013, adopted sanctions and recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaidó as president.

Now, in talks between the government and the opposition, with the mediation of governments from this region and Norway, an agreement was reached to unfreeze part of the funds and allocate them to social programs under United Nations supervision.

The United States and European countries are participating in the deal as sanctioning parties and the UN as manager of the released funds and social programs covered by them.

“These are absolutely insufficient resources in the face of the crisis, but well-managed they can have a positive impact given the country’s complex humanitarian emergency,” Piero Trepiccione, coordinator of the network of social centers in Latin America and the Caribbean run by the Catholic Jesuit order Society of Jesus, told IPS.

The HumVenezuela Platform, made up of dozens of civil society organizations, has maintained since 2019 that the social situation in this South American country is a complex humanitarian emergency, based on its records on food, water and sanitation, health, basic education and living conditions.

The sharp deterioration in the living conditions in this country over the last decade has gone hand in hand with the decline of the Venezuelan economy – a collapsed oil industry and several years of hyperinflation – whose most visible international consequence has been the migration of seven million Venezuelans.

Renowned nutritionist Susana Raffalli published, as an example of a generation of children born and growing up with malnutrition and other problems in Venezuela, a photograph of the legs of a girl who, the day the government-opposition agreement was reached, was eight centimeters shorter than the appropriate size for her age. CREDIT: Susana Rafalli/Twitter

Barrier against life

In recent years, U.S. sanctions and the political clash with other governments, as in the case of Colombia, a neighbor with which the borders and the transit of people and goods were closed, have had a major impact.

For example, tragedy struck the low-income family of Michel Saraí, a five-year-old girl with pneumonia who was treated at a small hospital in La Fría, a small town in the southwest near the border with Colombia, which lacked the equipment needed for the necessary tests and treatment.

When her health took a turn for the worse on Nov. 30, her parents decided not to take her to the public hospital in the regional capital, San Cristóbal, because they did not have the dozens of dollars charged there to accept patients, who must bring their own supplies and pay for tests.

A Civil Defense ambulance, with fuel donated by a neighbor – gasoline is scarce in the state of Táchira and others – took the girl and her mother some 25 kilometers to the border bridge in the town of Boca de Grita, so that she could be treated free of charge in the cities of Cúcuta or Puerto Santander, on the Colombian side.

With the border formally closed, the Colombian military agreed to receive the ambulance due to the emergency, but the Venezuelan National Guard refused to allow passage of the vehicle carrying the little girl connected to oxygen.

“We had no money to offer them to see if they would let her get through,” the father, Jonathan Pernía, told local reporters a few days later.

In desperation, the mother and an aunt accepted what seemed like the only alternative: disconnecting her from the oxygen, placing her on a wheelbarrow – “as if she were a sack of potatoes,” Pernía lamented – and running with her through the rain to the Colombian side of the bridge, where another ambulance was waiting for them. But the little girl arrived without vital signs.

At the morgue of the hospital in San Cristobal her parents picked up the body. A week later they were still trying to find the money needed to pay the burial expenses.

Jonathan Pernía, the impoverished father of a little girl who died when an ambulance was prevented from crossing the border between Venezuela and Colombia to give her emergency treatment, shows journalists the bill for the funeral expenses, which he has not been able to cover either. CREDIT: Courtesy of Bleima Márquez

Figures behind the crisis

In Venezuela, poverty – defined as those who cannot afford the basic food basket – currently affects 81.5 percent of the population (90.9 percent in 2021), according to the Living Conditions Survey of the Andrés Bello Catholic University, which surveyed 2300 households throughout the country. This is the first time in seven years that it has gone down, partly attributable to a rebound in the economy and remittances from migrants.

Meanwhile, multidimensional poverty – which takes into account housing, education, employment, services and income – fell from 65.2 percent in 2021 to 50.5 percent in 2022, and extreme poverty dropped from 68 percent in 2021 to 53.3 percent in 2022.

Venezuela is the most unequal country in the Americas, and along with Angola, Mozambique and Namibia is one of the most unequal in the world, as the richest 10 percent earn 70 times more (553.20 dollars per month on average) than the poorest 10 percent (7.90 dollars).

Seven million children are in school, down from 7.7 million in 2019, and an estimated 1.5 million children and adolescents are not in the educational system. Preschool and daycare coverage is just 56 percent.

The survey reported an improvement in formal employment and income this year, with average monthly earnings of 113 dollars for public employees, 142 dollars for the self-employed, and 150 dollars for people working in private sector companies.

As a consequence, food insecurity declined from 88 percent of Venezuelans worried about running out of food in 2021, to 78 percent, while the proportion of people who have gone a whole day without eating dropped to 14 percent, from 34 percent in 2021.

More than 90 percent of poor households have received food assistance from the government -especially carbohydrates- but only one third receive these products monthly.

In health, according to the survey, the use of public services is decreasing (70 percent) and health care is becoming more expensive because, while prices in private clinics are skyrocketing, 13 percent of those who turned to public services had to pay in outpatient clinics and 16 percent in hospitals, and in 65 percent of the cases they had to pay themselves for the medicine that was prescribed for them.

Venezuelan government and opposition negotiators, meeting in Mexico with that country’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and Norwegian mediator Dag Nylander, agreed to help address social needs in their country, as a preliminary step to a possible agreement to solving the political crisis. CREDIT: National Assembly of Venezuela

Mexican formula

Jorge Rodríguez, president of the legislative National Assembly and the ruling party’s lead negotiator, said that with the funds released after the agreement reached in Mexico, the infrastructure and materials in 2300 schools will be covered, and the vaccines required in accordance with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines will be purchased.

Medicine for oncological and HIV patients will be obtained, radiotherapy programs, blood banks and at least 21 hospitals will be revived, while more than one billion dollars will be allocated to the national electricity grid.

The World Food Program (WFP), meanwhile, which now delivers food to families of 100,000 schoolchildren in poor areas in the north of the country, hopes to raise funds to provide meals to more than one million people by the end of 2023.

According to Trepiccione, of the Jesuit network, resources should be directed “to the recovery of the infrastructure of hospitals and schools, which are in terrible condition, because that generates a chain of jobs, services and economic activity along with the obvious improvements in the provision of health care and the quality of education.”

“The same can be said of reactivating the electrical system, hit by blackouts that affect above all the economy and the life of people in the western part of the country,” he added.

Patiño, from the network of soup kitchens, said priorities were “programs for early childhood care, pregnant women, school feeding, as well as care for the elderly and indigenous communities, segments where many are dying too young due to lack of urgent health care.”

Groups of retirees and pensioners hold constant demonstrations in Caracas and other cities in protest against their tiny pensions, which in Venezuela are equal to the legal minimum wage and this December barely reached the equivalent of nine dollars for the entire month. CREDIT: Courtesy of Efecto Cocuyo

Government pensions, which are equal to the minimum wage, were equivalent to 30 dollars at the beginning of the year, but with the depreciation of the local currency they are equivalent to just nine dollars per month as of this December.

“We must also emphasize that this social agreement is absolutely insufficient in the face of the precarious conditions that exist in our country. These are resources that will be exhausted and the needs will not disappear,” said Patiño.

In his view, “the only thing that can really solve the crisis, the best possible social program, is a decent job, with a sufficient income and with a social security and public health program that takes care of the most needy.”

Funds for the agreement, frozen in banks in industrialized countries, will be released gradually under the supervision of a government-opposition committee and with UN agency management to tender, implement and oversee the programs, in 2023 and 2024.

And over the coming year new meetings will be held and further political agreements are expected, which may lead to an easing or lifting of sanctions and, eventually, to an improvement in the living conditions of Venezuela’s 28 million people.

A view of houses, a water tank, a pump and a Warao meeting center in Janoko, a community that is home to 22 families of this Venezuelan indigenous people who migrated to Brazil. Together they acquired 13.4 hectares in Cantá, a municipality in the northern border state of Roraima, and with that land they have begun a process of insertion and autonomy in the host country. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil , Dec 7 2022 (IPS)

A group of Warao families are, through their own efforts, paving the way for the integration of indigenous Venezuelans in Brazil, five years after the start of the wave of their migration to the border state of Roraima.

“It’s a model to follow,” said Gilmara Ribeiro, an anthropologist with the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), linked to the Catholic Church, which since 2017 has been helping indigenous immigrants from Venezuela, most of whom have refugee status.

Fifteen families acquired a 1340 square meter plot of land in the municipality of Cantá, population 20,000, and joined seven other families to form the Warao community of Janoko, inaugurated in May 2021. “Janoko” means house in their native language, while “Warao” means people of the water or of the canoe.

Makeshift dwellings made of wood or still under construction make up the village in which the Venezuelan indigenous people are trying to rebuild a little of the community life they had in the Orinoco delta on the Atlantic ocean, their ancestral land in the impoverished northeastern Venezuelan state of Delta Amacuro.

They are now creating a community like their old ones, in a wooded area 30 kilometers from Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, population 436,000.

The vast majority are Waraos, but there are also a few families of the Kariña people, who come from several northern Venezuelan states. Many of them traveled the 825 kilometers that separate the Orinoco delta from the Brazilian border of Roraima, in an almost straight line to the south, partly on foot and partly in buses or by hitchhiking.

Pintolandia ceased to be one of the shelters of the Brazilian Army’s Operation Welcome and the UNHCR and since March has become an unofficial camp for 312 Venezuelan indigenous people, lacking food and services, on the outskirts of Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Janoko is the dream that Euligio Baez and Jeremias Fuentes, “aidamos” or leaders in the Warao language, want to imitate in Pintolandia, where they were hosted by the Brazilian Army’s Operation Welcome with the support of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Precarious, unsanitary camp

Pintolandia, in a neighborhood on the west side of Boa Vista, has now become a precarious, unsanitary camp where 312 indigenous Venezuelans live. It was an official shelter in somewhat better conditions until March, when Operation Welcome decided to transfer the Venezuelan natives to another camp, Tuaranoko.

The population of the camp has continued to grow with the arrival of new migrants and it has become an irregular occupied zone, because almost half of its nearly 600 refugees refused to relocate and remain in the facility, a multi-sports stadium, where the indigenous people set up their tents and traditional woven “chinchorros” or hammocks.

“The new shelter is very far from the schools, and the children there have stopped studying. The 46 children here are still going to school. That was the first reason we refused to go,” Baez explained to IPS in a building without walls in Pintolandia, where health professionals from Doctors Without Borders provide care to the people in the camp.

In addition, Operation Welcome “does not respect our customs, does not consult us when making decisions” and does not allow anyone to enter the camp, he explained.

Euligio Baez, one of the “aidamos” or leaders, in the Warao language, of Pintolandia, on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Boa Vista, is opposed to the relocation of members of the Venezuelan Warao people to a new shelter, because it would take the children away from their schools, without offering possibilities of economic and social insertion for indigenous immigrants and refugees in Brazilian society. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This is the case even if they are relatives or people from the organizations that help the refugees, such as CIMI and the Indigenous Council of Roraima, an organization made up of 261 communities from 10 indigenous peoples from the state.

Roraima is the Brazilian state with the highest proportion of indigenous people, 11 percent of the total population, who occupy 46 percent of its surface area in lands reserved for their communities.

Indigenous Venezuelans complain of threats and pressure to force them to move to the new shelter. Since September, they have been suspended from receiving food, which continues to be provided in Tuaranoko.

They collect aluminum cans, cardboard and other recyclable materials, and receive occasional help from social organizations and individuals, to have an income that allows them to eat and survive, according to Baez.

Leany Torres (R) and her daughter stand in front of the house in the Warao community of Janoko, where she is one of the ”aidamos” or leaders, in Warao, on this collectively acquired land in the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. Her husband, Francisco Flores, is now building his father-in-law’s house next to theirs. The indigenous Venezuelan Warao people live in extended families that can exceed 100 members. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

No jobs or economic inclusion

“I’ve been here for six years, and nothing has been done to offer us an alternative for a better future, to support our projects. Those in charge know that we want land, they know our ideas and the anthropologists’ assessment of the situation,” Fuentes, a 32-year-old father of three, complained to IPS.

“A piece of land is essential. We are farmers,” he added.

“We want land to build a house, to grow food and plants for our traditional medicine, to raise chickens and pigs. A piece of land is the best solution for us,” said Baez, 38, who has seven children, after an eighth child died in Boa Vista.

The criticisms voiced by both leaders are strongly directed at the UNHCR, which assumed more direct management of the reception of Venezuelans, in view of the relative withdrawal of the Brazilian Army.

Operation Welcome and the UNHCR justified the relocation due to “irreparable infrastructure problems” affecting water and hygiene in the old shelters. And they argue that there was sufficient consultation with the Venezuelan indigenous people themselves before the move.

Diolinda Tempo, one of the few Venezuelan Kariña people in this majority Warao community, settled in the Cantá municipality in northern Brazil, where she produces casabe, a crunchy, thin, circular bread made from cassava flour, which she makes with a small mill invented by her father, Diomar Tempo. His cassava is the family’s source of income. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Operation Welcome played a positive role in its initial assistance, offering documentation and food to Venezuelans arriving in Roraima, but it does not help people integrate in the broader community. There are almost no public policies to provide work and income alternatives” for the immigrants, said Gilmara Ribeiro in an interview with IPS at the local headquarters of the Catholic Social Pastoral.

But a good part of the responsibility falls on the municipal and state governments, “which have been totally absent” from an issue that directly affects their territories, she said.

The chaos has been overcome, but not the exclusion

Even so, the situation today is calmer and more stable than it was five or six years ago, when a wave of immigration hit Roraima, with many Venezuelans living on the streets and a rise in violence.

At that time, it was the civil society, indigenous, human rights and migrant and refugee organizations that mitigated the effects of the wave of Venezuelans fleeing hunger and alleged political persecution.

The meeting center is fitted with solar panels that provide electricity to the Janoko community of 22 Venezuelan families of Warao indigenous people. As the batteries store little energy and two of the eight are damaged, the electricity only lasts until 8 PM. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Francisco Flores, a 26-year-old Warao Indian, lived on the streets of Paracaima, a city of 20,000 people on the Venezuelan border, for the first few months after his arrival in Brazil three years ago, before being taken into a shelter.

At that time a policeman approached him, suspicious of his intentions. He then ordered him to leave using the Portuguese word “embora”, but with the local pronunciation which leaves out the first syllable. For the Warao people, “bora” is a plant that provides a fiber used in handicrafts. So Flores answered “I don’t have any bora” and the policeman attacked him with pepper spray.

It was not until his second year of living in the shelter that Flores managed to get a job in Boa Vista that has enabled him to save some money to build, on his days off, his house and that of his father-in-law in the Warao community of Janoko, where his wife, Leany Torres, 32, is an aidamo and lives with her daughter, niece, mother and father.

Janoko is home to 68 people from 22 families, 15 of whom have the right to the land, which, divided, means just 89.3 square meters for each family. There is little left over to grow cassava, fruit trees and vegetables, but the indigenous people manage to feed themselves and survive.

Their beaded handicrafts, made by Torres and her mother, or vegetable fiber baskets, a specialty of William Centeno, a 48-year-old father of three, are a source of income.

Diolimar Tempo, a 38-year-old Kariña indigenous mother of three, who was a primary school teacher in Venezuela, earns some money making “casabe”, a thin, crunchy circular cake made from cassava flour. Her father, Diomar Tempo, 58, invented the little machine that grinds the cassava to make the flour.

The mothers are pleased that their children attend the schools in the city of Cantá, where the local government provides a bus to transport the students.

They are pioneers in recovering some features of their way of life among the 8200 indigenous Venezuelans registered as immigrants in Brazil, 10 percent of whom are recognized as refugees, according to UNHCR figures.

Venezuelan migrants stranded in Guatemala after their journey to Mexico was cut short by new restrictions issued by the United States. Most of them, unable to afford to return to their home country, await possible humanitarian return flights. CREDIT: IMG

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 28 2022 (IPS)

Thousands of Venezuelans who have crossed the treacherous Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama, or who have made the perilous journey through Central America and Mexico to reach the United States, have found themselves stranded in countries that do not want them, unable to continue their journey or to afford to return to their country.

Unexpectedly, on Oct. 12, the U.S. government announced that it would no longer accept undocumented Venezuelans who crossed its southern border, would deport them to Mexico and, in exchange, would offer up to 24,000 annual quotas, for two years, for Venezuelan immigrants to enter the country by air and under a new set of requirements.

“We were already in the United States when President Joe Biden gave the order, but they put us in a van and sent us back to Mexico. It’s not fair, on the 12th we had already crossed into the country,” a young man who identified himself as Antonio, among the first to be sent back to the border city of Tijuana, told reporters in tears.

He was one of approximately 150,000 Venezuelans who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border this year to join the 545,000 already in the U.S. by the end of 2021, according to U.S. authorities.

Raul was in a group that took a week to cross the jungle and rivers in the Darien Gap, bushwhacking in the rain and through the mud, suffering from hunger, thirst, and the threat of vermin and assailants. When he arrived at the indigenous village of Lajas Blancas in eastern Panama, he heard about the new U.S. regulation that rendered his dangerous journey useless.

There he told Venezuelan opposition politician Tomás Guanipa, who visited the village in October, that “the journey is too hard, I saw people die, someone I could not save because a river swept him away, and it was not worth it. Now what I have to do is return, alive, to my country.”

In Panama, as in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and of course Mexico, there are now thousands of Venezuelans stranded, some still trying to reach and cross the U.S. border, others trying to get the funds they need to return home.

They fill the shelters that are already overburdened and with few resources to care for them. Sometimes they sleep on the streets, or are seen walking and begging for food or a little money, abruptly cut off from the dream of going to live and work legally in the United States.

That aim was fueled by the fact that the United States made the possibility of granting asylum to Venezuelans more flexible, as part of its opposition to the government of President Nicolás Maduro, which U.S. authorities consider illegitimate.

In addition, it established a protection status that temporarily allowed Venezuelans who reached the U.S. to stay and work.

Venezuela has been in the grip of an economic and political crisis over the last decade which, together with the impoverishment of the population, has produced the largest exodus in the history of the hemisphere: according to United Nations agencies, 7.1 million people have left the country – a quarter of the population.

Venezuelan migrants walk in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez between the Rio Grande and the wall that separates them from the United States, a border that they will no longer be able to cross on foot but only by air and with express permission from Washington. CREDIT: Rey R. Jáuregui/Pie de Página

Caught up in the elections

The flood of Venezuelan immigrants pouring across the southern border coincided with the tough campaign for the mid-term elections for the U.S. Congress in November, which could result in the control of both chambers by the Republican Party, strongly opposed to Democratic President Biden.

Republican governors and candidates from the south, strongly opposed to the government’s immigration policy and flexibility towards Venezuelans, decided to send busloads and even a plane full of Venezuelan asylum seekers to northern localities governed by Democratic authorities.

Thus, through misleading promises, hundreds of Venezuelans were bussed or flown and abandoned out in the open in New York, Washington, D.C. or Martha’s Vineyard, an island where millionaires spend their summers in the northeastern state of Massachusetts.

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International denounced the use of migrants as political spoils or as a weapon in the election campaign.

Against this backdrop, the Biden administration changed its policy towards Venezuelans, closing the country’s doors to them at the southern border, reactivating Title 42, a pandemic public health order that allows for the immediate expulsion of people for health reasons, and reached an agreement with Mexico to return migrants to that country.

The 24,000 annual quotas provided as a consolation, for migrants who have sponsors responsible for their support in the United States, plus requirements such as not attempting illegal border crossings or not having refugee status in another country, is almost equivalent to the monthly volume of Venezuelans who tried to enter the U.S. this year.

A family of migrants reaches the end of their journey through the dangerous Darien jungle, between Colombia and Panama, on their long journey to reach the border between Mexico and the United States. But a new U.S. immigration measure prohibits access to the U.S. for Venezuelans. CREDIT: Nicola Rosso/UNHCR

What happens now?

In the immediate future, those who were on their way will be left in limbo and will now have to return to their country, where many sold everything – from their clothes to their homes – to pay for their perilous journey.

Hundreds of Venezuelans have begun to arrive in Caracas on flights that they themselves have paid for from Panama, while in Mexico and other countries they await the possibility of free air travel, of a humanitarian nature, because thousands of migrants have been left destitute.

There are entire families who were already living as immigrants in other countries, such as Chile, Ecuador or Peru – where there are one million Venezuelans in Lima for example – but decided to leave due to a hostile environment or the difficulties in keeping jobs or finding decent housing, in a generalized climate of inflation in the region.

This is the case told to journalists by Héctor, who with his wife, mother-in-law and three children invested almost 10,000 dollars in tickets from Chile to the Colombian island of San Andrés, in the Caribbean, from there by boat to Nicaragua, and by land until they were taken by surprise by the U.S. government’s announcement, when they reached Guatemala.

Now, in contact with relatives in the United States, he is considering the possibility of returning to the country he left three years ago for Chile, or trying to continue on, while waiting for another option to enter the U.S.

The United States has reported that crossings or attempts to cross its border by undocumented migrants have decreased significantly since Oct. 12.

Among the justifications for its action at the time, Washington said it sought to combat human trafficking and other crimes associated with irregular migration, and to discourage dangerous border crossings in the Darien Gap.

According to Panamanian government data, between January and Oct. 15 of this year, 184,433 undocumented migrants reached Panama from the Darien jungle, 133,597 of whom were Venezuelans.

After his return to the country on Oct. 25, Guanipa the politician told IPS that at least 70 percent of the migrants who crossed the Darien Gap in the last 12 months were Venezuelans, along with other Latin Americans and people from the Caribbean or African nations.

And, after collecting personal accounts of the death-defying crossing, he urged his fellow Venezuelans to “for no reason risk their lives” on this inhospitable stretch that is the gateway from South America to Central America.

At every Latin American border, migration rules are becoming more restrictive and Venezuelans wait patiently to be allowed access, often to try to reach the farthest destinations in the hemisphere, such as Chile or the United States. CREDIT: Gema Cortés/IOM

The Venezuelan government blames the massive exodus and the dangers faced in the Darien Gap on its political and media confrontation with the United States, while claiming that the numbers of reported migrants are wildly inflated and that, on the contrary, more than 360,000 Venezuelans have returned to the country since 2018.

Heads of United Nations agencies and international humanitarian organizations believe that given the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, the flow of migrants will continue, and they therefore call on host countries to establish rules and mechanisms to facilitate the integration of the migrants into their communities.

While the United States has slammed the door shut on Venezuelan migrants, in countries such as Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and some Central American nations, new rules are also being prepared to modify the policy of extending a helping hand to Venezuelans.

For example, Ecuador overhauled the Human Mobility Law to increase the grounds for deportation, such as “representing a threat to security”, and Colombia – which has received the largest number of Venezuelans – eliminated the office for the attention and socioeconomic integration of the migrant population.

Panama will require visas for those deported from Central America or Mexico, Peru is working to change regulations for the migrant population, and the government of Chile, which in the past has expelled hundreds of migrants on flights, announced that it will take measures to prevent unwanted immigration.

Of the 7.1 million Venezuelans registered as of September as migrants by U.N. agencies, the vast majority of them having left the country since 2013, almost six million were in neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Entire families have not only sought to reach the United States or Europe, but have traveled thousands of kilometers, in journeys they could never have dreamed of, with stretches by bus but often on foot, through clandestine jungle passes or cold mountains, to reach Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina or Chile.

Others tried their luck in hostile neighboring Caribbean islands and dozens lost their lives when the overcrowded boats in which they were trying to reach safe shores were shipwrecked.

Faced with the explosive phenomenon, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) established a platform for programs to help migrants in the region and host communities, which is coordinated by a former Guatemalan vice-president, Eduardo Stein.

Of their budget for 2022, based on pledges from donor countries and institutions, for 1.7 billion dollars, they have only received 300 million dollars, in another sign that Venezuelan migrants have ceased to play a leading role on the international stage.

A partial view of the city of Punto Fijo, with the Cardón refinery in the background, on the Paraguaná peninsula, projected as a special economic zone overlooking the Caribbean in northwest Venezuela. CREDIT: Megaconstrucciones

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Sep 3 2022 (IPS)

Venezuela is preparing to replicate the experience of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), a mechanism with which more than 60 countries have tried to draw investment and accelerate economic growth, while under its avowedly socialist government a “silent neoliberalism” is gaining ground.

The aim of the SEZs is “to provide special conditions to gain the economic confidence of investors from all over the world, and productive development to put an end once and for all to oil rentism,” said President Nicolás Maduro when he promulgated the Organic Law of Special Economic Zones on Jul. 20.

The SEZs, “90 percent of which are in the global developing South, are a catalyst for economic restructuring processes and go hand in hand with the expansion of the neoliberal economy,” sociologist Emiliano Terán, a researcher with the non-governmental Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology, told IPS.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), there were 5,383 SEZs in the world in 2019 and another 508 under construction, of which 4,772 were in developing countries – 2,543 in China alone and 737 in Southeast Asia.

In Latin America and the Caribbean there were 486 – 73 in the Dominican Republic, some 150 in Central America, seven in Mexico and 39 in Colombia.

SEZs are mainly commercial, such as free ports or free trade zones, where import quotas, tariffs, customs or sales taxes are eliminated; industrial, with an emphasis on improving infrastructure available to companies; urban or mining ventures; or export processing.

Their main characteristic is that, in order to stimulate investment, especially foreign investment, there are more flexible regulations on taxes, investment requirements, employment, paperwork and procedures, access to resources and inputs, export quotas and capital repatriation.

One of the camping areas improvised by tour operators on La Tortuga, an island with no permanent population where tourist developments are being planned that are triggering environmentalist alarms, as they may severely affect the still almost pristine ecosystem of the island and its surrounding Caribbean waters. CREDIT: Jorge Muñoz/Aleteia

An eye on the environment

In Venezuela, the first five zones decreed are the arid Paraguaná Peninsula, in the northwest; Margarita Island, in the southeastern Caribbean; La Guaira and Puerto Cabello, which are the largest ports, along the central portion of the Caribbean coast; and the remote La Tortuga Island, some 200 kilometers northeast of Caracas.

Paraguaná (an area of 3,400 square kilometers) is home to a large oil refining complex, and Margarita Island (1,020 square kilometers) has for decades been a sales tax-free zone and a tourist mecca for Venezuela’s middle class.

Puerto Cabello and La Guaira are essentially ports for imports to the populated north-central part of the country, whose main exports, oil and metals, are shipped from docks in the production areas in the east and west.

Hotel complexes, airports, marinas and golf courses are being planned for La Tortuga, which covers 156 square kilometers and has no permanent population. Environmental groups warn that its waters, reefs and the island itself are home to five species of turtles, 73 species of birds and dozens of species of fish and cetaceans.

Sociologist Emiliano Terán (R) with economists Luis Crespo (C) and Carlos Lazo (L) take part in a forum at the Central University of Venezuela critical of the announced special economic zones. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez/IPS

Limited economy

“The environmental issue is a concern, but it is hard to believe that the government has the resources or the investors for the number of hotels planned for La Tortuga,” economist Luis Oliveros, a professor at the Metropolitan and Central Universities of Venezuela, told IPS.

The decreed Venezuelan SEZs “seem more like announcements than realities, and although we like the government to think of growth and development hand in hand with private investment, much more is needed. It has yet to be clarified what exactly the government is pursuing with these zones,” Oliveros said.

In Venezuela “creating SEZs has limitations, such as the sanctions (imposed by the United States and the European Union) and the need to generate macroeconomic stability and legal certainty, which are pending issues,” he added.

After seven years of sharp decline – and three years of hyperinflation – Venezuela’s annual gross domestic product, which exceeded 300 billion dollars a decade ago, now stands between 50 and 60 billion dollars, according to economists.

Oil production, the main lever of the economy and source of tax revenues, has shrunk and is starved of new investments, while the State desperately seeks income by exporting crude oil at a discount or selling gold that is extracted at the cost of great environmental damage in the southeast of the country.

Attracting investment may be an uphill struggle for SEZs that have still not been fully mapped out, considering that, for example, major companies have not knocked on the door to raise oil production – 600,000 barrels per day when a decade ago it was three million – despite the favorable signals sent by the United States.

Since March, informal contacts between Washington and Caracas, prompted by the impact of the war in Ukraine on the world energy market, have explored, without success so far, easing sanctions and other measures to bring Venezuela back to the U.S. oil market with new investments.

Juan Griego Bay in the north of Margarita Island, already half a century old as a sales tax-free zone and tourist mecca for Venezuela’s middle class, is now one of the country’s five special economic zones. CREDIT: Mipci

Neoliberal plan

In the southeast of the country, an area rich in gold, iron, diamonds, coltan and other minerals, the 112,000 square kilometer Orinoco Mining Arc (larger than Bulgaria, Cuba or Portugal) was decreed in 2016 as a “strategic development zone”, and its control and management was handed over to the armed forces.

The Mining Arc “has been a precedent for a new model promoted by the State to attract investments, but with depredation of the environment and restriction of wages and workers’ rights,” warned Luis Crespo, professor of Economics at the Central University of Venezuela, during a forum at that university.

“The special economic zones are part of a silent neoliberal adjustment plan driven forward by the government of President Maduro,” said Crespo.

The Venezuelan SEZ law – enacted by the legislature, which has been boycotted by most of the political opposition – states that its purpose is to develop a new production model, promote domestic and foreign economic activity, and diversify and increase exports.

It also aims to promote innovation, industry and technology transfer, create jobs and “ensure the environmental sustainability of production processes.”

The terminology about socialism or transition to socialism, frequent in the political discourse of the government and the ruling United Socialist Party, is absent from the legislation of the SEZs and from the repeated calls for private capital.

“The example of China is being followed, as it is by other countries, in using the SEZs as a showcase for heterodox forms of capital accumulation, in a process of progressive neoliberalization of the economy, as the oil model of production and distribution of wealth is being exhausted,” Terán said.

He added that “the SEZs cannot be seen only in terms of macroeconomic indicators,” as they become “zones of social and environmental sacrifice, with a new political geography of dispossession, and with the cheapening of labor, especially that of women workers.”

According to UNCTAD, although there are differences in SEZs from one country to another and within countries, their common features include having a clearly defined geographic area, a regulatory regime that is distinct from the rest of the economy, and special infrastructure support for the development of their activities.

A view of the border crossing between Colombia and Venezuela over the Simón Bolívar Bridge (in southwest Venezuela and northeast Colombia), when there was free transit and intense activity before the border was closed and relations between the two countries broke down. Now Caracas proposes to create a binational special economic zone in the area. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez/IPS

More politics

Venezuela’s SEZs will be guided by a council to be freely appointed by the president, each will have a single authority to be named by the president, and the decree establishing one of the zones must be considered by the legislature within 10 working days or it will be approved, without discussion.

Areas such as the SEZs, the Mining Arc or special military zones in practice modify the political-administrative division of the country, which only in theory is a federal republic with 23 states plus a capital district.

In another political move, on Aug. 23 Maduro publicly proposed to his new Colombian counterpart, leftwing President Gustavo Petro, who took office on Aug. 7, the creation of a special binational economic zone between southwestern Venezuela and northeastern Colombia.

“We are going to propose to President Petro the construction of a large economic, commercial and productive zone between the department of Norte de Santander (Colombia) and the state of Táchira (Venezuela),” Maduro said.

Diplomatic, political, commercial and transit relations between the neighboring countries have been severed since February 2019.

In Táchira, business spokespersons have expressed their support for this Andean state of 11,000 square kilometers to obtain special regimes that favor trade with the neighboring country, and their peers in Colombia are betting on a recovery of bilateral trade, which prospered until the first decade of this century.

Terán described the projected creation of the SEZs as a possible “new pact of elites in Venezuela,” after more than 20 years of acute political confrontation, but warned that “there is an alternative, because although fragmented, dispersed and with a new look, protests against these pacts have never ceased.”

Children and adolescents in a Yanomami community in Parima, on the southern border with Brazil, the area where four indigenous people were shot dead and others injured when they confronted military troops last March. CREDIT: Wataniba

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 12 2022 (IPS)

The voracious search for gold in southern Venezuela, practiced by thousands of illegal miners under the protection of various armed groups, represents the greatest threat today to the lives of indigenous peoples, their habitat and their cultures, according to their organizations and human rights defenders.

In this part of the Amazon jungle, “mining, violence, habitat destruction, death from disease and forced migration make up a context that indigenous people are calling a silent genocide,” researcher Aimé Tillet, who has worked in the area for many years, told IPS.

At the other end of the country, along the northwest border with Colombia, indigenous people are fighting for the delimitation of their territories, which has led to clashes and deaths in their attempts to recover ancestral lands, while they are often reduced to destitution.

There are common features of life in border regions that are home to indigenous peoples, such as neglect by the government, which fails to fulfill its duties in health, education, security, provision of food, fuel and transportation, supplies, communications and consultations with native peoples regarding the use of their land and resources.

The government foments mining activity and in 2016 decreed the “Orinoco Mining Arc” on the right bank of the Orinoco river – an area of 111,844 square kilometers, larger than Bulgaria, Cuba or Portugal.

In parallel, it established an armed forces company, Camimpeg, to spearhead the mining of gold, diamonds, coltan and other conventional and rare minerals, in which the country is rich.

Opacity is a stain on the management of military companies by the authorities, according to non-governmental organizations such as Citizen Control for Security and Defense.

The local press has reported on the involvement of military and police units in the region in incidents related to mining activity that have sparked protests by indigenous people and human rights activists, ranging from deaths of native people in altercations to massacres in which “unknown groups” have killed dozens of people.

Artisanal and illegal mining, in hundreds of deforested areas and along rivers contaminated with mercury used to extract gold from ore, are often controlled by criminal gangs that call themselves “syndicates” and that traffic in gold and supplies, as well as in people who work in the mines, who are often subjected to forced labor.

According to human rights groups, for some years now another danger has been Colombian guerrillas, particularly the National Liberation Army (ELN), which is involved in mining and other illegal activities in the southern state of Amazonas, as well as dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which laid down its arms under a 2016 peace deal.

In the Sierra de Perijá mountains, home to three native peoples and part of the northern border between Colombia and Venezuela, the ELN has made inroads into indigenous communities, setting up camps, collecting “vacunas” – taxes or protection payment – from cattle ranchers, overseeing cattle smuggling and recruiting young people as guerrilla fighters.

A map showing the areas that are home to the main indigenous peoples of Venezuela, according to the governmental Simón Bolívar Geographic Institute. The most numerous groups are in the extreme northwest, south and east of the country. CREDIT: IGVSB

Shots in the jungle

On Mar. 20, four Yanomami Indians were shot and killed in the Sierra de Parima mountains that mark the border with Brazil in the extreme south, by Venezuelan Air Force troops after an altercation over the internet signal and a router shared by the military and members of a native community.

The Yanomami, who have lived in the jungles of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil for thousands of years – considered a living testimony to the Neolithic era who only came into contact with the rest of the world a few decades ago – have found mobile telephones a useful means of communication in their widely dispersed communities.

What happened in Parima “cannot be taken as an isolated reaction, but must be seen as the result of an accumulation of tensions and abuses, of a lack of a differentiated treatment based on the right to positive discrimination,” declared Wataniba, an organization supporting the indigenous peoples of Venezuela’s Amazon region, at the time.

“All these tensions that are experienced daily on the borders are a consequence of extractivism, coupled with abuses of power by the military, transculturation and the lack of concrete actions by the State to meet the basic needs of indigenous peoples,” the organization added.

Hundreds of informal and illegal gold mines deforest land, damage the soil, pollute the water with mercury and exploit indigenous and other workers under forms of modern slavery in Venezuela’s Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: RAISG

Undeterrable garimpeiros

In 1989, a decree law by then President Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922-2010, who governed the country from 1974-1979 and 1989-1993) banned for 50 years all mining activity in the state of Amazonas in the extreme south of the country, an area of 178,000 square kilometers of jungle with fragile soils, home to 200,000 inhabitants, more than half of them members of 20 indigenous peoples.

For decades, however, thousands of garimpeiros – the Brazilian name for informal gold prospectors, who originally came from Brazil – have made incursions into Amazonas, and in recent years on a larger scale, using airstrips and a large number of motor pumps, and imposing relations, sometimes involving trade but above all exploitation, with indigenous communities and individuals.

On Jul. 28, 2021, the Kuyujani and Kuduno indigenous organizations, as well as the Tuduma Saka court of justice of the Sanemá ethnic group (Yanomami branch) and their Ye’kuana (Carib) neighbors, denounced the presence of garimpeiros in four communities, in documents delivered to the governmental Ombudsman’s Office.

More than 400 armed garimpeiros, according to the complaint, were working with 30 machines extracting precious minerals in the Upper Orinoco area, forcing men and boys to work in mining, and enslaving and forcing women into prostitution.

The report added that the destruction of the forests has also affected the vegetable gardens of local indigenous communities, which have become dependent on food supplies from the garimpeiros.

Tillet said the incursion of guerrillas and illegal miners in the south also creates hotbeds of inter-ethnic conflict, because some indigenous people and communities desperate to find a means of survival accept the miners, while others (such as the Uwottija or Piaroas of the middle Orinoco) strongly oppose such incursions.

A view of the damage caused by uncontrolled mining in an area of southern Venezuela. CREDIT: SOS Orinoco/RAISG

Modern-day slavery

In the “currutelas” or mining villages, young men and boys work extracting gold-rich sands, while women are employed to cook, sweep, wash and clean the camps, and are exploited sexually.

This situation, seen in the hundreds of mining camps in Amazonas and the southeastern state of Bolívar, which covers some 238,000 square kilometers, is aggravated in the case of indigenous peoples, lawyer Eduardo Trujillo, director of the Andrés Bello Catholic University’s Human Rights Center, which is conducting several studies in the area, told IPS.

“Under the control of armed groups, dynamics of violence are generated, with confrontations and deaths, and conditions of modern-day slavery, where omission translates into acquiescence on the part of the Venezuelan State,” Trujillo added.

In particular, indigenous women recruited to work in the camps “are caught up in a dynamic of violence: their work is not voluntary, sometimes they are not paid, and they are subjected to risks to their health and lives,” he said.

Mining in Venezuela contributes to the figures of the International Labor Organization (ILO), according to which more than 40 million people around the world are victims of modern-day slavery, 152 million are victims of child labor and 25 million are forced laborers.

Autana hill, seen from the banks of the Cuao River, a tributary of the middle Orinoco. The Uwottija people consider it sacred and reject the presence in the area of guerrilla groups from Colombia, associated with illegal mining. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Adios habitat, culture and life

According to the 2011 census, at least 720,000 of Venezuela’s 28 million inhabitants are indigenous, belonging to some 40 native peoples, and close to half a million live in rural indigenous areas, mainly in border regions.

Although the largest indigenous group (60 percent) is the Wayúu, an Arawak-speaking people who live on the Colombian-Venezuelan Guajira peninsula in the north, most of the native peoples are in the south of the country. Some groups have thousands of members but others only a few hundred, and their languages and ancestral knowledge are at risk of dying out.

The environmental organization Provita reports that 380,000 hectares have been deforested south of the Orinoco in the last 20 years, while the area dedicated to mining increased from 18,500 to 55,000 hectares between 2000 and 2020.

Riverbanks and headwaters have been especially affected, many in areas theoretically protected as national parks. Tillet stressed that, in addition to the environmental damage they suffer, these are areas of limited resources for subsistence, for which indigenous communities and miners are now competing.

“Because they depend on mining for an income, indigenous people are forced to abandon their traditional activities of planting, fishing and hunting, their diet deteriorates, malnutrition and diseases such as malaria increase, and they are forced to say goodbye to their land, to move and migrate,” said Tillet.

The researcher said that health services, which are the responsibility of the State, have practically disappeared, and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic, while education has collapsed as teachers move away and migrate, with the result that “children who should be in school now work in exploitative conditions in the mines.”

In the document they presented to the Ombudsman’s Office, the Yanomami and Ye’kuana organizations said they were victims of selective killings, contamination of water with mercury, contagion from diseases and, in short, “a silent cultural genocide.”

Children from a Uwottija (Piaroa) community in the middle Orinoco region, where organizations of this native people reject the presence of guerrilla groups from neighboring Colombia, associated with illegal mining. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Territory, an elusive right

The current constitution, adopted in 1999, recognized the right of indigenous peoples to conserve their cultures and possess their ancestral territories, and provided for the expeditious demarcation of these areas – which has only happened for a small part of their territories.

In the case of the state of Amazonas, which is almost entirely the habitat of indigenous people, the demarcation process has been ignored, preventing indigenous peoples from laying claim to their rights, demanding the required consultation processes and consent for the exploitation of their territory, and eventually obtaining benefits from their land.

Tillet said that “demarcation is still a pending issue, for which there is no political will, but the avalanche of mining has relativized its importance, because if protected areas such as national parks or natural monuments are violated by mining, you can imagine that the same thing is true for indigenous territories.”

Examples are the 30,000-square-kilometer Canaima National Park in the southeast, rich in tepuis – steep, flat-topped mountains – and large waterfalls, and the 3,200-square-kilometer Yapacana, in the middle of Amazonas state, where mining is practiced while the authorities turn a blind eye.

On the other hand, in the northwest, the struggle for land of the Yukpa people in the center of the Sierra de Perijá continues, with episodes of violence. Like their neighbors, the Barí of Chibcha origin, and the Wayúu, they are a bi-national people, although with more members of the community on the Venezuelan side than in Colombia.

The crux of the conflict is that throughout the 20th century the indigenous people were pushed into the most inhospitable lands in the mountains, while the plains, on the western shore of Lake Maracaibo, were occupied by cattle ranchers.

Some communities have accepted plots of land – the least fertile areas – granted by the government. But a resistant group of Yukpa, led by chief Sabino Romero until he was murdered in 2013, lays claim to land occupied by cattle ranches, while combating incursions by smugglers and guerrillas in the mountains.

Sabino Romero, a Yukpa chief from the Sierra de Perijá mountains bordering Colombia, was killed in 2013 in the context of his people’s struggle to recover lands occupied by cattle ranchers throughout the 20th century. CREDIT: Homo et Natura Society

“Other members of Sabino’s family and followers of his have been killed over the years and have endured attacks by hired killers and employees of cattle ranchers, and even by the National Guard (militarized police) or the ELN,” Lusbi Portillo, leader of the environmental Homo et Natura Society, told IPS.

Ana María Fernández, a Yukpa activist in the area, said that “we are not only fighting against large landowners, police forces and the National Guard, and the State, which does not allow the demarcation of our lands. We are also attacked by Colombian guerrillas and hired killers contracted by ranchers.”

On the other hand, some Yukpa indigenous people sometimes seize cattle as a way to collect on the damages inflicted on them. Others, less combative, “charge a right of way on what used to be their lands, to earn some money to eat and survive,” said Portillo.

The activist said that one alternative is for the State to fulfill its commitments to compensate cattle ranchers whose farms must be returned to the indigenous people, and to make good on its duty to provide transportation routes for the communities’ agricultural production and health care in the face of the increase in diseases.

Ana María Fernández is an activist from a Yukpa community that is demanding the demarcation of their ancestral territories in the western Sierra de Perijá, where the best lands were occupied by cattle ranches throughout the 20th century. CREDIT: OEPV

Time to migrate

The crisis of the second decade of this century in Venezuela has forced thousands of indigenous people to migrate, as part of the diaspora of six million Venezuelans who have left the country since 2014, overwhelmingly heading to neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries, the United States and Spain.

The largest group is the Warao, a people living in the northeastern Orinoco delta, whose southern zone is affected by mining and logging activities, and who have gone mostly to Brazil, but also to Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.

The Warao “number less than 50,000, and the migration of at least 6,000, more than 10 percent of them, is a decrease in numbers that speaks volumes about the human rights situation of this population. In northern Brazil there are some 5,000, and Brazil already considers them to be a distinct, nomadic indigenous people in its territory,” Tillet commented.

Pablo Tapo, a member of the Baré people and coordinator of the Amazon Indigenous Human Rights Movement, compiled a report according to which more than 4,500 indigenous people from nine ethnic groups in his region crossed the border into Colombia in three years.

In both cities and rural areas, “communities are left on their own because there is no attention or services, in outpatient hospitals there are no doctors, medicines or supplies, and there is no food security,” said Tapo.

In the southwestern plains state of Apure, the armed confrontation that months ago involved Colombian guerrillas and Venezuelan military forced the flight to Colombia of indigenous groups living on the Venezuelan side of the Meta River.

In the extreme southeast, next to Brazil, the Pemón people have suffered from the drop in tourism due to the insecurity associated with mining and the pandemic, which has created an incentive to migrate. And in the northwest, for peoples such as the Wayúu, continuously crossing the border is an ageold practice that has never changed.

At the center of the indigenous people’s plight is mining, particularly the insatiable craving for gold, of which, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this country can produce some 75 tons per year, although actual extraction, both legal and clandestine, is possibly half that.

View of the Ras Tanura terminal in Saudi Arabia, the oil exporter receiving the highest revenues in the context of the crisis generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. CREDIT: Aramco

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 13 2022 (IPS)

The oil and gas supply crisis unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine represents new business opportunities for the oil-producing countries of the developing South, both traditional and emerging, and also for accelerating the global transition to green forms of energy.

“The countries with the most positive economic effects are the net exporters that depend on hydrocarbon revenues for a large portion of their budget, economic activity and foreign exchange,” Nate Graham, head of energy at the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue, told IPS.

In Latin America this is the case, Graham said, for “countries such as Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, while on the other hand, countries in the Caribbean, Central America and Chile, which import oil and gas, will suffer the opposite effect.”

The opportunities arose after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, due to the abrupt withdrawal, in markets with fragile balances, of some three million (159-liter) barrels per day of crude oil from Russia, and the decision of a large part of Europe to cancel gas imports from Russia and look for other suppliers.

Oil and gas producers in the South “are enjoying extraordinary revenues,” Venezuelan oil geopolitics expert Kenneth Ramirez told IPS, “but those who are not producers have higher energy bills and are suffering from higher prices for food, of which Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers.”

Graham said: “Even in oil-producing countries, rising consumer fuel prices put pressure on governments to provide subsidies, which can then be politically difficult to reverse when prices fall again.”

But it seems that it is not yet time to heed all the warnings, given the new “(black) gold rush” unleashed in a world dependent on fossil fuel energy and aware that it will continue to be so for several more decades.

The oil production vessel Liza Destiny is used by Exxon to develop oil fields under Atlantic waters that Guyana has not yet definitively demarcated with neighboring Venezuela. CREDIT: SBM Offshore

Room for everyone

In South America one of the first to benefit has been Guyana, which extracted from the Atlantic Ocean – in waters pending delimitation with Caracas, noted Ramirez, who chairs the private Venezuelan Council of International Relations – some 110,000 barrels per day (b/d) in 2021 and expects to add another 220,000 within a year.

To achieve this, U.S. oil giant Exxon, with a century and a half of experience in the industry, accelerated its decision to invest another 10 billion dollars in Guyana.

Neighboring Suriname is also hoping for new investments, and traditional exporters Colombia and Ecuador must be rubbing their hands together in anticipation. But the most striking note was a new contact between the United States and Venezuela.

Formal ties between the two political opponents are broken, Washington has imposed sanctions that prevent Caracas from freely trading its oil and the South American country has made a show of being Russia’s ally in the region.

Venezuela, a major oil exporter throughout the 20th century, with production exceeding three million b/d between 1997 and 2001, now produces less than 700,000 b/d, following a decline in its oil industry under the administration of President Nicolás Maduro, in office since 2013.

But the country has gigantic reserves, close to 300 billion barrels, mostly of heavy crude, and the market read the new contact from Washington as a sign that the United States has decided that the adiós to Russian supplies will last for a long time.

The US company Chevron, which maintains a minimum level of production in Venezuela with Washington’s permission, could invest to produce another 200,000 b/d in a year, and the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) is studying the leasing of new oil tankers, according to industry sources.

A technician works at the Tema refinery in Ghana, an emerging oil producer in West Africa. CREDIT: TOR

In Africa, in addition to the best-known producers, such as Nigeria, Angola, Libya, Algeria and Egypt, there are the hopes of the smaller and newer producers, such as Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan and above all Ghana, which, from producing a few thousand barrels a day five years ago, now produces almost 170,000 barrels per day.

Iran is another long-time oil producer which is again flexing with the crisis: it maintains energy alliances with Russia while the tug-of-war with the United States – which has sanctioned it for more than 40 years – continues over its nuclear program, whose redefinition may free it from some sanctions.

Tehran, which produces 2.5 million b/d, is preparing to increase its crude oil exports from 1.2 to 1.4 million b/d, and has a long-term plan to return to a production level of four million b/d.

Among the major beneficiaries of the crisis are the Gulf Arab exporters and in general the partners of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which act in alliance with 10 other producers in the OPEC+ group.

Saudi Arabia’s Aramco alone already recorded pre-war profits of 110 billion dollars in 2021 (compared to 49 billion dollars in 2020). Both the kingdom and the neighboring United Arab Emirates have been asked by Washington to increase oil production in order to avoid a price spike.

The main benchmark crudes, U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and North Sea Brent, were trading at around 70 dollars per barrel in 2021, but with the Ukraine crisis their prices soared: Brent has been holding steady this April at above 100 dollars and WTI at close to 95 dollars.

Global demand for crude oil is approximately 100 million b/d, of which OPEC contributes 32 million b/d, plus another 14 million b/d from the 10 OPEC+ allies, including Russia, Kazakhstan and Mexico.

OPEC+ rejected the request of large consumers, considering that the price increase is not due to market fundamentals but to the conflict in Ukraine, and agreed to add only 432,000 b/d to the group’s supply, starting in May.

“Nobody listened when we said more investments were needed in oil and gas,” said Emirati Oil Minister Suhail al-Mazroui. “Raising production will only be in a measured way and through a consensus among members.”

U.S. President Joe Biden then ordered the release of one million b/d for six months from his country’s strategic reserves of more than 650 million barrels, to increase the crude oil available to refineries and thus try to curb the rise in fuel prices.

Meanwhile, Algeria allowed itself the luxury of maintaining steady prices for the gas it exports to all its customers but not to Spain, in retaliation for a change in Madrid’s position on the dispute over the self-determination of the Saharawi people.

A crude desalter unit on its way to the Orinoco Oil Belt in southeastern Venezuela, considered the largest deposit of heavy crude on the planet and whose diminished production could receive a new boost as a result of the current energy crisis. CREDIT: PDVSA

The weight of Russia

And Moscow has stated that it will receive payment in rubles for its oil and gas exports to Europe, a region 40 percent dependent on Russian gas and 27 percent on its oil, with which it has not been able to completely do without after six weeks of war.

The late U.S. politician John McCain (1936-2018) said in 2014 that Russia “is a gas station masquerading as a country” to underline the nation’s heavyweight status in the field of fossil fuel energy.

Of the 1.7 trillion barrels of crude oil reserves on the planet, Russia has 107 billion, surpassed only by Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iran and Iraq. The Eurasian country produces 10.8 million b/d (more than 10 percent of the world total), behind only the United States and almost as much as Saudi Arabia.

In gas its weight is even greater, since it has 20 percent of the world’s reserves (38 of 188 trillion cubic meters), making it the leader by far, and with its annual production of 638 billion cubic meters it covers more than 18 percent of global demand.

The richest will earn more

Among the winners, oil companies will earn the most, and this year the 25 largest could make profits between 100 and 120 billion dollars higher than in 2021, when, according to the U.S. organization Accountable.US, they made record profits of 237 billion dollars.

Consumers, meanwhile, will pay the price. In almost all of Latin America a liter of gasoline costs well over a dollar (1.75 dollars in Uruguay, 1.40 in Chile, and 1.32 in Guatemala, for example) and even in up-and-coming Guyana – which has crude oil but no refinery, Graham pointed out – it sells for almost 1.10 dollars.

In the United States, where one out of every five barrels of oil the world produces is consumed, a liter cost 75 cents a year ago and this April averaged 1.10 dollars, with higher prices on the Pacific coast.

Gasoline prices this year exceeded four dollars per gallon (more than a dollar per liter) in the United States, and in an attempt to curb prices the government is releasing part of its strategic crude reserves so that the refineries have sufficient supplies. CREDIT: Fidel Márquez/IPS

Path to greener energy

In Europe, “the majority are now betting on a pragmatic and possibilist vision, which continues to focus on renewable energies and energy efficiency, but a debate is opening up about the use of nuclear energy and even coal, which would make a better balance between energy security and climate change,” said Ramírez.

Graham believes that “the present crisis underscores the geopolitical risks of dependence on foreign oil and gas and the importance of reducing it for security reasons, which can be an accelerating factor for the transition to renewable technologies and green hydrogen (obtained from clean energy sources).”

But “on the other hand, some may interpret the present crisis as a reason to increase domestic and regional hydrocarbon production in the short term, which may extend dependence on fossil fuels, while companies recover the costs of new investments,” he said.

In addition, there is pressure on governments to provide fuel subsidies to lessen the impact of the crisis on consumers, which may be politically difficult to reverse and might thus generate the opposite effect to what is needed to drive the energy transition, Graham said.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), made up of major industrialized consumers, recognized at its Mar. 24 meeting held to assess measures to address the crisis “the importance to energy security and clean energy transitions of ensuring clean, affordable, reliable, resilient, and secure energy infrastructure.”

Energy security and the transition to clean energies are “inextricably linked” in the view of the IEA, and its executive director, Fatih Birol, stated that “the response to this energy crisis will be an acceleration of the transition to clean energy,” not necessarily for climate reasons, but for energy security.

A Venezuelan family carrying a few belongings crosses the Simon Bolivar Bridge at the border into Colombia. Over the years, the migration flow has grown due to increasing numbers of people with unsatisfied basic needs. CREDIT: Siegfried Modola/UNHCR

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 26 2021 (IPS)

The exodus of more than five million Venezuelans in the last six years has led countries in the developing South, Venezuela’s neighbours, to set an example with respect to welcoming and integrating displaced populations, with shared benefits for the new arrivals and the nations that receive them.

In this region “there is a living laboratory, where insertion and absorption efforts are working. The new arrivals are turning what was seen as a burden into a contribution to the host communities and nations,” Eduardo Stein, head of the largest assistance programme for displaced Venezuelans, told IPS.

According to figures from the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), 5,650,000 people have left Venezuela, mainly crossing into neighbouring countries, as migrants, displaced persons or refugees, as of July 2021.

“This is the largest migration crisis in the history of Latin America,” Stein said by phone from his Guatemala City office in the Interagency Coordination Platform for Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants (R4V), created by the UNHCR and IOM in partnership with 159 other diverse entities working throughout the region."This region is a living laboratory, where insertion and absorption efforts are working. The new arrivals are turning what was seen as a burden into a contribution to the host communities and nations." -- Eduardo Stein

Colombia, the neighbour with the most intense historical relationship, stands out for receiving daily flows of hundreds and even thousands of Venezuelans, who already number almost 1.8 million in the country, and for providing them with Temporary Protection Status that grants them documentation and access to jobs, services and other rights.

Colombia’s Fundación Renacer, which has assisted thousands of child and adolescent survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and other types of sexual and gender-based violence, is a model for how to welcome and help displaced persons.

Renacer, staffed by activists such as Mayerlin Vergara, 2020 winner of the UNHCR’s annual Nansen Refugee Award for outstanding aid workers who help refugees, displaced and stateless people, rescues girls and young women from places like brothels and bars where they are forced into sexual or labour exploitation, often by trafficking networks that capture the most vulnerable migrants.

“In Colombian society as a whole there has been a process of understanding, after the phenomenon was the other way around for several decades in the 20th century, of people displaced by the violence and crisis in Colombia being welcomed in Venezuela,” Camilo González, president of the Colombian Institute for Development and Peace Studies, told IPS.

When the great migratory wave began in 2014-2015, “many Venezuelans were taken on as half-price cheap labour by businesses, such as coffee harvesters and others in the big cities, but that situation has improved, even despite the slowdown of the pandemic,” said González.

Stein mentioned the positive example set by Colombia’s flower exporters, which employed many Venezuelan women in cutting and packaging, a task that did not require extensive training.

The head of the R4V, who was vice-president of Guatemala between 2004 and 2008 and has held various international positions, noted that in the first phase, the receiving countries appreciated the arrival of “highly prepared Venezuelans, very well trained professionals.”

Yukpa Indians from Venezuela register upon arrival at a border post in Colombia. The legalisation and documentation of migrants arranged by the Colombian government allows migrants to access services and exercise rights in the neighbouring country. CREDIT: Johanna Reina/UNHCR

“One example would be the thousands of Venezuelan engineers who arrived in Argentina and were integrated into productive activities in a matter of weeks,” he said.

But, Stein pointed out, “the following wave of Venezuelans leaving their country was not made up of professionals; the profile changed to people with huge unsatisfied basic needs, without a great deal of training but with basic skills, and nevertheless the borders remained open, and they received very generous responses.”

But, he acknowledged, in some cases “the arrival of this irregular, undocumented migration was linked to acts of violence and violations of the law, which created internal tension.”

Iván Briscoe, regional head of the Brussels-based conflict observatory International Crisis Group, told IPS that in the case of Colombia, “it has been impressive to receive almost two million Venezuelans, in a country of 50 million inhabitants, 40 percent of whom live in poverty.”

Colombia continues to be plagued by social problems, as shown by the street protests raging since April, “and therefore the temporary protection status, a generous measure by President Iván Duque’s government, does not guarantee that Venezuelan migrants will have access to the social services they may demand,” Briscoe said.

The large number of Venezuelans “means an additional cost of 100 million dollars per year for the health services alone,” said González, who spoke to IPS by telephone from the Colombian capital.

Against this backdrop, there have been expressions of xenophobia, as various media outlets interpreted statements by Bogotá Mayor Claudia López, who after a crime committed by a Venezuelan, suggested the deportation of “undesirable” nationals from that country.

There were also demonstrations against the influx of Venezuelans in Ecuador and Panama, as well as Peru, where the policy of President-elect Pedro Castillo towards the one million Venezuelan immigrants is still unclear, as well as deportations from Chile and Trinidad and Tobago, and new obstacles to their arrival in the neighbouring Dutch islands.

“Not everything has been rosy,” Stein admitted, “as there are still very complex problems, such as the risks that, between expressions of xenophobia and the danger of trafficking, the most vulnerable migrant girls and young women face.”

However, the head of the R4V considered that “we have entered a new phase, beyond the immediate assistance that can and should be provided to those who have just arrived, and that is the insertion and productive or educational integration in the communities.”

Migrants who have benefited from Operation Welcome in Brazil, where there are more than 260,000 Venezuelans, shop at a market in the largest city in the country, São Paulo. CREDIT: Mauro Vieira/MDS-UNHCR

Throughout the region “there are places that have seen that immigrants represent an attraction for investment and labour and productive opportunities for the host communities themselves.”

Another example is provided by Brazil, with its Operação Acolhida (Operation Welcome), which includes a programme to disperse throughout its vast territory Venezuelans who came in through the northern border and first settled, precariously, in cities in the state of Amazonas.

More than 260,000 Venezuelans have arrived in Brazil – among them some 5,000 indigenous Waraos, from the Orinoco delta, and a similar number of Pemon Indians, close to the border – and some 50,000 have been recognised as refugees by the Brazilian government.

Brazil has the seventh largest Venezuelan community, after Colombia, Peru, the United States, Chile, Ecuador and Spain. It is followed by Argentina, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

Throughout the region, organisations have mushroomed, not only to provide relief but also to actively seek the insertion of Venezuelans, in some cases headed by Venezuelans themselves, as in the case of the Fundacolven foundation in Bogota.

“We are active on two fronts, because first we motivate companies to take on workers who, as immigrants, are willing to go the ‘extra mile’,” said Venezuelan Mario Camejo, one of the directors of Fundacolven.

As for the immigrants, “we help them prepare and polish their skills so that they can successfully search for and find stable employment, if they have already ‘burned their bridges’ and do not plan to return,” he added.

On this point, Stein commented that the growing insertion of Venezuelans “shows how this crisis can evolve without implying an internal solution in Venezuela,” a country whose projected population according to the census of 10 years ago should have been 32.9 million and is instead around 28 million.

Based on surveys carried out in several countries, the head of R4V indicated that “the majority of Venezuelans who have migrated and settled in these host countries are not interested in going back in the short term.”

Julio Meléndez is a young Venezuelan who has found employment in food distribution at a hospital in Cali, in western Colombia. Labour insertion is key for the integration of migrants in host communities. CREDIT: Laura Cruz Cañón/UNHCR

According to Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, they have benefited from the fact that the countries of the region “are an example, and the rest of the world can learn a lot about the inclusion and integration of refugees in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

In the north of the region, Mexico is dealing with a migration phenomenon on four fronts. On one hand, 12 million Mexicans live in the United States. And on the other, every year hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way through the country, mainly Central Americans and in recent years also people from the Caribbean, Venezuelans and Africans.

In addition, the United States sends back to Mexico hundreds of thousands of people who cross its southern border without the required documents. And in fourth place, the least well-known aspect: Mexico is home to more than one million migrants and refugees who have chosen to make their home in that country.

Major recipients of refugees and asylum seekers in other regions are Turkey, in the eastern Mediterranean, hosting 3.7 million (92 percent Syrians), and, with 1.4 million displaced persons each, Pakistan (which has received a massive influx of people from Afghanistan) and Uganda (refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other neighbouring countries).

In Sudan there are one million refugees, Bangladesh, Iran and Lebanon host 900,000 each, while in the industrialised North the cases of Germany, which received 1.2 million refugees from the Middle East, and the United States, which has 300,000 refugees and one million asylum seekers in its territory, stand out.

El Helicoide, a building in Caracas, Venezuela, currently headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN). Credit: Flakiz/Flickr

By Andrés Cañizález
CARACAS, Oct 20 2020 (IPS)

In mid-September, the United Nations Human Rights Council approved the renewal, for another two years, of the mandate of the Fact-Finding Mission to determine and document the existence of crimes against humanity in Venezuela, under the government of Nicolás Maduro.

In this way, the Council endorsed the work that this independent mission had already been conducting for one year. Weeks before, the team of experts had released a devastating report, prepared after reviewing slightly over 3,000 cases of which it rigorously documented 233.

In order to fully understand what is happening in Venezuela in terms of Human Rights, it may be convenient to pay close attention to one story, one of the many that make up this report. Due to our professional bias, we have stopped at a case clearly linked to freedom of expression and information.

Andrés Cañizález

For this piece, I have picked the events involving Pedro Jaimes Criollo, described in the UN report as from paragraph 727. This case clearly exposes the repressive policy on expression and information. Tweeting just turns out to be a crime, as the government of Nicolás Maduro understands it.

An aviation aficionado, this Venezuelan tweeter’s handles were @AereoMeteo and @AereoMeteo2. Disseminating meteorological and aeronautical information was his hobby, until May 2018.

On May 3, 2018, strikingly a date on which free speech is celebrated (World Press Freedom Day), Pedro Jaimes tweeted the flight path of the presidential plane on which Nicolás Maduro was headed for a ceremony in Aragua State, at the center of the country.

As underscored in the UN report, the tweeter obtained information in the public domain about the models of planes used by the Office of the President of Venezuela, data available on Wikipedia, and tracked the flight using the (equally open and public) FlightRadar24 app.

As of May 2018, there was no law or executive order in force classifying flight information as confidential.

A week after his tweets, Pedro Jaimes was arrested without any warrant by the National Bolivarian Intelligence Service (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional, SEBIN). He was arriving at his home. At the time of his arrest, he was beaten, and so was his sister as she tried to step in. When his family showed up at the SEBIN headquarters in El Helicoide (a 1950s spiral-shaped building), Caracas, officials denied that Pedro was being held there.

Several days after his arrest, this time carrying a search warrant, the SEBIN took some communications and computer equipment from his home. He was charged with using such equipment to interfere with radio communications from planes and airports; he was also indicted of revealing state secrets on Twitter.

In the report, the UN experts indicate that they have reviewed the handbooks of the equipment seized from the tweeter and that, with those devices, it was not possible either to transmit radio signals or to interfere with communications.

Pedro Jaimes Criollo, who did nothing but write tweets based on public information, was subjected to interrogations in which he was beaten with sticks or wooden bats wrapped in plastic or cloth, which leaves no marks. A bag was placed over his head and insecticide was sprayed inside, suffocating him. He was also administered electroshocks.

He was kicked in the head while on the floor, causing him to partly lose his hearing. SEBIN officials threatened to rape him with a wooden stick they had at hand.

That same month of May 2018, Provisional Prosecutor Marlon Mora filed charges against Pedro Jaimes at the Third Miranda State Control Court ([Tercer Tribunal de Control del Estado Miranda] a trial-level category), with Judge Rumely Rojas Muro presiding. He was charged with interference in operational security, revealing state secrets, and digital espionage. Although he was arrested a week after his tweets about Maduro’s flight, the prosecution claimed that he had been apprehended in flagrante delicto.

After over a month, during which time the government did not reveal the holding place of the tweeter despite the fact that his family filed for injunctive relief on several occasions, Pedro was able to call his sister, on a telephone provided by a guard at El Helicoide, to tell her where he was being held.

During the court proceedings on his matter, he was not allowed to appoint his defense lawyers, was denied access to his own docket, and the basis of the indictment was the interviews with the very SEBIN agents who had detained and tortured him.

Long held in abject conditions, for some time, even without access to a bathroom to relief himself, Pedro Jaimes was released while standing trial in October 2019. His matter has since been deferred a dozen times.

“As of the time of writing, Mr. Jaimes continued to await trial, with precautionary measures including monthly presentation at court and a prohibition on leaving the country. He continued to suffer from psychological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and physical trauma,” reads the UN report, released in mid-September.

His crime? Tweeting. His case, not being a unique or standalone story, epitomizes the lack of freedom and the repressive system that prevail today in Venezuela.

Excerpt:

A group of activists calling themselves the Embassy Protection Collective protested against the U.S. and opposition party leader Juan Guide's representatives taking over the Venezuelan embassy. Credit: Backbone Campaign/ (CC BY 2.0)

By Caley Pigliucci
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 10 2019 (IPS)

Venezuelans in the city of Washington D.C., in the United States, are currently without consular protection as access to their country’s embassy has remained unstable since April.

“I went to get my passport…and then of course April 2019 is when it expired. And that limits me because you know my parents are at an age that anything could happen,” Luis*, a 35-year-old Venezuelan living in the U.S., told IPS. He asked not to be identified by his real name as he still has family living in Caracas and is concerned for their safety.

While the situation regarding the embassy remains uncertain, Venezuela still has other consulates in the country, but IPS was unable to reach them.

Where do Venezuelans in need of assistance go to?

Luis’s inability to renew his passport through the embassy comes amid a continued power-struggle at the embassy. Protestors had occupied the Washington embassy two weeks prior to the revocation of visas for representatives in the embassy on Apr. 24 by the Trump Administration.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro won re-election in May 2018, but the U.S. and other nations, including Canada, recognised the leader of the opposition party Juan Guaidó as president in January.

The U.S. revoked the visas of Maduro’s representatives at the embassy and helped establish Carlos Vecchio, a representative of Guaidó.

Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Code Pink, a NGO that describes itself on its website as “a women-led grassroots organisation working to end U.S. wars and militarism”, which participated in protesting, along with other activists, against the U.S. and Guadio’s representatives taking over the Venezuelan embassy in May. She told IPS: “It is such a critical international convention on diplomatic relations, one that has global implications.”

“If you’re a Venezuelan in need of assistance, where are you going to go? You need representation.”

Luis moved to the U.S. at 17 and eventually naturalised. He now has dual citizenship, but according to the U.S. Department of State – Consulate Affairs, if a person is a dual national, they must still have a valid Venezuelan passport in their possession to enter and leave Venezuela.

In the almost two decades that he has been in the U.S., Luis said he “never encountered any issues”, having at least three passports during that time.

But now, should Luis wish to travel to Venezuela he would have to travel out of state, or possibly to the Venezuelan embassy in Canada, to renew his passport. It’s a trip that he said is too expensive and time consuming.

There are some consulates still open in the U.S., including the one in New York. But Luis said he believed the New York consulate has already been taken over by representatives of the Venezuelan opposition.

“I do not recognise the opposition’s president. I wouldn’t go and get my paperwork with an institution that I don’t recognise,” he said.

Luis told IPS that he is part of the local Venezuelan community and has many Venezuelan friends, but that he thinks many of them are not as concerned as he is about the embassy.

“I’m a minority, because the largest amount of Venezuelan people are people from middle and upper class that have the means to travel,” Luis said, referring to the ability to travel out of state to other consulates or out of country to other embassies to renew their passports.

“It’s a class-struggle and also an ideological struggle,” he added.

IPS tried to reach out to the embassy for a statement from Guaidó’s representatives, but the phone lines were cut, and there is no other contact information listed on their website.

Safety of Embassies

Protestors fighting against the U.S. intervention in Venezuela had kept a small group of four protestors inside the Washington embassy, starting about two weeks prior to the visa revocation on Apr. 24 until May 16 when police in Washington used a battering ram to enter the building. 

Adrienne Pine, an associate professor of anthropology at American University, was one of the final four protestors occupying the embassy. Other protestors had left after an eviction notice was posted by U.S. police on May 13. She was arrested on May 16, and released the following day after a court appearance. She is neither a member of Code Pink nor a Venezuelan.

When asked why she remained in the embassy until her arrest, Pine told IPS: “I am a United States citizen, and I feel passionate about our government not engaging in regime change operations and not acting as an imperial actor around the world.”

On May 15, the permanent representative to Venezuela, Samuel Moncada, stated to the United Nations that the U.S. actions in attempting to occupy the embassy was a “pretext of war”.

He called for the U.S. to respect international law and warned of a violation of respect for diplomats worldwide.

In response to Moncada, spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Stéphane Dujarric, stated in a U.N. press briefing on May 16: “We hope that the situation is resolved peacefully, bilaterally between the United States and Venezuela.”

The U.S. is legally allowed to recognise Guaidó, but under international law in Article 45 of the Vienna Convention, the violation of diplomatic offices of other governments is not allowed.

Pine warned of the U.S. police occupation of the embassy, “What it basically signals is that no embassy around the world is safe.”

Dozens of nations, including the U.S. and many of its western allies, recognise Guaidó as president of the Latin American nation. The U.N., however, continues to recognise Maduro as president. 

Though the U.N. has not agreed with the actions of the U.S., Benjamin believes the response from the U.N. and the international community has been too limited. She explained that this is “absolutely because of the United States. In any other country, I think the U.N. would have stepped in.”

Luis, who has family on both sides of the political aisle, is in support of the on-going international dialogue. He told IPS: “The ones who are left to pay are us, you know, the ones who want to have peace.”

“I just want my family to have a normal life,” he added.

*Not his real name.

Congressman Juan Guaidó of the Popular Will party, president of the National Assembly since Jan. 5, was sworn in on Jan. 23 before a crowd as Venezuela's interim president. Credit: NationalAssembly

By Ivar Andersen
STOCKHOLM, Mar 21 2019 (IPS)

More than 60 countries have recognized Juan Guaidó as legitimate interim president. But among international trade unions, support for Venezuelan self-determination is resolute.

On January 23, the leader of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself  interim president of Venezuela. His claim on the presidency was immediately recognized by the United States who, through Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, called for the world to “pick a side”.

A little over 60 countries have followed in the footsteps of the United States, according to information from Al Jazeera. On February 4, Sweden joined the list.

“Sweden supports and acknowledges Juan Guaidó as the leader of the National Assembly and, in accordance with the country’s constitution, his attempts to serve as interim President of Venezuela, now responsible for making sure free and fair democratic elections will be called,” said Margot Wallström, Minister for Foreign Affairs, in a statement that stressed the importance of solving the crisis peacefully.

The international trade union movement on the other hand, has chosen a different approach. On the same day as Guaidó declared himself president, the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA), released a harsh statement:

“We condemn the unilateral decision adopted today, January 23, by a group of governments of the region, notably led by the USA, to ignore the legitimacy of the government of President Maduro and to recognize the self-proclaimed ’president of the transition’, representative Juan Guaidó.”

TUCA is calling upon the government of Venezuela and the opposition to seek out dialogue, and for the international community to support this, but also states that the support for Guaidó “is a grave act of interference and intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, setting back the region to times we thought belonged to the past, in which coups d’état and military dictatorships were instigated”.

Many national trade union confederations have taken the same position. South Africa’s largest confederations Cosatu and Saftu condemn what they both call a “coup attempt”.

Trade unions in Canada are protesting the government’s decision to recognize Guaidó. The trade union confederation CLC writes that it supports “the Venezuelan people’s right to peaceful self-determination”.

The global union IndustriALL condemns the acknowledgement of Guaidó and “also rejects the external boycott, which has clear political and economic motives that violate Venezuela’s sovereignty”.

The relationship between the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Venezuela has been tense for some time, due to the fact that the country’s leadership doesn’t acknowledge ITUC’s affiliate ASI. But the ITUC also opposes foreign interference in the matter of the presidency.

“Concerning the Presidency of Venezuela, that is a matter for the people of Venezuela to decide, not any other entity outside of the country,” says Director of Communications Tim Noonan to Arbetet Global.

The ITUC also refers to its statement on Venezuela, which was adopted by the organisation’s world congress in December last year, before Guaidó’s challenge.

“The ITUC supports its affiliates in Venezuela in their struggle to strengthen democracy and dialogue, and the workers and people of Venezuela in dealing with the enormous difficulties that they are experiencing due to the economic blockade imposed on Venezuela.”

The Swedish Trade Union Confederation, LO, is in favour of humanitarian aid and UN led reconcilliation efforts. The international department stresses that the LO does not take sides in the question of the presidency, but does take a swing at foreign involvement.

“The unstable political situation is worsened by superpowers like China, the United States, and Russia trying to manoeuvre the political map,” says Åsa Törnlund, union officer responsible for South America.

Translation: Cecilia Studer 

This story was originally published by Arbetet Global

Alfred de Zayas at the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.

By Alfred de Zayas
GENEVA, Mar 12 2019 (IPS)

My mission to Venezuela in November/December 2017 was the first by a UN rapporteur in 21 years. It was intended to open the door to the visit of other rapporteurs and to explore ways how to help the Venezuelan people overcome the protracted economic and institutional crisis.

In preparation of the mission I studied all pertinent reports by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, UN High Commissioner, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Provea, Fundalatin, Grupo Sures, Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, etc.

During the mission, thanks to the professionalism of UNDP, I was able to meet with members of the opposition, National Assembly, chamber of commerce, churches, professors, students, representatives of OAS, Carter Center, victims of violence, and civil society. Since my mother tongue is Spanish, it was easy to inter-relate with Venezuelans, walk the streets, visit the supermarkets.

I learned about the scarcity of foods and medicines, black markets, smuggling of subsidized petrol, foods and medicines into neighbouring countries. The situation did not reach and still does not reach the threshold of a “humanitarian crisis” as we know from Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Haiti, etc.

A major obstacle to solving the problems was the polarization of the population and the dearth of confidence-building measures. I recognized that the government needed advisory services and technical assistance from UN agencies in order to carry out needed economic and institutional reforms.

I convened a meeting with UN agencies in order to explore concrete strategies. In a 6-page confidential memorandum to the government and in my report to the UN Human Rights Council I formulated constructive recommendations, some of which were quickly put into effect. I had requested the release of 23 detainees, 80 were released on 23 December 2017, more in the course of 2018. UN agencies noticeably intensified their assistance, in particular FAO and UNIDO, especially to manage the impacts of the sanctions.

Alfred de Zayas with his team at the seat of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.

Following my visit I continued to follow developments and study documentation, statistics and arguments from all sides. My diagnosis: The crisis is not caused by the ideological “failure of socialism as an economic model” (socialism has not failed in Norway, Sweden, China), but by concrete and palpable causes, the dramatic fall in the price of crude oil, the over-dependence on exports, the failure to diversify the economy, an excess of ideologues and relative scarcity of technocrats in government.

Most importantly, the crisis is the result of the cumulative impacts of 20 years of internal and external economic war, financial blockade, and sanctions. The mainstream narrative attributes the crisis to incompetence and corruption, but these also plague most Latin American countries. Besides, the level of corruption in Venezuela in the 1980’s and 1990’s was higher and Chavez won the 1998 elections on a wave of disgust at the corruption of the neo-liberal governments. I spent two hours with the current Attorney General in Caracas, from whom I received ample documentation on the government’s vigorous anti-corruption campaign, investigations and on-going prosecutions.

US efforts to topple Chavez started early, and the CIA cooperated with the Venezuelan oligarchy in the failed coup against Chavez on 11/12 April 2002. The 48-hour President Pedro Carmona had promptly issued a decree doing away with 49 pieces of social legislation, suspending the Supreme Court, the Chavez National Assembly, dismissing governors, etc. Although there is nothing more undemocratic than a coup – Carmona and the US media spoke of “restoring democracy” in Venezuela.

Back in 1970, when Allende was democratically elected President of Chile, Nixon called in Kissinger and told him that the US would not tolerate an alternative socio-economic system in Latin America and that the US would make the Chilean economy “scream”. When in spite of sanctions the Allende government proved resilient, it was necessary to use more muscle and General Pinochet carried out the coup that ushered 17 years of “democracy” – and torture – in Chile. As we know from the studies of Stephen Kinzer and William Blum, US Military and CIA interventions in Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Paraguay etc. have cost tens of thousands of lives and brought untold misery to millions of Latin Americans.

“Human Rights” has nothing to do with the US Venezuela policy. As it was in Iraq 2003 and Libya 2011, it is OIL. The US covets the largest oil reserves in the world, as well as the third largest reserves in gold and coltan. If Maduro is toppled, it will be a bonanza for US investors and transnational corporations.

What is sad is that some countries ostensibly committed to democracy, the rule of law and human rights, are supporting the sanctions and the Guaidó coup. We observe a Machiavellian, cynical instrumentalization of human rights and humanitarian aid for purely geopolitical reasons.

A solution of the crisis depends on direct dialogue between the opposition and the government. Such dialogue already took place in 2016-2018. Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero hosted these talks and arrived at a reasonable accord. On the day of signature, 6 February 2018, Julio Borges, the leader of the opposition refused to sign. This augurs badly for any kind of international mediation by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, by the High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet or by Mexico and Uruguay in the context of the Montevideo mechanism.

History shows us that sanctions kill, and when the level of killing reaches a certain threshold, sanctions become a crime against humanity. This is a worthy challenge for the International Criminal Court. What Venezuela needs is an end to sanctions and interference in is internal affairs, an end to the violations of Articles 1-2 of the UN Charter and of articles 3, 19 and 20 of the OAS Charter by the US and its “coalition”. Venezuela needs international solidarity and respect of its sovereignty.

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (USA, Switzerland), Professor of Law, Geneva School of Diplomacy (J.D., Harvard, Dr. phil. Göttingen) . Former UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee, former Chief of the Petitions Department at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Author of 9 books and numerous scholarly articles.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of IPS.

"Humanitarian aid now. We need it," read a banner during a massive demonstration in Caracas on Feb. 12, demanding that international aid blocked at the border of neighboring countries be allowed into the country. The demonstrations were held in 50 towns and cities around the country, in support of Juan Guaidó as acting president and demanding that President Nicolás Maduro step down. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 2019 (IPS)

The international community must extend protections for Venezuelans in light of a growing humanitarian crisis with no end in sight.

Human Rights Watch has urged governments in the Americas to provide temporary protection to the millions of Venezuelans fleeing a severe humanitarian crisis.

“The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is a classic case of the need for blanket temporary protection,” said Human Rights Watch’s refugee rights director Bill Frelick.

“This is not the time to be deporting Venezuelans,” he added.

According to the United Nations, more than three million people have fled Venezuela in recent years, representing 10 percent of the population.

The exodus is largely due to the severe shortages of medicine and food, leaving millions of Venezuelans in distressing and worsening living conditions.

According to the Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela, the country is experiencing an 85 percent shortage of medicine.

The ongoing economic crisis has also impacted access.

In 2018, inflation in the South American nation was at a staggering 1,698,488 percent. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that the rate will reach 10,000,000 percent in 2019.

As the official minimum wage in Venezuela is 6 dollars per month, many are unable to afford basic goods.

“During Nicolas Maduro’s presidency, the government has failed to address the crisis while making heavy-handed efforts to deny and conceal its severity,” Human Rights Watch said.

Among those efforts is Maduro’s government imposed aid blockade. The government even ordered to close its borders with Brazil, noting that Venezuelans are “not beggars” and do not need aid.

As a result of the escalating situation, the number of asylum applications by Venezuelans has increased significantly.

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), over 414,000 asylum claims were made by Venezuelans around the world, nearly 60 percent of them during 2018 alone.

Between July and September 2018, Venezuelans were the leading nationality seeking asylum in the United States as they represented 30 of all asylum applications in the three month period.

However, despite the crippling humanitarian situation, the United States continues to deport people back to South American nation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly deported 336 people to Venezuela in 2018, a 35 percent increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, the U.S. has not resettled a single Venezuelan refugee.

Human Rights Watch urged the U.S. to provide Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans due to the deteriorating conditions in their home country.

TPS allows foreign-born individuals to remain in the U.S. until conditions, caused by natural disasters or war, improve back home. Approximately 300,000 people have received those protections.

Though the current administration has made several attempts to end TPS, a buck has blocked the most recent efforts and extended TPS for people from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, and El Salvador.

“Some Venezuelans will qualify for asylum based on a well-founded fear of being persecuted if returned,” Frelick said.

“Temporary Protected Status is the best available way to offer protection for people who do not qualify as refugees or are not seeking asylum but who nevertheless should not be sent back to their country because of generally unsafe conditions there,” he added.

A group of 24 senators including Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio also asked President Donald Trump to designate Venezuela for TPS.

“Venezuela clearly meets the standard for TPS as it is obviously too dangerous for Venezuelan nationals to return…granting TPS to Venezuela is a concrete measure your Administration can immediately take to alleviate the suffering of innocent Venezuelan civilians and to demonstrate our nation’s commitment to supporting a safe democratic transition in Venezuela so that individuals can safely return home soon,” they wrote in a letter.

Human Rights Watch also urged Venezuela’s neighbours to grant region-wide temporary protection, providing Venezuelans legal status for a fixed period.

Colombia is among those who have opened their doors, now hosting over 1 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants, the highest proportion in the region.

The Colombian government has developed programmes to support fleeing migrants, such as a border mobility card which allows people to move between the two countries as well as a special work permit which provides Venezuelans temporary residence and work for two years.

The response has been starkly different in Brazil where tensions have escalated, leading to riots against refugee camps. In one case, riots forced over 1,000 Venezuelans to flee back over the border.

In 2015, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called refugees “scum of the earth.”

Though the country is continuing to accept arrivals at the border, it is uncertain for how much longer.

UNHCR stressed the urgency of international support, appealing for 738 million dollars to support 2.2 million Venezuelans and 500,000 people in host communities across 16 countries.

A young man wounded by a bullet during protests in Santa Elena de Uairén is transported on a motorcycle by other young opposition demonstrators during protests after food and medical aid was prevented on Feb. 23 from entering the country from nearby Brazil, 1,260 kilometers southeast of Caracas. Credit: Courtesy of local residents of Santa Elena de Uairén

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 26 2019 (IPS)

The violent repression that prevented food and medical aid from crossing into Venezuela, which left at least four people dead and 58 with gunshot wounds, has distanced solutions to what is today Latin America’s biggest political crisis, although 10 countries in the hemisphere are stepping up the pressure while at the same time ruling out the use of force.

But for the United States, “all options are on the table,” including the use of military force, according to President Donald Trump, and as his Vice President Mike Pence reminded the 10 governments of the Lima Group that met on Feb. 25 in Bogotá to discuss the situation in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s neighbors “don’t want war but continue to struggle for a political solution that would involve the departure from power of President Nicolás Maduro. By repressing the entry of humanitarian aid trucks, we have an excuse to increase political, economic and diplomatic pressure on the regime,” said Carlos Romero, a postgraduate professor of political science at two public universities in Caracas.

The international aid accumulated in border areas of Colombia, Brazil and the neighboring Dutch island of Curacao consisted of a few hundred tons of medical supplies, some emergency medicines and food supplements that opposition Juan Guaidó ordered across the border on Feb. 23.

Venezuela, with a population of 32 million people, more than three million of whom have left the country in the last five years, according to United Nations sources, is in the grip of an economic and social crisis marked by hyperinflation measured in millions of percent annually, as well as the collapse of its public health system and of other essential public services.

Figures from a study by the three main universities in Caracas indicate – in the absence of official figures over the past three years – that poverty affects 80 percent of the population, and GDP has plunged 56 percent in the last five years.

The Maduro administration militarised and closed the borders, arguing that the aid was a pretext for foreign military intervention supported by the opposition led by Guaidó, the president of the parliament, who declared himself “acting president” on Jan. 23.

Two trucks that made it partly across one of the bridges on the border with Colombia, some 860 kilometers from Caracas, caught fire as Venezuelan security forces repelled young men advancing next to the vehicles, while in the neighboring cities of Ureña and San Antonio members of the security forces and armed civilians used gunfire to disperse opposition marches aimed at receiving the aid.

In the extreme southeast of the country, where the Pemón indigenous people live, hundreds of native people have been trying since Feb. 22 to keep out military personnel attempting to prevent the entrance of trucks carrying aid from Brazil.

Alfredo Romero, director of the human rights group Foro Penal, said the military shot their way through, according to indigenous leaders, leaving four dead and 25 with bullet wounds.

Indigenous groups seized and held several of the commanding officers for more than 24 hours, but then “some 70 vehicles, including buses full of members of the security forces, secured their release on their way to Santa Elena de Uairén,” a local resident of that city near the border with Brazil, 1,260 km from Caracas, told IPS.

Indigenous leaders are hiding in the countryside and in Santa Elena there is a de facto curfew, according to local residents who provided IPS with harsh photos and videos showing what happened there, while the opposition leadership and the media were focusing on the events on the border with Colombia.

Opposition leaders denounced the murders of at least 15 people in the area and the Foro Penal recorded nine cases of missing persons since Feb. 23.

In Ureña and San Antonio, in southwest Venezuela on the border with Colombia, more than 20 people were wounded by bullets fired by members of the security forces or armed civilians wearing ski masks, according to reports from journalists in the area. Several opposition demonstrations in support of the entry of international aid were also cracked down on heavily in the country’s hinterland.

Meanwhile, at least 326 members of Venezuela’s military and police, including several mid-level officers, have deserted since Feb. 23, fleeing mainly to Colombia.

The Lima Group – ad-hoc, this time made up of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela-Guaidó- and the United States urged the military to stop supporting Maduro and to recognise and obey Guaidó as their commander.

The Lima Group stated that “the transition to democracy must be conducted by Venezuelans themselves peacefully and within the framework of the Constitution and international law, supported by political and diplomatic means, without the use of force.”

That renunciation for now of the use of force “runs counter to radical people in the Venezuelan opposition who are desperate because they have not found a quick solution,” Romero said.

The call for the use of force “has gained ground, because of the way the government has dug in its heels and refused to consider any alternative path that would involve giving up power, in a kind of existential struggle,” Luis Salamanca, also a postgraduate professor of political science at the Central University, told IPS.

He quoted Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who said, hours after the violent events at the borders, that the government’s determination “is a small part of what we are willing to do.”

Washington increased the financial and asset blockade against the Venezuelan State, as well as measures on visas and assets of its authorities, while the Lima Group decided to increase international denunciations and tighten the diplomatic and political noose around Maduro.

Romero warned, however, that in the acceleration of the crisis so far in 2019 “no element of moderation has worked: the compromise initiative set forth by Mexico and Uruguay, the European Union contact group and some countries of the Americas died at birth, as did Pope Francis’s insinuation that he would mediate if requested by the parties.”

While the government digs in its heels, the Venezuelan opposition “has to imagine and develop actions that keep people’s hope alive, to fight the discouragement that set in after the goal of bringing trucks in with aid was not achieved,” Félix Seijas, director of the pollster Delphos, told IPS.

The experts who spoke to IPS agreed that the opposition led by Guaidó made a mistake in making the entrance of aid on Feb. 23 a decisive battle, arguing instead that the call for the re-establishment of democracy is a gradual process with many steps.

Salamanca stressed that “the government seems firm, but with each passing hour new pieces are moved, and there is an underground current that is crumbling the bases on which it is sustained. The desertion of the members of the military is a very striking sign in this regard.”

But for now, the leadership of Venezuela’s armed forces remains completely loyal to Maduro.

Meanwhile, on the international stage, the United States, the country with the greatest capacity to exert pressure in the hemisphere, requested a new meeting on Venezuela at the United Nations Security Council, this time with the backing of the Lima Group, which described the crisis in the oil-producing country as “an unprecedented threat to security, peace, freedom and prosperity throughout the region.”