Children Are Dying of Hunger in Venezuela
camps — cases that were highly unusual in oil-rich Venezuela before its economy fell to pieces.
For many low-income families, the crisis has completely redrawn the social landscape. Parents like Kenyerber’s mother go days without eating, shriveling to the weight of children themselves. Women line up at sterilization clinics to avoid having children they can’t feed. Young boys leave home and join street gangs to scavenge for scraps, their bodies bearing the scars of knife fights with competitors. Crowds of adults storm Dumpsters after restaurants close. Babies die because it is hard to find or afford infant formula, even in emergency rooms.
“Sometimes they die in your arms, just from dehydration,” Dr. Milagros Hernández said in the emergency room of a children’s hospital in the city of Barquisimeto. “Children arrive with the same weight and height of a newborn.”
Before Venezuela’s economy started spiraling, doctors say, almost all of the child malnutrition cases they saw in public hospitals stemmed from neglect or abuse by parents. But as the economic crisis began to intensify in 2015 and 2016, the number of cases of severe malnutrition at the nation’s leading pediatric health center in the capital more than tripled, doctors say. Last year looked even worse.
The statistics are staggering. In the Ministry of Health’s 2015 annual report, the mortality rate for children under 4 weeks old had increased a hundredfold, from 0.02 percent in 2012 to just over 2 percent. Maternal mortality had increased nearly fivefold in the same period.
For almost two years, the government did not publish a single epidemiological bulletin tracking statistics like infant mortality. Then in April of last year, a link suddenly appeared on the Health Ministry’s official website, leading to the unpublished bulletins. They showed that 11,446 children under the age of 1 had died in 2016 — a 30 percent increase in one year — as the economic crisis accelerated.
The findings made national and international headlines before the government said the website had been hacked, and the reports were swiftly removed. The health minister was fired and the military was put in charge of monitoring the bulletins. No reports have been released since.
Doctors are often warned not to include malnutrition in children’s medical records.
“In some public hospitals, the clinical diagnosis of malnutrition has been prohibited,” Dr. Huníades Urbina said.
But doctors interviewed by The Times encountered nearly 2,800 cases of child malnutrition in the last year alone. “Never in my life had I seen so many hungry children,” said Dr. Livia Machado, a pediatrician who gives free consultations at her private practice. I
President Nicolás Maduro has acknowledged that people are hungry in Venezuela, but he has refused to accept international aid, saying that Venezuela’s economic problems are caused by foreign adversaries like the United States waging an economic war.
Kenyerber was born healthy, at three kilos. But his mother, María Carolina Merchán, 29, was bitten by a mosquito and infected with a severe case of the Zika virus when Kenyerber was 3 months old. She had to be hospitalized, and doctors instructed her to stop breast feeding because of her illness.
Unable to find or afford infant formula, the family improvised: bottles of cream of rice or cornstarch, mixed with whole milk.
At 9 months, his father found him listless in bed, blood running from his nose. He rushed him to the overcrowded pediatric emergency room at Dr. Domingo Luciani hospital.
The 2016 National Survey of Hos- pitals found that 96 percent of Venezuelan hospitals reported not having all of the infant formula they needed to attend to patients. More than 63 percent reported having no formula at all.
Severe acute malnutrition is both self- evident and strikingly complex. Even when doctors are open to recording it for a patient, it is not necessarily the official cause of death. Instead, acute malnutrition can set off a range of pathologies in the human body, leading to death from respiratory failure, infection or other ailments. But in the case of Kenyerber, a rare situation occurred for Venezuela: Severe malnutrition was listed as a cause of death on his death certificate. crown placed on her head.
Oriana Caraballo, 29, waited in line for hours with her three children — Brayner, 8; Rayman, 6; and Sofia, 22 months — to enter a crowded soup kitchen in Los Teques. They had not eaten for three days.
Before the crisis, Ms. Caraballo fed her children using the wages from her job at a restaurant. Now, she wept as she spooned soup into Sofia’s mouth — and recounted how her children had foiled her suicide attempt.
Ms. Caraballo could not bear the pain of watching her children go hungry. She said she had taken them outside her home, while her baby daughter was sleeping, then went back inside and shut the door. She hung a cable and wrapped it around In Barquisimeto, Dr. Hernández her neck. rushed into the emergency room, “I heard a voice tell me, ‘Do it, do shouting: “I’m coming in with an it, do it,’ ” she said. “Then in my other 18- day- old baby. He was fed with ear I heard, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it — anise tea, cow’s milk and sometimes look at your children.’ ” breast-fed by a neighbor. It’s a bad Her son called to her, telling her to one!” open the door. She became overcome
Doctors in Barquisimeto said they with guilt and decided against suihad received malnutrition cases cide. nearly every day. The United Nations and the Pan
But only a fraction of the medicines American Health Organization they need are available. In June, the found that 1.3 million people who hospital director at the time, Dr. used to be able to feed themselves in Jorge Gaiti, said he had requested Venezuela have had difficulty doing so.193necessarymedicationsfromthe government agency responsible for n soup kitchens around the coundistributing them to public hospitals. try visited by The Times, many of the Only four of the 193 were delivered. parents who brought their children
Nurses send parents away with had full- time jobs. But hyperinflalists of items to look for in pharmation had destroyed their salaries and cies. savings.
Dr. Hernández said she felt helpCaritas, the Roman Catholic aid less as a doctor, as children died ungroup, has been weighing and meanecessarily. “It is unfair,” she said. suring groups of children under 5 in
That baby who was rushed into the multiple states since last year. Fifemergency room spent weeks in and ty-four percent suffer from malnuout of the hospital, and died on Octotrition, the study has found. ber 8. Many families scavenge for food in
Three floors above, a 5-month- old the streets or at garbage dumps. Few girl, Dayferlin Aguilar, struggled to are homeless, and most said they had open her eyes. Her mother, Albiannever had trouble finding food before nys Castillo, had brought Dayferlin the crisis. Hundreds of people can be to the hospital when the baby began seen picking through garbage cans falling in and out of consciousness each evening when restaurants and and suffering uncontrollable diargrocery stores take out their trash rhea. Doctors diagnosed malnutrifor collection. tion and dehydration. Families are also sending their
“Your mamá is here with you, my children out to beg or work. Some daughter — and I love you,” she told never return. Dayferlin when she managed to open her eyes.
Dayferlin died three days after being admitted to the hospital. She was buried with fuchsia- colored wings made from paper, with a matching
In Caracas, two brothers — José Luis Armas, 11, and Luis Armas, 9 — said they had run away from home, where there was scarcely enough to eat. Now they live in the streets with other homeless boys in street gangs, getting into knife fights to expand or defend their territories and to control areas for panhandling or picking through garbage.
Several friends have been killed, they said. Luis raised his shirt to show a large gash across his stomach — the result, he said, of a machete attack by a member of another gang. The attack nearly killed him, he said.
They say they prefer to live on the streets, despite the danger, because they eat better than they could living at home with their families.
The burden of caring for children can be so great these days that many women are opting to be sterilized. Just after dawn one Saturday in July, 21 young women dressed in surgical gowns waited to be surgically sterilized during a free event at the staterun José Gregorio Hernández Hospital in a working- class neighborhood of the capital.
The hospital says it has sterilized more than 300 women through this program. On that Saturday, all 21 of the women, who ranged from 25 to 32 years old, said they already had children and wanted to be sterilized because the economic crisis had made it too difficult to raise children.
The crisis has also led to widespread shortages of birth- control pills and condoms.
Eddy Farías, 25, a hair stylist, said she was nervous about the operation but resolute. As a single mother with a full-time job, she said her wages at a salon were barely enough to feed her five children.
“If I got pregnant again, that would mean I’d have to go to war again for diapers,” she said. “It is like war to have to buy diapers on the black market, or have to wake up before dawn to wait in long lines and fight others for the food, the diapers, the personal things.”
Six weeks after cutting out angel wings from the food rations box to bury Kenyerber, his family was still battling hunger.
His mother, María Carolina Merchán, said she weighs 30 kilos from skipping meals so her four surviving children had a little more to eat. Social workers said she was severely malnourished, as were her own mother and her 6-year old daughter, Marianyerlis.
Marianyerlis follows Ms. Merchán around, sobbing, begging for food. Ms. Merchán stares blankly at the floor as the little girl cries. “Mama, I’m hungry!” she pleads.
Marianyerlis’s weight fluctuates between 9 and 13 kilos, depending on how much food she gets. She recently fainted after going two days without eating.
The family has made its home with relatives in an abandoned housing project, with no running water or indoor plumbing. Kenyerber’s relatives fear that another child in the family may die.
“I worry about it day and night,” said his aunt, Andreína.