Venezuela’s opposition reinvents itself with soup kitchens

CARACAS: Miguel Castillo hurried up a narrow, dusty street in a poor neighbourhood in Venezuela’s capital city carrying a boy who clung to him as if his life depended on it.

Castillo, a member of the country’s tattered opposition movement, brought the six-year-old named Tomas to a dining hall filled with nearly a hundred skinny children sitting at tables and scooping spoonfuls of beef and rice soup into their mouths. Tomas, who was running a fever and needed food, required help reaching the opposition-run soup kitchen because of a disability that left him unable to walk.

“I never imagined my country would come to be like this,” Castillo said on a recent day. “This is my way of doing something.”

For Venezuela’s opposition, this is a new kind of politics – one that has it providing free meals and medical check-ups in an attempt to connect with the poor. The outreach is aimed at helping change the negative perception many Venezuelans have of an opposition that has been unable to influence change as President Nicolas Maduro further consolidates power.

Members of the Justice First party launched a soup kitchen which has so far provided 4,000 meals to poor youth in Caracas, while leaders of the Popular Will party say they’re pushing to provide 40,000 each week in neighbourhoods across Venezuela.

The food is provided with the help of local businesses and Venezuelans living abroad. The doctors among the opposition parties’ ranks are giving free medical care to children and the elderly.

Inflation in Venezuela is projected to surpass 2,000% this year, and the economy is estimated to have shrunk by 12%. Shortages of food, medicine and basic goods have become dire amid moves by Maduro to crack down on dissent.

“Our politics are in crisis, and our politicians are in crisis,” said Henrique Capriles, a former presidential contender and governor who organised the soup kitchen visited by Castillo.

Many members of the opposition now see their quest for political relevance as closely tied to their efforts to help everyday Venezuelans in what opposition politician and physician Winston Flores calls “a policy of solutions”.

On a recent day, Flores provided free medical check-ups at a makeshift neighbourhood camp, using his cellphone as a flashlight to examine an elderly woman’s throat.

“There are some who walk around like zombies looking for food and looking for medicines,” he said, adding that the opposition’s latest outreach is another way of doing politics.

The growing focus on the poor sounds familiar to many who have seen similar policies implemented by the socialist leaders that the opposition has been struggling for years to unseat from power.

During his 14 years in office, the late President Hugo Chavez launched numerous programmes aimed at providing free medical care and social services to Venezuela’s neediest, while Maduro regularly touts initiatives to provide subsidised food and housing.