As hundreds of thousands leave Venezuela
at the minimum wage to buy a dozen eggs. The value of local salaries is falling by the day. In the middle of 2017, an average teacher’s salary was worth nearly US$45. Today, it’s worth about US$8.
“If we continue like this, Venezuela won’t even be a Third World country anymore,” said Flores, the school principal.
Massive gaps in the labour force are undercutting critical services here. Inside the darkened halls of a Caracas subway station on a recent afternoon, for instance, passengers climbed broken escalators and filed past closed ticket booths. The conditions reflect the shrunken workforce; last year, 2 226 subway employees — more than 20 per cent of the staff — abandoned their posts, according to Familia Metro, a Caracasbased transit watchdog group.
“There’s a huge lack of people in operations and maintenance now,” said Ricardo Sansone, head of Familia Metro. “They have no people to sell tickets at many stations, so passengers are often not even paying to use the subway.”
At the Jose Manuel de los Rios Children’s Hospital in Caracas, 68 doctors — or 20 per cent of the medical staff — quit and left the country over the past two years. The hospital’s cardiology department is now only open for a morning shift, since three of its six specialists are gone. There are 300 vacant nursing positions. Personnel shortages are so bad that the facility can only staff two of its seven operating rooms.
“It now takes eight months to a year for a surgery appointment,” said Huniades Urbina, a senior staff paediatrician.
This year, thousands of blackouts have hit Venezuela, darkening cities for weeks at a time. A lack of imported spare parts to fix the poorly maintained power grid is one problem. But so is “the flight of our trained workers”, said Aldo Torres, executive director of the Electricity Federation of Venezuela, an association of labour unions.
“Every day, we’re receiving dozens of calls from colleagues saying they’re going to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador,” Torres said. “They’re being replaced by people who are mostly not qualified.”
Ten kilometres down the road from Aquiles Nazoa Elementary School, the campus of Simon Bolivar University is oddly quiet. Once considered the MIT of Venezuela, a university that churned out some of the best Latin American engineers and physicists is now in danger of becoming a ghost town.
In 2017, 129 professors — nearly 16 per cent of the staff — quit, the vast majority to leave the country. It’s no surprise, officials here say. Using the black market rate for dollars, a professor’s salary here now tops out at about US$8 a month, because of hyperinflation.
Thirty professors retired last year but have not been replaced, in part because of a lack of qualified candidates. The university is so shortstaffed that three departments — languages, philosophy and electronic engineering — are about to close.
Yet as Venezuela’s young people depart in droves, Simon Bolivar also does not have the demand it once did. Three years ago, electronic engineering had nearly 700 students. Now, it’s down to 196.
Jesus Perez, 20, is one of the students who are just giving up. He was studying to be a computer engineer. But over the past six months, he’s lost 4.5kg from a lack of food. “I can’t wait anymore,” he said. “I have to leave. So far, 15 of my friends from school have left the country since February.” He’ll go to Peru, a country that two decades ago was far poorer than Venezuela.
What will he do?
“I don’t care,” he said. “Be a waiter, clean floors. I can’t ask for much.”
A 40-minute bus ride away from Aquiles Nazoa Elementary School, Deiriana Hernandez sat on the floor of her one-room home, puzzling out her homework.
A student at the school, she is on her third teacher in one year. One of them retired. Another quit to leave the country. Her latest — “Mrs Kory” — is a volunteer who only recently finished her high school equivalency degree.
Deiriana recently spent two weeks at home because her school could find no one to teach third grade. With a volunteer teacher, she can at least go to class. But she and other students are slipping behind.
Their grades are falling, and behavioural problems are worsening. Deiriana is 9. But she can barely read.
She was looking at a list of 16 words now, and instructions to separate them into four groups — animals, colours, cities, plants.
She scratched her head and called for her mother.
“You don’t understand?” said her mum, Yanelis Blanco, 26. Blanco was nervous.
“She’s behind for a third grader,” the mother said. “She doesn’t read correctly, has lots of grammatical errors when she writes. It’s a terrible thing that her teachers constantly leave.”
Deiriana’s classmates are also leaving. Last year, her class had 24 students. Now they’re down to 19.
Two days after Deiriana laboured over her homework, her mother received news from the school. Mrs Kory had quit.
For Deiriana, it’s back to staying at home, where her family is discussing another big change. Unable to put enough food on the table, her father is thinking of going to Peru to look for work.
“At least maybe that way we can pay for private schools where teachers, I imagine, are being paid better and given incentives to stay?” Blanco said. “I don’t know.”
His awkward move drew cheers from the audience, mostly made of up other Philippine workers, but his claims that it was only a gimmick did not prevent a backlash online where Duterte was slammed for being a “misogynist” and a “hypocrite”.
“I’m not even going to state all the things that’s obviously wrong here. But look at how President Duterte is gripping the Filipina’s forearms while he kisses her in front of an audience,” remarked one Twitter user.
“President Duterte said at the end of his speech in South Korea that the ‘KISS’ was only for entertainment. Hah! I’m not buying it Mr President. The woman was not an entertainer. Advancing on women for entertainment purpose is OFFENSIVE,” said another.
Duterte has made a number of offensive remarks about women, including that female rebel fighters should be shot in the vagina, that the smell of foreign women keeps him faithful to more “fragrant” Filipina women, and that he regretted that he did not get to join in and go first in the gang-rape of Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill, who died during a 1989 hostage-taking incident in Davao.