Venezuela the land where supplies are few and pain is everywhere

VENEZUELA - Pain is rarely worse than when it’s needless. That’s something young Daniela Chacon and much of Venezuela feels now. Daniela’s eyes, peeking out between her pink woolen hat and surgical mask, drip tears of extreme pain. She can still feel the leg she had amputated a day earlier: a common syndrome known as “phantom limb.” Yet this life-changing loss, one that causes her to scream as the doctors change her dressing, was needless. Years earlier, before a government-made economic meltdown crippled the healthcare system, an early diagnosis and meager amount of chemotherapy would have been readily available in the city of Valencia and would probably have stopped Daniela’s cancer, preventing any amputation, according to her doctor. So much of this crisis is human made. In short, Hugo Chavez, the late president, tried to found a socialist utopia, funded by high oil prices, which had the state run everything, and banished capitalism. But when oil prices collapsed, so did the dream, and now Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, is presiding over a country where the government tells people how much they must pay for basic foodstuffs while failing to keep their state-provided wages high enough to buy that same food.

Maduro has raised the country’s minimum wage six times in the last year. So many people are hungry that normal political processes are a thing of the past and unrest is everywhere. Street protests are frequent, met with force, and often deadly. (CNN.COM)