The contagion and mortality figures offered by Maduro and his spokesmen are perhaps the most flattering in the world, after those of New Zealand, whose Prime Minister has officially announced that he has completely stopped contagion.
Since quarantine was imposed more than a month ago, the only government-authorized laboratory serving the country of 27 million inhabitants (almost five million emigrated in the past three years) has certified 325 infections and only 10 deaths. Our two neighboring countries, Brazil and Colombia, together report almost 69,000 infections; Brazil has confirmed 4,543 deaths and Colombia 244.
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Quarantine ramble on the “social outbreak”- Venezuela: pandemic and police terrorism
- Patient zero
The scantiness of the accounts that the dark psychiatrist Jorge Rodríguez, Minister of Information, imparts day by day with the gown and face of a murderous doctor, seek to persuade us that the Bolivarian Revolution has made Venezuela, according to the proud expression of Nicolás Maduro, a "Impregnable hemispheric bastion" against which the coronavirus has crashed, so overwhelming in other parts of the world.
The rebuttal offered by the independent drug company does not invoke contrasting figures, although it is presumably that they do have them: disclosing them can lead to a spectacular arrest, rather a kidnapping with enforced disappearance that is usually resolved in an indictment in a 24-hour court at the instigation of to hatred and betrayal of the fatherland.
However, when judging the numbers of Dr. Rodríguez, highly accredited epidemiologists point out that, even if they are accepted as good, the government accounts only testify to the almost null diagnostic capacity of the public health device.
Much is still unknown about the insidious coronavirus; Science still cannot offer assurances about a vaccine or a definitive cure and the span of a year that has been talked about is only a suggestion. For this reason, I do not believe that a hypothesis is negligible, which, let us repeat, assuming Maduro's figures, have been privately formulated by highly respected Venezuelan doctors to explain them: the virus - doctors suggest - does not thrive in malnourished organisms; it would be said that a high level of hemoglobin is a relevant fact for him.
According to the report released last week by the World Food Program (WFP), the UN humanitarian aid agency, Venezuela was quarantined with more than 8 million of its inhabitants completely without food inventory at home, without capital , without the possibility of going out into the street to battle in the informal economy, a picture that WFP defines as “severe food insecurity”.
The Venezuelan nutritionist, international expert in humanitarian assistance, the admirable Susana Raffalli, translates the language of the WFP into a compelling image: they are families who, with luck, hardly consume a serving of plantain and rice once a day and who have already exhausted their Livelihoods. In an interview for Radio Caracas Radio, Raffali said last week that treating the codiv-19 pandemic as a health crisis and not as a major humanitarian emergency is a major irresponsibility.
Rather, Raffali says, it would be required to open up to massive international humanitarian aid without delay, as the pandemic must fatally complicate itself with a food situation that puts Venezuela in the same group of countries such as Yemen, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Afghanistan, Republic of the Congo, Nigeria or Haiti.
It is the group of countries that have seen their productive apparatus completely destroyed and in which a large part of the population has simply been expelled from economic life, in some cases due to internal armed conflicts. In Venezuela the destruction has been in charge of the socialism of the 21st century.
Maduro and his people, however, blame the country's widespread impoverishment on the economic sanctions imposed by Washington since the beginning of 2018. A glance at the tables that accompany the WFP report reveals that the decline that today constitutes a very serious humanitarian situation began in Venezuela many years ago, between 2012 and 2013.
Raffalli draws attention to Iran and Zimbabwe, countries that, even though they are subject to sanctions comparable to those that surround Maduro and his henchmen, were never in a situation as critical as the one that my country is going through, as a result of government ineptitude and looting. massive of their wealth.
Raffalli is not the only authority on the matter that considers it imperative that Maduro open himself to massive food aid that could only be provided by the World Food Program. This would, of course, entail giving up using the pandemic and centralized food distribution as a pincer of political control and accepting the competition of all sectors of the country without exception, something unthinkable for the cornered narco-military clique that tyrannizes the country.
Raffalii adds that the meager direct transfers the regime boasts of - the last announced bonus is less than one dollar and twenty cents - should ideally rise to $ 60 per family. According to the report, the covid-19 crisis will double 2019 records, bringing to 265 million people exposed to food insecurity worldwide.
A famine of "biblical proportions," gloomily predicts David Beasly, WFP Executive Director. Venezuela will have to face it in bankruptcy, under a dictatorship and in the final days of its oil century.
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