Less than a decade ago, when the streets of Caracas were covered with mangoes during the first days of August, the fruits were so many that they could rot or had to be thrown away.
That was before the
start of hunger:
in 2014, the year in which a group of Venezuelan universities began the National Survey of Living Conditions (Encovi) due to the lack of official information, 80% of those surveyed already said that money did not give them was enough to buy food.
Three years later, in 2017, the media reported on dozens of people who had died from eating bitter cassava, who picked or bought at pitiful prices to put something on their stomach.
Today there are no fruits left in Venezuela.
The children of Johanna Barrios are waiting for their mother in the Ruiz Pineda neighborhood of Caracas.
Last year's mango season was highly anticipated. The latest Encovi report, from March 2020, said that 96% of Venezuelan households were already in poverty and 79% in extreme poverty. And then came the coronavirus. "The pandemic further eroded access to basic food needs," says Venezuelan photographer Andrea Hernández Briceño. "Venezuelans depend more than ever on mangoes." In his long walks through Caracas and coastal towns last year, Briceño captured snapshots of cities and towns deserted by gasoline shortages and extreme quarantines, and observed a majority of Venezuelans who eat less than twice a day and go out to look for what nature can offer them.
The lucky ones who can buy sugar, says Hernández Briceño, make jelly with the mangoes.
“And those who can buy flour make other desserts.
Many eat bananas, plantains, and lechoza these days and use herbs to season simple foods like rice, beans, or arepas.
Sometimes we grow bell peppers in our backyards. "
Mango has always been synonymous with abundance in Venezuela: here you drop a mango seed and you have a tree, says a popular phrase.
Today, this fruit has also become a memory and a promise of better times.
"The palm / may sustain the world," wrote the Venezuelan poet Igor Barreto, "but the mango / has accepted / the dark call of good."
A boy poses with some flowers he bought for his mother's birthday in Caracas, on August 24, 2020.
Join EL PAÍS now to follow all the news and read without limits
Subscribe here
Nica Guerrero carries her son Biko in the parking lot of her residential complex.
A man with a cloth as a face mask picks up mangoes to take home in an affluent neighborhood of Caracas, on August 9, 2020.
A children's park closed at the beginning of the pandemic in the San Martín neighborhood on July 4, 2020.
Elianny Toro, 10, poses for a portrait in front of her father's fruit stand in central Caracas.
Disinfection of a parking lot in Caracas.
A mask lies on a table while its owner drinks a coffee from a food business in San Antonio de Los Altos.
Ángel sells fish on the road to Puerto Cabello.
It is one of the most important ports in the country and was an active commercial area before the pandemic.
A dog rests in front of a fire pit in Patanemo.
Alejandro Dumont poses for a portrait in Choroní, Venezuela.
Bees buzz on a mango tree that exploded on the pavement after falling on a Caracas street.
A workhorse bites its tail during its break from carrying bags of cocoa on a farm in Patanemo.
It belongs to the Flores family, who work on these lands.
Credits:
Photographs:
Andrea Hernández Briceño
Text:
Eliezer Budasoff
Visual editing:
Héctor Guerrero
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the informative keys of the current situation in the region.