"Upon Chávez’s death in 2013, Corbyn thanked him on Twitter for “showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared.” But neither Chávez nor Maduro has ever shown anything of the sort. Whatever progress the country made against poverty in the past was due to high oil prices, which have since slumped.
Now Maduro presides over a disaster that is devastating the poor above all. Raffalli told me that the food-production system began to break down nearly a decade ago, thanks to the expropriation of land and the destruction of small agricultural companies, though a few big ones survive. Widespread malnutrition began a few years later. The Catholic charity Caritas believes that 78 percent of Venezuelans eat less than they used to, and 41 percent go whole days without eating. The side effects of hunger—higher rates of both chronic and infectious diseases—are spreading too.
But if you haven’t heard about hunger in Venezuela, that’s not an accident: The government is going to great lengths to hide it.
The tactics of deception include the use of outdated nutrition measures, which help conceal the severity of the problem. Government departments have also resorted to euphemistic jargon. “Malnutrition” has become “nutrition vulnerability,” Raffalli said, and a system of health centers for starving children is now the Service for Nutritional Education. The country’s National Assembly, which is controlled by the opposition, passed special measures to address the health crisis; the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Maduro, rejected them. Most ominously, doctors in Venezuelan hospitals have faced pressure not to list malnutrition as either a cause of illness or a cause of death. Though the official media do not mention these policies, people know about them anyway. Raffalli herself witnessed an extraordinary scene in one hospital: The parents of a child who had died from starvation tried to give her the corpse, because they were afraid that state officials would take it away and hide it. She was also in a rural region where children leave school at midday to hunt for birds or iguanas to cook and eat for lunch."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/venezuelas-suffering-shows-where-illiberalism-leads/606988/
Now Maduro presides over a disaster that is devastating the poor above all. Raffalli told me that the food-production system began to break down nearly a decade ago, thanks to the expropriation of land and the destruction of small agricultural companies, though a few big ones survive. Widespread malnutrition began a few years later. The Catholic charity Caritas believes that 78 percent of Venezuelans eat less than they used to, and 41 percent go whole days without eating. The side effects of hunger—higher rates of both chronic and infectious diseases—are spreading too.
But if you haven’t heard about hunger in Venezuela, that’s not an accident: The government is going to great lengths to hide it.
The tactics of deception include the use of outdated nutrition measures, which help conceal the severity of the problem. Government departments have also resorted to euphemistic jargon. “Malnutrition” has become “nutrition vulnerability,” Raffalli said, and a system of health centers for starving children is now the Service for Nutritional Education. The country’s National Assembly, which is controlled by the opposition, passed special measures to address the health crisis; the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Maduro, rejected them. Most ominously, doctors in Venezuelan hospitals have faced pressure not to list malnutrition as either a cause of illness or a cause of death. Though the official media do not mention these policies, people know about them anyway. Raffalli herself witnessed an extraordinary scene in one hospital: The parents of a child who had died from starvation tried to give her the corpse, because they were afraid that state officials would take it away and hide it. She was also in a rural region where children leave school at midday to hunt for birds or iguanas to cook and eat for lunch."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/venezuelas-suffering-shows-where-illiberalism-leads/606988/