Birth And Death In Venezuela's Times Of Hunger

Mothers and babies are starving in Venezuela, despite the government's official story that denies such a situation and boasts of the Bolivarian Socialist Revolution's programs and plans to reduce hunger and poverty. For a couple of years, while the oil prices were high, hunger was on the way down. But since 2013, the trend has reversed with dramatic consequences.

This is what a joint investigation by the Venezuelan online news site Efecto Cocuyo and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) shows. They obtained leaked documents with birth statistics from the two primary maternity hospitals in the capital of Caracas, which confirmed a negative rate: for the past three years, the number of babies born with low birth weights has risen steadily. Some are dying days after being born, others have serious difficulties developing.

The series puts these numbers in context by portraying the stories of 15 women. Many already have several children and are raising them on their own. Some are widows or their partners have left them. Some are only teenagers. All are barely surviving in a country whose inflation rate is projected to 13,000 percent and faces serious shortages of basic food, medicines and ... contraceptive methods.

According to international standards, once 15 percent of children in a given country or region suffer from acute malnutrition the situation qualifies as an emergency. This is the case in Venezuela. The last official figures released by Health Minister Antonieta Caporale in May 2017 indicated that maternal mortality had increased by 66 percent and infant mortality by 30 percent from 2015 to 2016. President Nicolas Maduro fired her the next day.