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Venezuela in Times of Pandemic


The last few days I’ve been thinking about restarting my blog Aletórica, which has been inactive since 2017. After all we are in quarantine and why not go back to talking about literature, movies, tv shows, etc., especially these days when there is so much content available to watch or read. I also thought I could use my blog to post some micro fiction I’ve been writing the last few years or to write about theater. However, today I sit down to write and the only thing I can think of is Venezuela. My last post from May 29th, 2017 was precisely about my trip there and all the calamities that millions of people endure every day. My post was titled ¿Hasta cuando? (How much longer). Three years later the situation in the country has gotten worse (yes, it is possible) and now they are also dealing with a pandemic. Fortunately, COVID-19 hasn’t hit too hard there, and Venezuelan people have been following the recommendations and they’re trying to protect themselves. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you get sick there, your possibilities to survive are very low. The government of course declared a quarantine, that was recently extended. Yes, it sounds very reasonable. But the problems in Venezuela aren’t limited to the threat of a deadly virus. Here I’ll tell you about just a few things people have to deal with. Right now, there is no gas (I know, ironically there is no gas in one of the countries with the biggest reserves of oil in the world). This means people can’t go to work, or even grocery shopping. The gas problem is very convenient for the government, because according to them, people should be at home anyway. And this means that if you don’t follow their rules you can easily go to jail and believe me, you may as well die of the virus than going to a prison in Venezuela. I have two sisters who work in the health system and they can’t go to work, because they can’t drive to the hospitals or take public transportation since there isn’t any. After all nobody is essential there. Public services are a luxury. There isn’t gas for transportation and there isn’t gas for cooking (which is what most of the people use to cook there). If you are lucky you get water a couples of hours a day. The food and medicines that are available are so expensive that only a few people can afford three meals a day or a treatment for an illness (not to mention the malnutrition problems children and adults are suffering from). Not only the food is hard to get, but now you need dollars to buy it. The economy is dollarized and if you really need to buy something you better get ready to pay for it. One example, in the black market 20 liters of gas (if you can find someone selling and you take a risk of going to jail if they catch you) is $20 dollars. In the US we pay about 0.5 cents for a litter. But we are talking about a country where the minimum wage right now is $ 4.6. Today AT&T closed Direct TV in Venezuela, citing the impossibility to comply with both the U.S. imposed sanctions and the Maduro regime’s minimum requirements to provide the service in the country. 40% of the Venezuelan people used Direct TV. Since it relies on satellite signal, DirecTV reached places that many other cable providers didn’t. Venezuelans in the countryside, in slums, and in low-income neighborhoods could watch cable television even if they lived in areas where open signal channels (estate-owned and propaganda fed)) weren’t available. Channels like CNN en español haven’t been available for years, but still there were a few international channels that kept people informed about the latest news. My family learns about the situation in Venezuela and the rest of the world through a German channel for example. So now, a lot of people lost their only source of information (most newspapers disappeared a while ago), and entertainment. And you can imagine how quarantine without TV could be. And forget about internet, very few people have good Internet access that allows them to have Netflix or any other Streaming service. Of course, this is music for the Government’s ears, after all keeping people isolated in reality and figuratively speaking is a great scenery to maintain control over everyone.

I used to think things couldn’t really get worse there, but how wrong I’ve been! As of today: no gas, no services, no education (guess how many people can do online education), no TV. That’s the landscape of my country in times of pandemic. Hope? It’s been a while since hope has been part of the vocabulary of Venezuelan people.


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