Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro has said he asked the United Nations for help in boosting his country's medicine supplies. Hospitals in the country are reportedly running on just 3 percent of the supplies they need.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/R. Schemidt
Advertisement
Maduro's admission on Friday that Venezuela was battling a crippling medicine shortage was a rare public admission of the desperate state the cash-strapped country finds itself in.
"I have asked the United Nations to regularize the whole medicine issue," Venezuela's president said in a broadcast on national television. "The United Nations has the most advanced plans to recover the pharmaceutical industry's productive capacity."
With the country in its fourth year of deep recession, reports of depleted pharmacies, as well as hospitals without antibiotics or cancer drugs have become commonplace.
According to the Venezuelan Medical Federation, hospitals are running with just 3 percent of the medicine and supplies they need.
Venezuela, home to the world's largest oil reserves, has been hit hard in recent years by falling oil prices. However, Maduro on Friday reiterated that the country's crippled economy was the victim of what he called an "economic war" waged by business interests seeking to destabilize his government.
"Resisting has been worth it. Socialism is worth it," Maduro said.
The mighty fall
Maduro's admission marked a remarkable U-turn for a country that had previously prided itself on providing humanitarian aid to poorer nations.
Yet even as Maduro was making his admission, government aides were hosting a business forum entitled "Venezuelan Powerhouse," while cargo planes were dropping emergency supplies for victims of the floods in Peru.
That has prompted the opposition to decry the government's move to put further strain on supplies, saying that generosity should be reserved for Venezuelans.
The opposition has been trying tirelessly to force Maduro from power. In 2015, however, Maduro disavowed a landslide election loss and suspended a recall campaign. On Friday fourteen countries from North and South America issued a plea for Venezuela to "re-establish democracy" by releasing political prisoners and holding national polls.
The next elections are scheduled for 2018.
Venezuela's illegal gold mines
Although working in the mines of eastern Venezuela is dangerous, diggers from all over the country head underground daily, pushed by the rise in gold prices and the severe economic crisis affecting the country.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Barreto
Mafia war in Venezuelan gold mines
There is a bloody mafia war raging for control of the unlicensed gold mines in the Venezuelan state of Bolivar. Miners get killed regularly, their bodies mutilated or riddled with bullets. They have flocked to this region as President Nicolas Maduro's Socialist government has struggled with a three-year recession, spiraling inflation and food shortages.
Dangerous life in the mines of El Callao
A worker descends into an underground mine on the bank of a river in El Callao. It is believed, that 90 percent of the gold produced in the South American nation comes from illegal mines. In a country where a crushing economic crisis has fueled an epidemic of violent crime, such mines are "primarily in mafia hands," says Venezuelan Mining Chamber head Luis Rojas.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Barreto
"I'll probably do this till I die"
A narrow mine shaft is filled with water and the smell of gases. The handmade wood supports to prevent a collapse look precarious at best. But Ender Moreno is unfazed. At 18 years old, he has already been doing this job for eight years. "I'm not afraid," he says as he climbs through the pitch black, his headlamp lighting the way through the hazardous maze 30 meters (100 feet) underground.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Barreto
Assault rifle shootouts common
Ender knows three young men who were killed in his neighborhood. "They were miners, but they started running around with gangsters." A while ago, his boss at the mine was killed because he refused to let mobsters take over the business. Two months before that, 28 workers were massacred at a nearby mine, in what authorities called a turf war between rival gangs.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Barreto
Polluting mining
A miner shows a gold-mercury amalgam he found prospecting. At the nearby Nacupay gold mine, workers dig the earth from the bed of a contaminated river as others pour mercury into pans of extracted sediment. The open-pit mine is known as one of the most violent and polluting in the region.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Barreto
Desperate situation
Ender looks for gold in an open pit. After returning back to the surface, he contemplates his future during a short break. "My mom says this is no kind of life. But I can't stop because I need the money to help her," the teenage miner says. Workers make somewhere between 260,000 and one million bolivars a month ($95 to $360 or €88 to €334) - which, they point out, is far higher than minimum wage.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Barreto
Workers sleep on-site in malaria-ridden camps
Venezuela was the first nation worldwide to eradicate malaria in its most populated areas, even preceding the United States in 1961. However, the situation now has changed for the worse, as the country has reported an increase in the incidence of malaria cases every year since 2008. The state of Bolivar accounts for the majority of these cases.
