Venezuela’s ‘socialist paradise’ turns into a nightmare: medical shortages claim lives as oil price collapses

The Perez family hold a photograph of their family member, Carmen, 51, who died in December in a state hospital in Caracas because of shortages of a prosthetic artery Photo: Meridith Kohut

Peter Foster reports exclusively from Caracas, where ordinary Venezuelans battle for survival as hospitals are left without supplies and shops without basic necessities

For Jose Perez, a Venezuelan taxi driver from Caracas, the hardest part about watching his wife die from heart failure was knowing just how easily she could have been saved.

The surgeons at the Caracas University Hospital were ready to operate on 51-year-old Carmen, but because of the shortages of medicines now ravaging Venezuela, they had no stocks of the prosthetic artery that would have saved her life.

For a day, the family enjoyed a glimmer of hope after a nationwide search uncovered one such device, but Carmen needed two and a second one was nowhere to be found. She died two days later.

It is life-and-death stories like these that illustrate the depth of the economic crisis now confronting Venezuela, a crumbling socialist-run petro-state that looks in danger of being tipped over the edge by the crunch in world oil prices.

For Venezuelans like Mr Perez and tens of thousands more awaiting medical treatment around the country, the magic realism of Hugo Chavez’s great Bolivarian socialist revolution has turned to bitter reality less than two years after the former leader’s death from cancer.

“It’s the government who is responsible for my wife’s death, not the doctors,” Mr Perez, 63, told The Telegraph last week. “Things are very bad in this country, and they are getting worse. I feel that we are in a dictatorship. At the start I believed in Chavez, now I can’t look at him. He is in the best place now.”

Mr Chavez might be dead, but as one of Latin America’s most charismatic political performers, he is far from forgotten.

His placid features still stare out from billboards in Caracas, while Venezuelan television still plays his rambling speeches denouncing America, capitalism and the West.

He promised the people the riches of the revolution, and for a while he was able to deliver, thanks to his country being blessed with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

But now, as the people queue at the pharmacy and the supermarket for basic necessities like baby formula, flour, milk and toilet paper, the promises sound like empty boasts.

Even the middle classes, previously insulated from many of the country’s gathering economic woes, are feeling the pinch as poorer people come from the slums and suburbs in search of restricted goods, forming queues in previously upmarket areas.

Empty shelves and wishful thinking

In a shopping centre in the Sabana Grande district last week, women queued outside a pharmacy for nearly two hours to buy two four-roll packs of toilet paper. In what has become the ultimate indignity for the Venezuelan public – and a huge embarrassment for the regime – shortages of toilet paper mean it is now strictly rationed.

In public, the shoppers are stoical, wary of speaking ill of a regime that has a track record of taking revenge on its critics, excluding them from the handouts and government jobs that became the hallmark of Chavez’s rule.

A line of several hundred shoppers wait to purchase toilet paper at a state-owned Bicentenario grocery store (Meridith Kohut)

But in private, the anger is intense. “In Venezuela, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, you have to queue for the right to wipe your backside,” said a queuing taxi driver, who declined to give his name.

For Nicolas Maduro, the president, a former bus driver who Chavez designated as his successor and who won a disputed election in 2013, the response to the crisis has been a mixture of denial, wishful thinking and angry denunciations of international capitalism waging an “economic war” on Venezuela.

But with Mr Maduro’s approval ratings now at just 20 per cent, it seems a growing number of Venezuelans no longer believe his claims that outsiders are always to blame.

Having promised a 15 per cent wage and pensions increase during last month’s annual state of the nation address, Mr Maduro last week announced emergency measures to relax currency restrictions on importers of key goods, including everything from toilet paper to tuna fish.

But with real inflation now running at nearly 100 per cent, according to Robert Bottome of the VenEconomia think-tank, and with Venezuela’s oil revenues being squeezed further by international oil prices, the measures were equivalent to trying to open an umbrella in a hurricane.

Sharply lower oil prices caught Venezuela off guard, with “no rainy day fund, no contingency plans”, wrote Mr Bottome in his latest weekly report on the economy. “In short Venezuela is in the midst of a crisis unlike anything in its history.”

The country is almost completely reliant on oil sales to pay for imports of goods that it no longer manufactures after decades of living as a petro-state. With Venezuelan oil prices dipping below $40 (£27) a barrel this week, those revenues are shrinking fast.

Yuca fries, anyone?

In the streets of Caracas, there is a superficial normality. Cars still clog the roads, as it costs only 3.5 bolívares – roughly 37 pence – to fill a saloon car with petrol – and many of the shops appear well stocked.

But look more closely and the “Potemkin village” aspects of Venezuela’s economy become clear. McDonald’s has no potato fries to serve because the company’s supplier cannot find the money to import real potatoes, so instead it serves a cardboard tasting substitute made from yuca.

In a branch of the Farmatodo pharmacy, one entire wall is stocked just with toothpaste and mouthwash and another with bottles of Pepsi, following a government directive ordering stores to fill the shelves with anything to give the appearance of plenty. Curiously, for all the toothpaste on display, there are no toothbrushes.

A sign that lists the medical supplies unavailable in a state run hospital, including: masks, syringes, and X-rays (Meridith Kohut)

For families like that of Carmen Perez, and 13 other Venezuelans who doctors at the Caracas University Hospital say have died as a direct result of medical shortages, the crisis is no longer about inconvenience, but the worth of a human life.

In another consulting room, we listened as the father of a boy with leukaemia was told that the hospital had only three of the five chemotherapy drugs his son needed, and that one of those was a substitute that would cause horrible side effects. As a young doctor pointed out though, the boy was lucky to be getting anything at all.

Such is the speed of Venezuela’s downward slide that policy analysts, Western diplomats, economists and opposition activists interviewed by The Telegraph this week all admitted that no one knows where, or when, it will end.

At the hospital they know only that if things don’t improve fast, more lives will be lost.

“There are 600 to 700 people on the cardiac waiting list,” said a doctor, who detailed shortages of everything from gauzes to sample tubes. “If they don’t receive the surgeries they need, more of them will die.”

Tomorrow on Telegraph.co.uk, Peter Foster speaks exclusively to Henrique Capriles, Venezuela’s opposition leader about the crisis engulfing his country – and how it can be fixed