Getting Sick in Venezuela Has Become a Death Sentence
From Tylenol to chemo — if you need it, you’re out of luck.
BY MARCH 11, 2016
For her 13th birthday, my wife Marianella was given a child’s Swiss Army watch with a glow-in-the-dark dial. This portable treasure would soon become one of her only possessions. Seven weeks later, she was evacuated from her rooftop by helicopter as her hometown, Los Corales, and most of her friends and neighbors, were swept into the Caribbean Sea. An estimated 30,000 souls lost their lives to the torrential rains, mudslides and flooding that befell Venezuela’s Vargas state in December 1999, although we will never know precisely how many.
We’ll likewise never know how many of the lost might have been saved had the country’s newly elected president, Hugo Chávez, not spurned offers of U.S. assistance on ideological grounds. In so doing, he turned back hundreds of American military engineers along with their equipment — the most advanced naval and logistical support on the planet. For all Chávez’s many faults, this may have been his most unforgivable crime.
Today Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s ineffectual handpicked successor, is once more following in his predecessor’s footsteps and sacrificing the lives of his countrymen at the altar of ideology. By steadfastly staying a disastrous course despite the unprecedented and growing scarcities of medicine and medical supplies he may even be surpassing his storied mentor. According to official statistics from the ministry of health, the crisis has tripled the mortality rates for patients in public hospitals, and shows little sign of abating.
That Venezuela currently faces an acute shortage of medical supplies and medicines is one of the tragic results of the chaos wrought upon the country’s imports sector by the combination of plunging oil prices, economic mismanagement, and draconian currency controls. In particular, the state’s heavy-handed price control policies make importing pharmaceuticals and other medical goods a losing game. It’s much more profitable for importers to concentrate on seeking opportunities for arbitrage within the country’s arcane, multi-tiered exchange rate system.
