The Current Turmoil In Venezuela
I proceed to inform and convey, with much anguish and agony, the desperation divulged in this work. What will be recounted are the words of my family who are suffering alongside their nation; a message in a bottle cast away from a desolate country cut off from the world. Their story and their cry for justice is a voice of desperation shouting from across the Caribbean Sea hoping to fall on the ears of any that care to listen to their pain.
The blood of my father’s home has been drawn with the likeness of a Jackson Pollock painting. The lives of Venezuela’s children, mothers and fathers have been cut short. A generation lost at the hands of the government, which are meant to protect and not subdue its people.
Like the tactics of a boa constrictor, the Chavista regime has been suffocating the innocent, and with every instance of resistance, the snake crushes the lungs of the troupial ever so tightly. The government has taken steps to avoid judgement by ripping out the tongues of those who may criticize them by eliminating freedom through the destruction of journalism, oppositional parties and universities.
Venezuela’s currency, the Bolivar, has been turned into a useless reminder of promise that the nation once showed. The nation with the largest oil reserves in the world is in financial disarray, and with that comes a diminished spending power. Lack of supplies such as food, medicine and surgical equipment has driven people to desperation. In areas hit the hardest, people fight with tooth and nail for rations. In other areas, such as Puerto La Cruz, where my family lives, people queue for most of the day in the equatorial heat hoping that the food truck yields enough food for their turn in line. If they’re not so lucky, they head home with empty hands and empty stomachs.
The doctors have been left to figure out how to improvise care for their suffering patients. According to an unofficial survey by a network of more than 200 doctors in August 2016, 76 percent of public hospitals lacked the basic medicines that should be available in any functional public hospital, including many that are on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) List of Essential Medicines.
The criminals that brought this once prospering nation to its knees face no internal judgement, for they control the judiciary and have bribed the surrounding nations to silence. University students have armed themselves against the government, in protest and in resistance, to the never-ending wave of corruption. They see no other way out and place all their chips in the middle of the table, gambling their lives, and hope that they will be rewarded with an answered prayer for a rebutted injustice. As my aunt told me, “We are in the hands of God.”
