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Some poor Venezuelan parents give away children amid deep crisis
‹
7/7
Juan Pulgar, 73, holds a picture of himself taken about a year ago, as he poses for a portrait in his house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela November 17, 2016.
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS
1/7
Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, holds her son Emmanuel, 4, next to her husband Maikel Cuauro (L), 30, and her father Juan Pulgar, 73, w...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
2/7
Emmanuel Cuauro, 4, plays with a ball next to his parents Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, and Maikel Cuauro, 30, in their house in Punt...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
3/7
Zulay Pulgar (C), 43, stands in line outside a hardware store, next to her son Emmanuel, 4, to buy cement and resell it in P...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
4/7
Zulay Pulgar (C), 43, rest in a coffee shop with her son Emmanuel, 4, after standing in line to buy cement in a hardware sto...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
5/7
Zulay Pulgar (C), 43, gives Venezuelan bolivar notes to her husband Maikel Cuauro, 30, in their house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
6/7
Emmanuel Cuauro, 4, seats on the sidewalk next to his mother Zulay Pulgar, as they make a line outside the hardware store to ...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
7/7
Juan Pulgar, 73, holds a picture of himself taken about a year ago, as he poses for a portrait in his house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela November 17, 2016.
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS
1/7
Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, holds her son Emmanuel, 4, next to her husband Maikel Cuauro (L), 30, and her father Juan Pulgar, 73, w...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
›
X
By Girish Gupta and Mircely Guanipa | PUNTO FIJO, VENEZUELA
Struggling to feed herself and her seven children, Venezuelan mother Zulay Pulgar asked a neighbor in October to take over care of her six-year-old daughter, a victim of a pummeling economic crisis.
The family lives on Pulgar's father's pension, worth $6 a month at the black market rate, in a country where prices for many basic goods are surpassing those in the United States.
"It's better that she has another family than go into prostitution, drugs or die of hunger," the 43-year-old unemployed mother said, sitting outside her dilapidated home with her five-year-old son, father and unemployed husband.
With average wages less than the equivalent of $50 a month at black market rates, three local councils and four national welfare groups all confirmed an increase in parents handing children over to the state, charities or friends and family.
The government does not release data on the number of parents giving away their children and welfare groups struggle to compile statistics given the ad hoc manner in which parents give away children and local councils collate figures.
Still, the trend highlights Venezuela's fraying social fabric and the heavy toll that a deep recession and soaring inflation are taking on the country with the world's largest oil reserves.
Showing photos of her family looking plumper just a year ago, Pulgar said just one chicken meal would now burn up half its monthly income. Breakfast is often just bread and coffee, with rice alone for both lunch and dinner.
Nancy Garcia, the 54-year-old neighbor who took in the girl, Pulgar's second-youngest child, works in a grocery store and has five children of her own. She said she could not bear to see Pulgar's child going without food.
"My husband, my children and I teach her to behave, how to study, to dress, to talk... She now calls me 'mom' and my husband 'dad,'" said Garcia.
FOOD
Every day at the social services center in Carirubana, which oversees Pulgar's case, more than a dozen parents plead for help taking care of their children in this isolated, arid corner of Venezuela with a shaky water supply and little food.
ADVERTISEMENT
Last year, the rate was around one parent a day.
"The principal motive now is lack of food," said Maria Salas, director of the small and understaffed center, echoing colleagues at two other welfare groups interviewed by Reuters elsewhere in the country.
Salas added that her organization - the Council of Protection for Children and Adolescents - lacked the resources to deal with the situation and had asked authorities for help, even just a dining room, but had no luck.
Not far from Salas' office, long supermarket lines under a hot sun help explain why parents are finding life so tough, a scene repeated across the country of 30 million people.
Venezuelans suffer shortages of the most basic goods, from food to medicine. Millions are going hungry amid triple-digit inflation and a nearly 80 percent currency collapse in the last year.
The government blames the United States and Venezuela's opposition, yet most economists pin the responsibility on socialist policies introduced by former president Hugo Chavez, which his successor Nicolas Maduro has doubled down on even as oil prices - the economy's lifeblood - plunged.
Venezuela's Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The Caracas municipality of Sucre, which encompasses Petare, one of the region's largest and poorest slums, has seen an "exponential" increase in parents needing help, say officials.
"The parents come in crying," said Sucre welfare director Angeyeimar Gil.
"It's very dramatic to see parents' pain when saying they can no longer look after their child," she said. "We're seeing a lot of cases of malnutrition and children that come to hospital with scabies."
Two-thirds of 1,099 households with children in Caracas, ranging across social classes, said they were not eating enough in a survey released last week by children's' rights group Cecodap.
ABANDONED
In some cases, parents are simply abandoning their kids.
Last month, a baby boy was found inside a bag in a relatively wealthy area of Caracas and a malnourished one-year-old boy was found abandoned in a cardboard box in the eastern city of Ciudad Guayana, local media reported.
Gil said that she had helped find places in orphanages for two newborns recently abandoned by their mothers in hospitals after birth.
There are also more cases of children begging or prostituting themselves, according to welfare workers.
Abortion is illegal in Venezuela and contraception, including condoms, is extremely hard to find.
Back in Carirubana, Pulgar was relieved that her child was being looked after properly by her neighbor.
"My girl has totally changed," she said as another son clambered over her, adding that even her manner of speaking had improved.
She said she would love to take the child back one day but does not see her situation improving.
"This is written in the Bible. We're living the end times."
(Additional reporting by Liamar Ramos and Andreina Aponte in Caracas and Leonardo Gonzalez in Punto Fijo.; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer, Christian Plumb and Kieran Murray)
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1441TB
Declaring war on common sense, Venezuela bans its own money
By Francisco Toro Global OpinionsDecember 15 at 1:43 PM
Venezuela’s president has ordered the central bank to withdraw all 100-bolivar bills from circulation following a bizarre, baseless announcement of a devious conspiracy hatched by the U.S. Treasury Department. (Miguel Gutierrez/European Pressphoto Agency)
The scale of the conspiracy is staggering: More than 300 million of Venezuela’s highest-denomination bank notes have been ferried out of the country in recent months. Huge stacks of 100-bolivar bills now sit in warehouses throughout Central and Eastern Europe — Poland, Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Macedonia — all part of a devious plot hatched by the U.S. Treasury Department. Working through local nongovernmental organizations and local mafia syndicates, the plotters have spirited the actual physical banknotes first by land to neighboring Colombia and later by air to Europe in an ambitious bid to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist government by choking off the supply of paper money, setting off chaos and destabilizing the economy. The notes can’t be destroyed because the Americans have offered to pay dollars for them to their proxies, but only once the government has actually been overthrown.
If this story sounds outlandish to you, spare a thought for the people of Venezuela, who sat stunned on Tuesday as the powerful interior minister, Nestor Reverol, announced this bizarre, baseless conspiracy theory as settled fact.
Reverol’s reverie was far from innocent. PowerPoint presentation in hand, he set out his story to justify the government’s cunning plan to short-circuit the threat by removing the 100-bolivar bill from circulation altogether, within 72 hours.
The announcement set off panic, as millions of people scrambled to round up their 100-bolivar bills and deposit them in bank accounts ahead of the arbitrary deadline. Everyday life — already disastrously precarious for many — was thrown into complete disarray as everyone from bus drivers to shop owners refused to accept the bills, realizing that there’s no point accumulating banknotes that will be worth nothing by the end of the week.
As a result, Venezuela’s economy, which was already one of the most dysfunctional in the world, virtually stopped altogether this week. The 100-bolivar bill, lest we forget, was only worth about 3 U.S. cents to begin with. Withdrawing it leaves the country relying on the 50-bolivar bill — now worth a penny and a half — as the biggest bill, at least until new 500-bolivar bills come into circulation. That was supposed to happen in the next few days. Surprise, surprise: The 500s are late.
Reverol’s story is so far-fetched, so plain weird, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it doesn’t make the least bit of sense in its own fantastical terms. If the “international mafias” that haunt the minister’s imagination really were stockpiling 100-bolivar bills purely to sell them to the United States following regime collapse, why would they possibly care if they’re legal tender in Venezuela?
The minister clearly has not thought his own conspiracy theory through. He’s proposing to fight a secret plan to withdraw money from the country in order to cause economic chaos by … withdrawing much more paper money from circulation and creating far more chaos, especially among the poor, who often don’t have bank accounts in which to deposit their banknotes in the first place.
In fairness, though, it’s probably unwise to spend too much time and effort puzzling through the official story. It is so harebrained that Reverol can’t possibly believe it.
Other government officials, including President Nicolás Maduro, have portrayed the decision as aimed more at illegal exchange bureaus along the Colombian border, which the government is convinced are manipulating the value of the bolivar.
This makes more sense than the tall tales about Macedonian warehouses, but not that much more. To believe it, you’d have to think businessmen in Colombia are choosing to hoard one of the world’s fastest-depreciating assets. This version of the conspiracy theory refutes itself just as readily as the other one. With the bolivar losing 10 percent to 20 percent of its value every single month, stockpiling Venezuelan banknotes would be a little like trying to stockpile ice in open air in Phoenix in the summer.
So why is the government doing this, really? It’s a question Venezuelan economists have been asking themselves privately all week. Perhaps the measure is aimed at one specific player, some enemy Maduro happens to know is sitting on a lot of 100-bolivar bills specifically this week. Maybe.
Or maybe the Maduro administration has just lost the capacity for making even the most minimally logical of economic decisions for the country. Maybe we’ve entered the self-harm stage of the revolution, where everyone with even a passing acquaintance with the way a modern economy works has already been purged from the ranks and major policy decisions are made almost randomly, by a leadership clique that isn’t able even to measure the harm those decisions will do not only to the country at large but also to their own political well-being.
Maybe.
It isn’t easy to tell at this point. Which is alarming in itself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...la-bans-its-own-money/?utm_term=.55911d847c35
I kind of want to laugh at this stupid conspiracy theory but that would be insensitive because millions of Venezuelans are suffering because of the economically suicidal policies of Maduro
@Hell hound @Moonlight @The Sandman
‹
7/7
Juan Pulgar, 73, holds a picture of himself taken about a year ago, as he poses for a portrait in his house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela November 17, 2016.
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS
1/7
Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, holds her son Emmanuel, 4, next to her husband Maikel Cuauro (L), 30, and her father Juan Pulgar, 73, w...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
2/7
Emmanuel Cuauro, 4, plays with a ball next to his parents Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, and Maikel Cuauro, 30, in their house in Punt...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
3/7
Zulay Pulgar (C), 43, stands in line outside a hardware store, next to her son Emmanuel, 4, to buy cement and resell it in P...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
4/7
Zulay Pulgar (C), 43, rest in a coffee shop with her son Emmanuel, 4, after standing in line to buy cement in a hardware sto...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
5/7
Zulay Pulgar (C), 43, gives Venezuelan bolivar notes to her husband Maikel Cuauro, 30, in their house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
6/7
Emmanuel Cuauro, 4, seats on the sidewalk next to his mother Zulay Pulgar, as they make a line outside the hardware store to ...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
7/7
Juan Pulgar, 73, holds a picture of himself taken about a year ago, as he poses for a portrait in his house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela November 17, 2016.
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS
1/7
Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, holds her son Emmanuel, 4, next to her husband Maikel Cuauro (L), 30, and her father Juan Pulgar, 73, w...
REUTERS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS +
›
X
By Girish Gupta and Mircely Guanipa | PUNTO FIJO, VENEZUELA
Struggling to feed herself and her seven children, Venezuelan mother Zulay Pulgar asked a neighbor in October to take over care of her six-year-old daughter, a victim of a pummeling economic crisis.
The family lives on Pulgar's father's pension, worth $6 a month at the black market rate, in a country where prices for many basic goods are surpassing those in the United States.
"It's better that she has another family than go into prostitution, drugs or die of hunger," the 43-year-old unemployed mother said, sitting outside her dilapidated home with her five-year-old son, father and unemployed husband.
With average wages less than the equivalent of $50 a month at black market rates, three local councils and four national welfare groups all confirmed an increase in parents handing children over to the state, charities or friends and family.
The government does not release data on the number of parents giving away their children and welfare groups struggle to compile statistics given the ad hoc manner in which parents give away children and local councils collate figures.
Still, the trend highlights Venezuela's fraying social fabric and the heavy toll that a deep recession and soaring inflation are taking on the country with the world's largest oil reserves.
Showing photos of her family looking plumper just a year ago, Pulgar said just one chicken meal would now burn up half its monthly income. Breakfast is often just bread and coffee, with rice alone for both lunch and dinner.
Nancy Garcia, the 54-year-old neighbor who took in the girl, Pulgar's second-youngest child, works in a grocery store and has five children of her own. She said she could not bear to see Pulgar's child going without food.
"My husband, my children and I teach her to behave, how to study, to dress, to talk... She now calls me 'mom' and my husband 'dad,'" said Garcia.
FOOD
Every day at the social services center in Carirubana, which oversees Pulgar's case, more than a dozen parents plead for help taking care of their children in this isolated, arid corner of Venezuela with a shaky water supply and little food.
ADVERTISEMENT
Last year, the rate was around one parent a day.
"The principal motive now is lack of food," said Maria Salas, director of the small and understaffed center, echoing colleagues at two other welfare groups interviewed by Reuters elsewhere in the country.
Salas added that her organization - the Council of Protection for Children and Adolescents - lacked the resources to deal with the situation and had asked authorities for help, even just a dining room, but had no luck.
Not far from Salas' office, long supermarket lines under a hot sun help explain why parents are finding life so tough, a scene repeated across the country of 30 million people.
Venezuelans suffer shortages of the most basic goods, from food to medicine. Millions are going hungry amid triple-digit inflation and a nearly 80 percent currency collapse in the last year.
The government blames the United States and Venezuela's opposition, yet most economists pin the responsibility on socialist policies introduced by former president Hugo Chavez, which his successor Nicolas Maduro has doubled down on even as oil prices - the economy's lifeblood - plunged.
Venezuela's Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The Caracas municipality of Sucre, which encompasses Petare, one of the region's largest and poorest slums, has seen an "exponential" increase in parents needing help, say officials.
"The parents come in crying," said Sucre welfare director Angeyeimar Gil.
"It's very dramatic to see parents' pain when saying they can no longer look after their child," she said. "We're seeing a lot of cases of malnutrition and children that come to hospital with scabies."
Two-thirds of 1,099 households with children in Caracas, ranging across social classes, said they were not eating enough in a survey released last week by children's' rights group Cecodap.
ABANDONED
In some cases, parents are simply abandoning their kids.
Last month, a baby boy was found inside a bag in a relatively wealthy area of Caracas and a malnourished one-year-old boy was found abandoned in a cardboard box in the eastern city of Ciudad Guayana, local media reported.
Gil said that she had helped find places in orphanages for two newborns recently abandoned by their mothers in hospitals after birth.
There are also more cases of children begging or prostituting themselves, according to welfare workers.
Abortion is illegal in Venezuela and contraception, including condoms, is extremely hard to find.
Back in Carirubana, Pulgar was relieved that her child was being looked after properly by her neighbor.
"My girl has totally changed," she said as another son clambered over her, adding that even her manner of speaking had improved.
She said she would love to take the child back one day but does not see her situation improving.
"This is written in the Bible. We're living the end times."
(Additional reporting by Liamar Ramos and Andreina Aponte in Caracas and Leonardo Gonzalez in Punto Fijo.; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer, Christian Plumb and Kieran Murray)
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1441TB
Declaring war on common sense, Venezuela bans its own money
By Francisco Toro Global OpinionsDecember 15 at 1:43 PM
Venezuela’s president has ordered the central bank to withdraw all 100-bolivar bills from circulation following a bizarre, baseless announcement of a devious conspiracy hatched by the U.S. Treasury Department. (Miguel Gutierrez/European Pressphoto Agency)
The scale of the conspiracy is staggering: More than 300 million of Venezuela’s highest-denomination bank notes have been ferried out of the country in recent months. Huge stacks of 100-bolivar bills now sit in warehouses throughout Central and Eastern Europe — Poland, Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Macedonia — all part of a devious plot hatched by the U.S. Treasury Department. Working through local nongovernmental organizations and local mafia syndicates, the plotters have spirited the actual physical banknotes first by land to neighboring Colombia and later by air to Europe in an ambitious bid to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist government by choking off the supply of paper money, setting off chaos and destabilizing the economy. The notes can’t be destroyed because the Americans have offered to pay dollars for them to their proxies, but only once the government has actually been overthrown.
If this story sounds outlandish to you, spare a thought for the people of Venezuela, who sat stunned on Tuesday as the powerful interior minister, Nestor Reverol, announced this bizarre, baseless conspiracy theory as settled fact.
Reverol’s reverie was far from innocent. PowerPoint presentation in hand, he set out his story to justify the government’s cunning plan to short-circuit the threat by removing the 100-bolivar bill from circulation altogether, within 72 hours.
The announcement set off panic, as millions of people scrambled to round up their 100-bolivar bills and deposit them in bank accounts ahead of the arbitrary deadline. Everyday life — already disastrously precarious for many — was thrown into complete disarray as everyone from bus drivers to shop owners refused to accept the bills, realizing that there’s no point accumulating banknotes that will be worth nothing by the end of the week.
As a result, Venezuela’s economy, which was already one of the most dysfunctional in the world, virtually stopped altogether this week. The 100-bolivar bill, lest we forget, was only worth about 3 U.S. cents to begin with. Withdrawing it leaves the country relying on the 50-bolivar bill — now worth a penny and a half — as the biggest bill, at least until new 500-bolivar bills come into circulation. That was supposed to happen in the next few days. Surprise, surprise: The 500s are late.
Reverol’s story is so far-fetched, so plain weird, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it doesn’t make the least bit of sense in its own fantastical terms. If the “international mafias” that haunt the minister’s imagination really were stockpiling 100-bolivar bills purely to sell them to the United States following regime collapse, why would they possibly care if they’re legal tender in Venezuela?
The minister clearly has not thought his own conspiracy theory through. He’s proposing to fight a secret plan to withdraw money from the country in order to cause economic chaos by … withdrawing much more paper money from circulation and creating far more chaos, especially among the poor, who often don’t have bank accounts in which to deposit their banknotes in the first place.
In fairness, though, it’s probably unwise to spend too much time and effort puzzling through the official story. It is so harebrained that Reverol can’t possibly believe it.
Other government officials, including President Nicolás Maduro, have portrayed the decision as aimed more at illegal exchange bureaus along the Colombian border, which the government is convinced are manipulating the value of the bolivar.
This makes more sense than the tall tales about Macedonian warehouses, but not that much more. To believe it, you’d have to think businessmen in Colombia are choosing to hoard one of the world’s fastest-depreciating assets. This version of the conspiracy theory refutes itself just as readily as the other one. With the bolivar losing 10 percent to 20 percent of its value every single month, stockpiling Venezuelan banknotes would be a little like trying to stockpile ice in open air in Phoenix in the summer.
So why is the government doing this, really? It’s a question Venezuelan economists have been asking themselves privately all week. Perhaps the measure is aimed at one specific player, some enemy Maduro happens to know is sitting on a lot of 100-bolivar bills specifically this week. Maybe.
Or maybe the Maduro administration has just lost the capacity for making even the most minimally logical of economic decisions for the country. Maybe we’ve entered the self-harm stage of the revolution, where everyone with even a passing acquaintance with the way a modern economy works has already been purged from the ranks and major policy decisions are made almost randomly, by a leadership clique that isn’t able even to measure the harm those decisions will do not only to the country at large but also to their own political well-being.
Maybe.
It isn’t easy to tell at this point. Which is alarming in itself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...la-bans-its-own-money/?utm_term=.55911d847c35
I kind of want to laugh at this stupid conspiracy theory but that would be insensitive because millions of Venezuelans are suffering because of the economically suicidal policies of Maduro
@Hell hound @Moonlight @The Sandman
