Suicides Surge in a Hopeless Venezuela - 차베스의 포퓰리즘 정책이 가져온 무서운 결과
이강기2018. 10. 26. 13:17
Suicides Surge in a Hopeless Venezuela
The desperate act is becoming ordinary in a population plagued by hyperinflation, hunger and mass emigration.
Maria Leida Sanchez stands under the tree where her son died. The farmhand tended fields of cabbage and carrots. He broke his leg in a fall and grew despondent that he could no longer provide.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
By
Andrew Rosati
A record surge of suicides in troubled Venezuela is wearing down doctors who work at the university hospital in the Andean state of Merida. People who have tried to kill themselves arrive at an uncertain rhythm that breeds dread in the professionals who receive them.
“We live between terror and impotence,” said Ignacio Sandia, who heads the psychiatry department. “We constantly think we can’t do what we should in the moment we’re able to, and we’re terrified that patients commit suicide and there’s nothing we can do for them.”
Merida, hemmed in by mountains, has always had high suicide rates. Now, they are at record levels. Experts say a closed and conservative culture contributes to the toll.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
Suicides are rapidly rising across this once-wealthy nation, but particularly in mountainous Merida, where they are hitting levels never seen. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental organization, estimates that the state’s suicide rate was more than 19 per 100,000 in 2017. only 12 nations have a rate so high.
Such deaths are becoming ordinary in a population plagued by hyperinflation, hunger and mass emigration. Xiomara Betancourt, a neurologist who heads mental-health services at Corposalud Merida, the public health system, blamed scarcities of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine and loneliness as loved ones leave.
“It’s a cocktail, a multitude of factors that have all converged,” she said.
Merida, just smaller than Connecticut with a namesake capital city, is known for sleepy farming towns and snow-capped peaks and has about 1 million residents. Blackouts roil the region; gasoline and public-transportation shortages force residents to hitchhike through trash-strewn streets. Students at the University of the Andes have fled, taking any contagious optimism with them.
Absent reliable official figures, the Violence Observatory combed press clippings and police and hospital registries to document more than 190 suicides in Merida last year.
The death of Angel Isol Mendez, 75, ended a decline that mirrored the state’s. His bodega in a rural town ran out of goods. Hunger withered his body and a lack of insulin riddled his feet with diabetic sores. on Aug. 23, his son found him in the store’s barren anteroom, shot dead by his own revolver.
“There wasn’t anything left to sell, nothing, not even a piece of candy,” said his wife, Sonia Arellano. “Everything was going wrong. He felt like a prisoner. I figure it forced him to make a decision.”
A photo of Angel Isol Mendez hangs in his house in Bailadores.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
Many final decisions, doctors and authorities say, are made on impulse. Farmhand Eudis Miguel Valero Sanchez, 20, last year broke his leg falling from a truck bed. He lapsed into a deep depression and, after a Christmas Eve fight, he dashed from the family’s one-room house and hanged himself.
“I still come here at times to ask him why he did it,” said his mother, Maria Leida Sanchez, as she stood under the tree where her son died.
In the city of Merida, intense hunger means every trash bag is opened and sorted. The nation’s economic breakdown has created a sense of unremitting crisis.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
The government has been opaque about the deaths. As with inflation, homicides and HIV statistics, the autocratic government of President Nicolas Maduro often keeps silent for years at a time. Yet scraps of data confirm the surge. In greater Caracas, there were 131 suicides in June and July, according to a national investigative police document obtained by Bloomberg News. That implies a total this year of 786 in the capital alone. By comparison, the entire nation had 788 suicides in all of 2012, the last reliable accounting by Venezuela’s National Statistics Institute.
“It’s a chronic situation,” said Caracas psychiatrist Minerva Calderon. “A sensation of hopelessness takes over, and people see there is no exit.”
Convite, an advocacy group for the elderly, said that suicides among older Venezuelans rose 67 percent in 2017 from the year prior. This month, the children’s rights group Cecodap released a study showing an 18 percent increase in suicides by minors in 2017.
Sonia Arellano hangs Mendez’s hat in their house in Bailadores.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
Merida’s rates have long surpassed the national average. Officially, Corposalud says the figure more than doubled to nine per 100,000 in 2016, over the previous year. Last year’s numbers are still being compiled, but analysts say the national investigative police, who record the deaths, systematically underestimate reality.
“No government benefits from revealing statistics that prove their country is one of the most violent in the world,” said Gustavo Paez, who runs the Violence Observatory’s Merida chapter.
Neither Merida’s investigative police division nor Venezuela’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the force, responded to requests for interviews and official data.
Hitchhikers climb into a truck to catch a ride in impoverished Merida. Mass emigration has those left behind feeling isolated and abandoned.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
Merida is nestled in mountains near the Colombian border, and psychiatrists say self-harm has always been elevated there in reaction to a conservative and closed culture. Others point to alcoholism and genetic traits made more prevalent due to intermarriage. The Maduro administration is making matters worse by denying the nation’s collapse is happening, said Sandia, the psychiatry department head.
“The question for the one who is suffering becomes, ‘Am I the only one this happening to? If the problem isn’t the government, if it isn’t the situation in the country, the problem is me, and if I die it solves everything,”’ Sandia said.
Adriana Rangel, 30, an accountant, said her father felt like a burden after a rare autoimmune disease ended his career in advertising. Jose Felix Rangel’s days became never-ending hunts for medicine, and he spent sleepless nights in his Merida home playing guitar in the company of his dog, Coco.
“He became completely consumed by the situation in the country,” Adriana Rangel said.
Rangel hanged himself on July 20, 2016.
Jose Felix Rangel’s dog, Coco, waits inside his house in Merida.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
Venezuela has no suicide hotline. If you are considering suicide, please click on this link for a list of Latin American agencies that can provide immediate counseling.
Venezuela no tiene una línea directa de prevención del suicidio. Si estás considerando el sucidio, por favor haz click aquí para una lista de agencias en América Latina que pueden ofrecerte ayuda inmediata.
— With assistance by Fabiola Zerpa
Venezuela Is Said to Move Cash Through an Obscure Russian Bank
An obscure Moscow-based state-run bank has emerged as a key player in Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s efforts to work around U.S. sanctions that are cutting his country off from the global economy.
Evrofinance Mosnarbank, which is jointly owned by Russia and Venezuela but not subject to sanctions itself, has been tapped by the Maduro government as an alternative to handle payments to its suppliers. What’s more, officials in Caracas are urging local banks and companies to channel international transactions through Evrofinance, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
For Maduro, there’s a lot riding on the gambit. Desperate to stem a brutal economic collapse and restore some sense of normalcy, the authoritarian leader needs to find a way to reinsert companies in international markets so that they can carry out tasks as simple as importing and exporting goods or wiring money from Caracas to Miami.
Major U.S. and European-based financial institutions have cut off ties with Venezuelan businesses to avoid running afoul of restrictions that the U.S. imposed to punish the Maduro regime for human-rights abuses, political repression and graft. But Evrofinance, with its unique capital structure and its origins as a joint venture created during the alliance between Vladimir Putin and the late Hugo Chavez, has been unmoved by such concerns. If anything, it’s become increasingly involved in Venezuelan markets.
Putin and Chavez in Caracas on April 2, 2010.
Photographer: Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images
Bank Meetings
In at least two meetings in the past month, central bank officials have told local private banks that they need to open Evrofinance accounts in order to take part in currency auctions, according to two people who participated in the discussions. Those auctions are now swapping bolivars for euros, yuan and other currencies instead of U.S. dollars, Economy Vice President Tareck El Aissami said last week.
In addition, state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela SA’s contractors are also being told to open accounts with Evrofinance to receive payments abroad, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.
In recent years Evrofinance has grown “mainly due to shocks to the banking sector such as the rehabilitation of lenders and revoking of licenses from large players on the market,” according to an e-mailed response from the bank’s press office, without commenting specifically on whether Venezuela business has increased. “An influx of clients from troubled banks due to these circumstances, as well as favorable fees, settlement speed and attractive interest rates for deposits, has had a positive impact on the bank’s performance.”
Venezuela’s Central Bank and PDVSA didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Since taking over for Chavez in 2013, Maduro has driven the country into its deepest economic collapse while cracking down on opponents, undermining institutions and cementing the military’s hold on power. Those moves have drawn the ire of the U.S., which slapped government officials with sanctions and forbid many transactions with the regime to try to force a change of course.
Financial Maneuvering
The growing isolation has increased Maduro’s dependence on the likes of Turkey, China, Russia and Iran and required complex financial maneuvering to keep key imports flowing, including refined oil products at a time when crude output sinks to the lowest in at least four decades. The risk of more sanctions, not only on Venezuela -- but also on its aforementioned allies, remains high and could require another re-jiggering of financial channels.
Their support is becoming increasingly important as the government faces a $949 million debt payment coming due Oct. 27, and in turn needs to find ways to get money into bondholder accounts. The payment is tied to a bond that’s backed by a majority stake in Citgo Holdings Inc. The government has skipped about $7 billion of debt payments in the past year, in part, arguing that the sanctions are blocking their ability to move money around the globe.
The story behind how Evrofinance Mosnarbank got involved in Venezuela goes back to 2011, when Chavez, riding the wave of sky-high oil prices and confidence, bought a 49.9 percent stake in the Moscow-based firm through the FONDEN development bank. Originally viewed as a bilateral bank to fund joint oil and infrastructure projects, Evrofinance obtained a local banking license, opened an office in Caracas and even advised on more than $3 billion of bond sales.
The other 50.1 percent ownership is split between Gazprombank, ITC Consultants of Cyprus, VTB and Novie finansovie tehnologii Ltd, according to bank’s website. Evrofinance is a small lender in Russia, with 57.8 billion rubles ($881 million) in assets as of Sept. 1, less than 0.1 percent of the banking system’s total assets.
