09/06/2018 (Caracas, Venezuela)Mayra Castro, 37 years old, prepares food in her improvised home in Petare, Caracas. Her younger daughter died of hunger when she was only 1 year old. “When I took her to the hospital the doctor said I should give her chicken or meat but, how could I afford to buy chicken?”
Source: Time
Desperate people in Venezuela don’t rob stores or banks. There would be no point; cash machines have been mostly empty since early this year, when hyperinflation transformed the bolívar into a worthless piece of paper.
But desperate people in Venezuela do rob restaurants.
As the country creaks into its fifth year of economic crisis, hunger is on everyone’s minds. Nine out of 10 households say they don’t have enough money to buy food. Nearly two-thirds go to sleep hungry at night. Catholic non-profit Cáritas calculatesthat a family would need 98 times the minimum wage to afford a basic food supply.
Locals call the lack of food, “The Maduro diet,” after President Nicolás Maduro, who since 2013 has led Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian government and driven the country into humanitarian crisis.
Categories: South America, The Muslim Times, Venezuela, Violence