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FEBRUARY 1 2015 / THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH26
PETER FOSTER
in Caracas
FOR JOSE PEREZ, a Venezue-
lan taxi driver from Caracas,
the hardest part about watch-
ing his wife die from heart
failure was knowing just how
easily she could have been
saved.
The surgeons at the Caracas
University Hospital were ready
to operate on 51-year-old
Carmen, but because of the
shortages of medicines now
ravaging Venezuela, they had
no stocks of the prosthetic
artery that would have saved
her life.
For a day, the family enjoyed
a glimmer of hope after a
nationwide search uncovered
one such device, but Carmen
needed two and a second one
was nowhere to be found. She
died two days later.
It is life-and-death stories
like these that illustrate the
depth of the economic crisis
now confronting Venezuela, a
crumbling socialist-run petro-
state that looks in danger of
being tipped over the edge by
the crunch in world oil prices.
For Venezuelans like Mr
Perez and tens of thousands
more awaiting medical treat-
ment around the country, the
magic realism of Hugo
Chavez’s great Bolivarian
socialist revolution has turned
to bitter reality less than two
years after the former leader’s
death from cancer.
“It’s the government who is
responsible for my wife’s
death, not the doctors,” Mr
Perez, 63, told The Sunday Tel-
egraph last week. “Things are
very bad in this country, and
T
they are getting worse. I feel
that we are in a dictatorship.
At the start I believed in
Chavez, now I can’t look at
him. He is in the best place
now.”
Mr Chavez might be dead,
but as one of Latin America’s
most charismatic political
performers, he is far from for-
gotten. His placid features still
stare out from billboards in
Caracas, whileVenezuelan tel-
evision still plays his rambling
speeches denouncing Amer-
ica, capitalism and the West.
He promised the people the
riches of the revolution, and
for a while he was able to
deliver, thanks to his country
being blessed with the world’s
largest proven oil reserves.
But now, as the people
queue at the pharmacy and
the supermarket for basic
necessities like baby formula,
flour, milk and toilet paper,
the promises sound like empty
boasts.
Even the middle classes,
previously insulated from
many of the country’s gather-
ing economic woes, are feel-
ing the pinch as poorer people
come from the slums and
suburbs in search of restricted
goods, forming queues in pre-
viously upmarket areas.
In a shopping centre in the
Sabana Grande district last
week, women queued outside
a pharmacy for nearly two
hours to buy two four-roll
packs of toilet paper. In what
has become the ultimate
indignity for the Venezuelan
public – and a huge embar-
rassment for the regime –
shortages of toilet paper
mean it is now strictly
rationed.
In public, the shoppers are
stoical, wary of speaking ill of
a regime that has a track
record of taking revenge on its
critics, excluding them from
the handouts and government
jobs that became the hallmark
of Chavez’s rule.
But in private, the anger is
intense. “In Venezuela, the
country with the world’s larg-
est oil reserves, you have to
queue for the right to wipe
your backside,” said a queu-
ing taxi driver, who declined
to give his name.
For Nicolas Maduro, the
president, a former bus driver
who Chavez designated as his
successor and who won a dis-
puted election in 2013, the
response to the crisis has been
a mixture of denial, wishful
thinking and angry denuncia-
tions of international capital-
ism waging an “economic
war” on Venezuela.
But with Mr Maduro’s
approval ratings now at just 20
per cent, it seems a growing
number of Venezuelans no
longer believe his claims that
outsiders are always to
blame.
Having promised a 15 per
cent wage and pensions
increase during last month’s
annual state of the nation
address, Mr Maduro last week
announced emergency meas-
ures to relax currency restric-
tions on importers of key
goods, including everything
from toilet paper to tuna fish.
But with real inflation now
running at nearly 100 per cent,
according to Robert Bottome
of the VenEconomia think-
tank, and with Venezuela’s oil
revenues being squeezed
further by international oil
prices, the measures were
equivalent to trying to open
an umbrella in a hurricane.
Sharply lower oil prices
caught Venezuela off guard,
with “no rainy day fund, no
contingency plans”, wrote Mr
Bottome in his latest weekly
report on the economy. “In
shortVenezuela is in the midst
of a crisis unlike anything in
its history.”
The country is almost com-
pletely reliant on oil sales to
pay for imports of goods that it
no longer manufactures after
decades of living as a petro-
state. With Venezuelan oil
prices dipping below $40 (£27)
a barrel this week, those rev-
enues are shrinking fast.
In the streets of Caracas,
there is a superficial normal-
ity. Cars still clog the roads, as
it costs only 3.5 bolívares –
roughly 37 pence – to fill a
saloon car with petrol – and
many of the shops appear well
stocked.
But look more closely and
the “Potemkin village” aspects
of Venezuela’s economy
become clear. McDonald’s has
no potato fries to serve
because the company’s sup-
plier cannot find the money to
import real potatoes, so
instead it serves a cardboard
tasting substitute made from
yucca. In a branch of the Far-
matodo pharmacy, one entire
wall is stocked just with tooth-
paste and mouthwash and
another with bottles of Pepsi,
following a government direc-
tive ordering stores to fill the
shelves with anything to give
the appearance of plenty.
Curiously, for all the tooth-
paste on display, there are no
toothbrushes.
For families like that of Car-
men Perez, and 13 other Ven-
ezuelans who doctors at the
Caracas University Hospital
say have died as a direct result
of medical shortages, the cri-
sis is no longer about incon-
venience, but the worth of a
human life.
In another consulting room,
we listened as the father of a
boy with leukaemia was told
that the hospital had only
three of thefive chemotherapy
drugs his son needed, and that
one of those was a substitute
that would cause horrible side
effects. As a young doctor
pointed out though, the boy
was lucky to be getting any-
thing at all.
Such is the speed of Vene-
zuela’s downward slide that
policy analysts,Western diplo-
mats, economists and opposi-
tion activists interviewed by
The Sunday Telegraph this
week all admitted that no one
knows where, or when, it will
end. At the hospital they know
only that if things don’t
improve fast, more lives will
be lost.
“There are 600 to 700 peo-
ple on the cardiac waiting
list,” said a doctor, who
detailed shortages of every-
thing from gauzes to sample
tubes. “If they don’t receive
the surgeries they need, more
of them will die.”
Clockwisefromabove:JosePerez,withhisfamilyandapictureofhisdeadwife;emptyshelvesatthehospital;andinthesupermarket;Venezuelansqueueforhoursoutsideashoppingcentre
MERIDITH KOHUT
DAVID BLAIR
A CHEMICAL WEAPONS
expert who may have been
developing poison gas to
defend the biggest city under
Isil control has been killed in
northern Iraq, the US said
yesterday.
Salih Jasim al-Sabawi – also
known as Abu Malik – died in
an air strike near the city of
Mosul on Jan 24.
A statement from US
Central Command described
him as a “chemical weapons
engineer” who had joined the
Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (Isil).
Malik is believed to have
worked for Saddam Hussein’s
poison gas programme before
it was dismantled in the Nine-
ties. He was based atAl-Muth-
anna, formerly Iraq’s main
production centre for chemi-
cal weapons.
After Saddam’s downfall,
Malik was part of al-Qaeda’s
network in Iraq from 2005.
“He later joined Isil and his
past training and experience
provided the terrorist group
with expertise to pursue a
chemical weapons capability,”
said US Central Command.
His death would “diminish
Isil’s ability to potentially
produce and use chemical
weapons”, it added.
Experts point to the signifi-
cance of the location of
Malik’s death near Mosul.
With a population of about
1.5million, Mosul is the big-
gest city in northern Iraq and
the largest population centre
in Isil’s hands.
In recent weeks, however,
Kurdish peshmerga forces
have begun to encircle the
city aided by American and
British air strikes. Mosul
may be the target of a
counter-offensive later this
year.
Malik’s main task may have
been to prepare poison gas to
hold the city, according to
Hamish de Bretton Gordon,
formerly the commander of
the British Army’s defences
against chemical and biologi-
cal weapons.
“In my opinion, Isil will do
anything to avoid losing
Mosul,” he said.
“Malik will have had the
technical knowledge to be
able to make chemical weap-
ons. This was obviously a tar-
geted attack.”
Isil has used mortar bombs
loaded with chlorine gas
against the Iraqi security
forces. This form of gas, made
from a civilian cleaning agent,
is usually ineffective.
In theory, Bashar al-Assad’s
regime sacrificed its entire
arsenal of chemical weapons
last year.
In reality, Mr Assad is
suspected of omitting about
200 tons of mustard gas from
Syria’s official declaration to
international inspectors.
If any of that has fallen into
Isil’s hands, the group could
develop the ability to gas its
enemies. “The real worry is if
Isil has got hold of some of
the mustard agent which may
be missing,” said Mr de Bret-
ton Gordon, who now works
as managing director of Avon-
Protection, a security com-
pany.
America and its allies have
been using drones and
manned aircraft for targeted
strikes on Isil commanders.
John Kerry, the US Secre-
tary of State, said last week
that half of the group’s leaders
had been killed and that Iraqi
ground forces, supported by
nearly 2,000 air strikes by
America and other coalition
nations, had reclaimed more
than 270 square miles of terri-
tory from Isil.
SmokerisesnearMosul,whereAbuMalikwaskilled,lastweek