Caracas, Venezuela (CNN) The red brick slum trips down the hillsides of eastern Caracas, and stumbles to a halt at a highway that separates the poor from the rest of Venezuela's capital.

Halfway down, in a makeshift church, about 30 children sit with their noses to the edge of wooden tables. Their eyes are fixed hard on plastic bowls, spoons gripped in tiny fists. The half-filled bowls of rice and beans are likely the only meal they'll get that day.

This is a feeding center in Petare, a community where 750,000 Venezuelans live in abject poverty. It is operated by local charity Alimentare la Solidaridad Petare, part of a network that runs 65 other feeding centers in 10 states across Venezuela.

Imael, 5, with a bowl of rice and beans, his only meal of the day.

Venezuela boasts the world's largest-known oil reserves. But its people are going hungry, putting pressure on a demographic that was once fiercely loyal to the Chavez and then Maduro regimes. "We need medicine, we need food because they broke the system," says Angel Alvarrez, the National Assembly representative for the Petare area, referring to embattled President Nicolas Maduro's regime.

Three million people have fled Venezuela in the last three years, according to the UN. Now, humanitarian aid is being mustered at Venezuela's border at the call of Maduro's rival Juan Guaido, the self-declared president who has won the recognition of many South American and European countries. His gambit will test Maduro's relationship with the military, forcing soldiers at the border to choose between food and loyalty to him.

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