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As recently as 2001, Venezuela was the oil-rich economic success story of South America.

Today prisoners are eating rats to survive.

Migrants fleeing to neighbouring Colombia are pilaging bins to prevent starvation.

So how did it get like this?

And what is life like inside a collapsing economy?

'We ate dead rats. Raw'

(Image: Pableysa Ostos)

Venezuela once had more oil reserves than any other place in the world.

Now, the nation's highest denomination 100 bolívar banknote is now worth less than three cents (US) on the black market, according to a recent piece by The Economist .

Banknotes are so worthless people have been stitching them together to fashion crude craft items for sale at the roadside.

The IMF expects consumer prices to rise by 2,200% this year.

The knock-on effects are stark.

(Image: Pableysa Ostos)

According to local media reports in El Euevo Herald a prison inmate at Vista Hermosa prison in Bolívar was taken to hospital to be treated for food poisoning.

What had he eaten?

Dead rats.

Alejandro Manuel Mago Coraspe, 41, had to be transferred to hospital and treated for food poisoning after eating dead rats he found in the garbage

“We cooked them, but they were still raw,” said Alejandro Manuel Mago Coraspe, aged 41.

“We ate them anyway. I think they were poisonous and that’s why I fell ill. I normally kill them myself.”

Coraspe, serving eight months for vehicle theft theft, was suffering serious inflammation of his legs and feet.

But the main reason for severely malnourished Coraspe's pain was that the rat's bones and cartilage “obstructured his intestine”.

Surgery was required to remove them.

'Migrate or die'

(Image: REUTERS)

The remote Colombian border town of Maicao marks a frontline in Latin America's worst humanitarian crisis.

A queue of migrants snakes back 8 miles to the border crossing at Paraguachon.

Venezuelans are arriving hungry, thirsty and tired, often unsure where they will spend the night, but relieved to have escaped the calamitous situation in their homeland.

In Venezuela's backwards economy hyperinflation under President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government has rendered their currency virtually worthless.

More than half a million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, many illegally, hoping to escape grinding poverty, rising violence and shortages of food and medicine in their once-prosperous, oil exporting nation.

"It's migrate and give it a try or die of hunger there. Those are the only two options," said Yeraldine Murillo, 27, who left her six-year-old son behind in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, 56 miles across the border.

"There, people eat from the trash. Here, people are happy just to eat," said Murillo, who hopes to find work in Colombia's capital Bogota and send for her son.

(Image: iStockphoto) (Image: AFP)

The exodus from Venezuela - on a scale echoing the departure of Myanmar's Rohingya people to Bangladesh - is stirring alarm in Colombia.

A weary migration official said as many as 2,000 Venezuelans enter Colombia legally through Paraguachon each day, up from around 1,200 late last year.

Under pressure from overcrowded frontier towns such as Maicao, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced a tightening of border controls this month, deploying 3,000 additional security personnel.

But the measures are unlikely to stem the flow of illegal migrants pouring across the 1,379-mile (2,219 km) frontier.

At Paraguachon, where a lack of effective border controls has long allowed smuggling to thrive, officials estimate 4,000 people cross illegally daily.

"We left houses, cars. We left everything: money in the bank," said former electronics salesman Rudy Ferrer, 51, who sleeps outside a warehouse in Maicao. He estimates there are 1,000 Venezuelans sleeping on the town's streets every night.

Election - or a sham coronation - looms

(Image: AFP)

There is now a rival to stand against Maduro in the election on April 22.

Maduro had been expected to stand alone but now former state governor Henri Falcon, 56, launched his candidacy on Tuesday.

However, that has also proved a controversial move because it acts in defiance of the Democratic Unity coalition's policy of not fielding candidates, which is designed to isolate Maduro.

Opposition leaders plan to declare the election a fraud if it is a one-man coronation - his most popular rivals Leopoldo Lopez and Henrique Capriles are barred from standing - and see Falcon's stand as helping legitimize to contest.

"With this step, Henri Falcon abandons the (Democratic) Unity and the Venezuelan people's democratic sentiment," the coalition said in a series of angry tweets.

(Image: AFP) (Image: AFP)

"We cannot legitimize a fraudulent election system. We call on Venezuelans to keep fighting for democratic change."

Given his roots within "Chavismo" - as the ruling movement named after former President Hugo Chavez - Falcon may appeal to some government supporters.

He calls Maduro the "hunger candidate".

But many opposition supporters are calling Falcon a sellout who is being exploited by Maduro to legitimize a sham election.

'The Maduro diet'

(Image: AFP)

Three million Venezuelans - a tenth of the population - have left Venezuelan since former leader Hugo Chavez started his Socialist revolution in 1999.

Despite four months of violent anti-government protests last year, Chavez's hand-picked successor Maduro is expected to win a fresh six-year term at elections on April 22.

Mechanic Luis Arellano and his children were among the lucky ones who found beds at a shelter in Maicao run by the Catholic church with help from a U.N. refugee agency.

The 58-year-old said his children's tears of hunger drove him to flee Venezuela.

"It was 8pm and they were asking for lunch and dinner and I had nothing to give them," he said, spooning rice into his seven-year-old daughter's mouth.

"This isn't the size they should be," Arellano said, raising his children's spindly arms.

Migrants told Reuters news ageny they were paying up to 400,000 bolivars for a kilo of rice in Venezuela. The official monthly minimum wage is 248,510 bolivares - around £5.79 at the official exchange rate, or 79p on the black market.

Food shortages, which many migrants jokingly refer to as the "Maduro diet", have left people noticeably thinner than in photos taken years earlier for their state identification cards.

The shelter - where bunk beds line the walls of the bedrooms - provides food and shelter for three days and, for those joining family already in Colombia, a bus ticket onwards.

It will soon have capacity for 140 people a night - a fraction of the daily arrivals.

Colombia is letting the migrants access public health care and send their children to state schools. Santos is asking for international help to foot the bill, which the government has said runs to tens of millions of dollars.

Trump's economic war

(Image: Getty Images North America)

Maduro blames a U.S.-led "economic war", including sanctions imposed last year by President Donald Trump, for the unprecedented recession that has left millions hungry, created widespread shortages and fueled a migration exodus.

Critics say incompetent policies, such as dysfunctional currency controls, and rampant graft are behind the crisis.

"I got sick from eating rotten potatoes"

At another shelter in the Colombian border city of Cucuta, people regularly spend the night on cardboard outside, hoping places will free up.

The largest city along the frontier, Cucuta has borne the brunt of the arriving migrants. About 30,000 people cross the pedestrian bridge that connects the city with Venezuela on daily entry passes to shop for food.

Conditions are desperate for migrants like Jose Molina, a 48-year-old butcher unable to find work after leaving his wife and son in Venezuela's northern Carabobo state four months ago.

"I feel so depressed," said Molina, his face puffed and tired after sleeping outside a church.

"I got sick from eating rotten potatoes but I was hungry so I had to eat them."

Molina is so hopeless he has considered returning home.

(Image: REUTERS)

"My wife says everything's getting worse and it's best to wait," he said. "I don't want to be a burden to them. They don't have enough to eat themselves."

While many feel a duty to welcome the migrants, in part because Venezuela accepted Colombian refugees during thatcountry's long civil war, others fear losing jobs to Venezuelans being paid under the table.

After locals held a small anti-Venezuelan protest last month, police evicted 200 migrants who were living on a sports field, deporting many of them.

Migrants are verbally abused by some Colombians who refuse them work when they hear their accents, said Flavio Gouguella, 28, from Carabobo.

"Are you a Veneco? Then no work," he said, using a derogatory term for Venezuelans.

In Maicao, locals also worry about an increase in crime and support police efforts to clear parks and sidewalks.

They already have to cope with smuggled subsidized Venezuelan goods damaging local commerce, and have grown tired of job-seekers and lending their bathrooms to migrants.

Spooked by police raids, migrants in Maicao have abandoned the parks and bus stations where they had makeshift camps, opting to sleep outside shuttered shops. Female migrants who spoke to Reuters said were often solicited for sex.

Despairing of finding work, some entrepreneurial migrants turn the nearly-worthless bolivar currency into crafts, weaving handbags from the bills and selling them in Maicao's park.

"This was made from 80,000 bolivars," said 23-year-old Anthony Morillo, holding up a square purse featuring bills with the face of South America's 19th century liberation hero Simon Bolivar.

"It's not worth half a bag of rice."