Story highlights Mina Chang: On my last day in Venezuela, a group of heavily armed men accused me of being a journalist

The government is trying stop the horrific conditions of people eating from garbage and children resorting to prostitution from getting to the press, she writes

Mina Chang is Chief Executive Officer of Linking the World, a non-governmental organization that uses research tools to bridge the gap between practitioners and policy-makers. Chang is an International Security Fellow for New America. Follow her on Twitter @MinaChang. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) The violence that broke out Wednesday during Venezuela's Independence Day felt all too familiar. In fact, only last week I had seen for myself some of the chaos that has enveloped the country when I visited Caracas.

I was there to meet with local partners who have been begging for help in a humanitarian crisis that is still too often being overlooked. And, as I traveled around the city, I saw suffering and violence -- in plain view -- unlike any I had seen in all my years of working in active war and disaster zones.

I saw a young mother say goodbye to her 7-year-old daughter as a "fixer" (a paid smuggler) -- one of the few jobs in Venezuela growing in demand -- arranged to take the child into Colombia. The mother's tears blurred the view of her daughter and the man walking through one of five border checkpoints into the neighboring country and to an unclear future. I was waiting with her older daughter, a scared 12-year-old who was crying inconsolably because her sister had just been given away to a stranger.

Mina Chang

But the mother faced a dilemma that many in the country are battling against. She cannot feed her family, which has been living off of one meal of corn flour a day, and believes that her youngest will have a higher chance of survival. She hopes someone on the other side will care for her child.

This scenario is one of the millions of equally tragic scenes unfolding right now in Venezuela. People are dying from lack of basic needs or being killed for speaking out against their poor living conditions. There are no operational medical facilities. For many, there is no medicine, there are no doctors, with scarce clean water leaving disease to fill the void.

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