A generation of children is growing up hungry and stunted in Venezuela, where the economic crisis and a lack of public resources have led to widespread shortages of food and a public health system unable to care for the malnourished.

Filed: December 18, 2019, 7 p.m. GMT

















Last August, Francys Rivero, an unemployed single mother of four, feared for her baby’s life. Two months after his birth, even though she was breastfeeding him regularly, Kenai de Jesús wasn’t gaining weight.

“I feel like my heart is breaking,” Rivero, 32, told Reuters in an interview here in the capital of the western Venezuelan state of Lara. “I don’t know what’s wrong with my son.”

She tried repeatedly to see nutritionists, but failed. One didn’t show up, another required a month-long wait. Desperate, Rivero attended a charity event offering checkups and information for families of children with nutritional problems.

At the event, organized by Caritas, the Catholic aid organization, doctors performed a check-up. With donations from the charity, and financial assistance from siblings now living abroad, Rivero began supplementing her breast milk with baby formula.

Within weeks, Kenai rebounded. By December, he reached an acceptable weight for his age. But Rivero, like many enduring a recession now in its sixth year, fears she could once again find herself short of the money needed to keep him healthy.

“How am I going to afford such expensive food?” she asks.

Venezuela’s economic crisis is taking a crippling toll on the country’s children, who face a growing risk of malnutrition as basic food is increasingly out of reach for many families. The public health system, notoriously short of medicine and other standard supplies, is unable to provide much succor, and aid groups struggle to bridge the gap.

President Nicolás Maduro, increasingly a global pariah for undermining democracy and overseeing the country’s economic collapse, blames the crisis and food shortages on U.S. sanctions meant to force him from power. The leader, also accused of overseeing widespread human-rights abuses and turning a blind eye to suffering across the once-prosperous country, often says foreign media and global aid organizations exaggerate Venezuela’s problems.