Supported by
By Anatoly Kurmanaev, Isayen Herrera and Sheyla Urdaneta
CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuelan officials denounce other people who may have been in contact with the coronavirus as “bioterrorists” and urge their neighbors to report them. The government owns and intimidates doctors and experts who question the president’s policy on the virus.
And it brings in combination thousands of Venezuelans who return home after wasting their jobs abroad, keeping them in makeshift containment centers for fear of being infected.
President Nicols Maduro has attacked the coronavirus as much as he has an internal risk to his power: deploying his repressive security opposed to him.
In requisitioned hotels, disused schools and cordoned-off bus stations, Venezuelans returning home from other Latin American countries are forced to settle in overcrowded rooms with little food, water or masks, and are kept in army custody for weeks or months for coronavirus testing.or remedy with unproven drugs, according to interviews with detainees, videos they took on their cell phones and government documents.
“They told us that we are polluted, that we are to blame for infecting the country,” said Javier Aristizábal, nurse from the capital Caracas, who said he spent 70 days in the centers after returning from Colombia in March.
In a giant city, St. Kitts, activists from the ruling party badge the homes of families suspected of having the virus and threaten to stop them, citizens said. In the city of Maracaibo, police patrol the streets in search of Venezuelans who have returned to the country.country without official approval Local opposition politicians whose constituencies have an epidemic say they are threatened with being prosecuted.
“It’s the country in the world where having Covid is a crime,” said Sergio Hidalgo, a Venezuelan opposition activist who said he had severed symptoms of the disease, to place policemen at his doorstep and government officials accusing him of infecting the community..
As the pandemic swept with neighboring countries, overwhelming health service networks more prepared than Venezuela’s collapsed system, Maduro has taken an uncompromising approach and treated coronavirus as a risk to national security that could destabilize his bankrupt country and undermine its control of power…
“The pandemic obviously poses a risk to the government because it shows the precariousness of its resources,” said John Magdaleno, a Venezuelan politician in Caracas.”The priority is to deal with the pandemic. It’s short-term political survival.
During his seven years in office, Maduro oversaw the collapse of Venezuela’s fitness care system, the destruction of the national economy and a sharp increase in the country’s external isolation.
Advertisement