Patients awaiting emergency care fill a hallway at Luis Razetti Hospital in Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela. The economic crisis in the Latin American country has exploded into a public health emergency, part of a larger unraveling that has become so widespread it has prompted President Nicolas Maduro to impose a state of emergency, raising fears of a government collapse.

In Venezuela, crisis, economic chaos and the spectre of coup

With an economic crisis so severe that corn flour and milk, antibiotics and blood pressure medication are in short supply, Venezuelans have reached their breaking point.

On Tuesday, thousands of opposition protesters chanted “I am hungry,” as they marched toward the presidential palace in Caracas to demand the ousting of President Nicolas Maduro. Once the protesters were within a half dozen blocks, riot police turned them back with tear gas.

It was the fourth protest to march on the palace in as many weeks.

“Everything is falling apart,” said Phillip Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. “If street disturbances exceed the capacity of riot squads, then the government may have to call out the army. And the army may not back the government. Some people fear that could lead to a coup.”

The South American country of 30 million has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but its economy is collapsing to the point that the government cannot pay for imports, and has had to operate schools and services part time to save on electricity and water.

Hospitals can barely function, unable to run dialysis machines and incubators or print X-rays. Recently, blackouts knocked out respirators in a maternity ward in the coastal city of Barcelona and seven newborns died in one day, reported the New York Times. Yet Maduro has refused to allow international humanitarian organizations to bring in supplies.

According to local polling firm Datanalisis, scarcity in Caracas’ supermarkets reached 82 per cent this year, meaning that people only find two out of every 10 items on their list. Looting has become more common.

The recession has been compounded by a spiralling political crisis. The opposition Democratic Unity coalition, which won control of the National Assembly in parliamentary elections Dec. 2015, submitted a petition for a recall referendum with nearly two million signatures last month. But the government-dominated national electoral council keeps postponing meetings with the opposition to rule on the first stage of the referendum process.

In the meantime, Maduro is ruling by emergency decree.

The political spat is threatening to engulf the hemisphere. Luis Almagro, head of the Organization of American States, called Maduro a “petty dictator” and last week invoked the forum’s democratic charter, a move which could result in Venezuela’s suspension from the 35-member body.

In a show of solidarity with its old socialist ally, Cuban President Raul Castro then called the OAS “an instrument of imperialist domination” and said Cuba would not return to the forum, which promotes democracy and human rights in the region.

Maduro has called Almagro, Uruguay’s well-respected former foreign minister, a spy for the CIA, and told him: “you can shove that democratic charter wherever it fits.”

“The hemisphere has to get involved because there has been a breakdown in democratic order. Maduro is using the tools of democracy to have a dictatorship,” said Dany Bahar, a Venezuelan-born economist and fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Analysts say the current crisis is the result of years of irresponsible policies.

Venezuela remains almost wholly dependent on oil and has to import food staples and medicines. With the price of oil having plunged from more than $130 per barrel to about $50, the government has run out of money to pay for imports, and to service its substantive debt repayments.

Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, president from 1999 to 2013, funded widespread social reforms in his self-styled “Bolivarian Revolution,” using record-high oil revenues of the 2000s. But he also overspent, built up a multi-billion-dollar debt and failed to diversify the economy or invest properly in the state-run oil and gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela, known by its Spanish acronym PDVSA.

“The country used to export three million barrels of oil a day. Today it is closer to two,” said Bahar.



Human Rights Watch has criticized Maduro’s government for arbitrarily arresting opposition politicians and for intimidating, censoring and prosecuting critics.

Gunson believes the government would rather lose power in a coup, than through an opposition referendum. “Then Maduro could maintain the narrative that they are victims of a plot, and not rejected by their own people,” he said, adding that he hopes the political impasse can be resolved through dialogue.

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