VENEZUELA: 87,000 Seniors Register in 'Greater Love' Mission

CARACAS, Venezuela / Venezuela Analysis.com / News / January 5, 2012


By Rachael Boothroyd,  VenezuelaAnalysis.com

More than 87,000 senior citizens have signed up to the government’s
new mission since registration began on December 20. (CdO)

The Venezuelan government has announced that since December 20, over 87,000 senior citizens have registered in the state’s new social program, the “Greater Love” mission, designed to tackle extreme poverty within the nation’s older generation.

Women over the age of 55 and men over the age of 60 are eligible to register in the mission, which was announced in early December last year. The new mission seeks to expand the number of Venezuelan senior citizens who have access to a pension, currently equal to the national minimum wage of 1,548 Bolivars per month (US$360).

“This mission is a benefit for us. Here there is someone who thinks of the grandparents, because they have always been abandoned” said Maria Araque, 62.

Previously only senior citizens who had made social security contributions were eligible to receive a full pension from the IVSS, (Venezuelan Institute of Social Security), excluding those who worked outside of the official public and private sectors.

“This is the first time that senior citizens are receiving help, and in my case I need it, because I have always been self-employed and I don’t have a pension” stated Luis Araque from Caracas.

Although some senior citizens are able to claim benefits of up to 60% of the national minimum wage from the Institute of Social Services (INASS), there are currently an estimated 400,000 older citizens living in extreme poverty throughout the country.

“How many older people are there who worked their whole lives in family homes, washing and ironing, and then after turning 60 or 70, they don’t have a pension? We’re going to give them their full pension” declared Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

For her part, Commune and Social Protection Minister, Isis Ochoa, confirmed that the 203,000 senior citizens currently receiving 60% of the minimum wage from INASS will be upgraded to receive their full pension.

There are currently 163 registration points across the states of Miranda, Vargas and the Capital District, which will be extended to include 13 states across the nation as of next week. A family member or a friend may register on behalf of those citizens who are unable to leave the house for reasons of immobility or disability.

Senior Citizen Committees

According to the Venezuelan press, more than 6,600 “Senior Citizen Committees” have also been formed as part of the mission, with the intention of incorporating the nation’s older generation into the country’s educative, health and social security systems.

Made up of 104,000 senior citizen volunteers, the committees will work in conjunction with their local communities in the following areas; preventative healthcare, education for self-liberation, sustainable agriculture, communications (social networks) and politics.

“The senior citizen of today isn’t the same sad and solitary person of the past, they’re upbeat, alert and motivated to participate in the different activities” explained Dinora Jiménez, a member of one of the committees.

During his appearance on “Up Front”, a television programme on Venezuelan state television channel VTV, Manuel Gonzales, official spokesperson for the Great Patriotic Pole, also praised the government’s policies for improving the lives of the nation’s elderly, describing how older generations were no longer viewed as “scrap metal”.

Gonzales also contrasted the government’s latest mission for older people with the neo-liberal policies currently being implemented by governments in the West, which he said were restricting older citizens’ access to a pension.

“We have to remember that before the revolution, there were only 367,000 people in the country who were receiving a pension, which was only 10% of the minimum wage. Now there are 1,900,000 of us enjoying a pension equivalent to the minimum wage” he said.

Although the Chavez administration has managed to decrease extreme poverty from 29.8% in 2003 to 6.8% in 2011, the government recently set itself the task of further reducing this figure. As well as announcing the creation of the “Greater Love” mission in December of last year, the Sons and Daughters of Venezuela mission was also initiated, aimed at alleviating extreme poverty amongst children, children with disabilities and teenage mothers.

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VENEZUELA: Health Care Takes Turn For the Worse

Many public hospitals have fallen on hard times in a nation awash in oil wealth. The childbirth death rate and cases of dengue and malaria are up, and doctors are in short supply. By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer CARACAS, VENEZUELA April 8, 2008 Grimacing from contractions, expectant mother Castuca Marino had more on her mind than birth pangs. She was nervous about whether she and her newborn child would make it out of the hospital alive. Interviewed as she stood in the emergency room of Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital here last week, Marino had heard news reports of six infant deaths there over a 24-hour period late last month. She knew that since the beginning of February, six mothers had died in the hospital during or after childbirth. "What are poor people going to do?" said Marino, 20, as she was being admitted to this sprawling complex where, on average, 60 babies are born a day. "I'm just hoping that there are no complications and that everything goes well." Palacios, Venezuela's largest public maternity hospital and once the nation's beacon of neonatal care, has fallen on hard times. Half of the anesthesiologists and pediatricians on staff two years ago have quit. Basic equipment such as respirators, ultrasound monitors and incubators are either broken or scarce. Six of 12 birth rooms have been shut. On one day last month, five newborns were crowded into one incubator, said Dr. Jesus Mendez Quijada, a psychiatrist and Palacios staff member who is a past president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation. The deaths of the six infants "were not a case of bad luck, but the consequence of an accumulation of circumstances that have created this alarming situation," Mendez said. He and others say the problems at Concepcion Palacios are symptoms of a variety of ills that have beset the public healthcare system under leftist firebrand President Hugo Chavez. Cases of malaria nearly doubled between 1998, the year before Chavez took office, and 2007. Incidents of dengue fever more than doubled over the same period. Poorly paid doctors regularly demonstrate at hospitals from Puerto La Cruz in the northeast to Maracay in the industrial heartland, demanding back pay and protesting the lack of equipment and supplies. Others are leaving in droves for Spain, Australia or the Middle East, where they make 10 times the $600 monthly average salary they earn in public hospitals. Venezuela's healthcare system was facing problems even before Chavez took office. The system has been riven with corruption, mismanagement and disorganization for decades. In addition, tropical conditions have made the country ripe for epidemics difficult for any government to control. An encephalitis outbreak in 1996 sickened 20,000 people. But the system's current crisis comes as the country is awash in oil wealth, a windfall that critics say could be used to ease the problem. Instead, Chavez is building a parallel health program called Barrio Adentro, which features 11,000 neighborhood clinics staffed mainly by Cuban doctors. Inaugurated nationwide in 2003, Barrio Adentro initially was so popular with the poor that it helped Chavez win a crucial 2004 referendum and hold on to power. It has brought basic healthcare to the barrios, providing free exams and medicine as well as eye operations that have saved the sight of thousands. But the system siphons resources and equipment away from the public hospitals, which have four-fifths of the nation's 45,000 hospital beds and where the public still goes for emergency and maternity care, as well as for most major and elective surgeries. The finances and organization of Barrio Adentro are "a black box and not transparent, so it's impossible to analyze it for efficiency," said Dr. Marino Gonzalez, professor of public policy at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, the capital. A lack of openness has affected other facets of public health too. After the medical establishment blamed him for an outbreak of dengue fever last summer, Chavez halted weekly publication of an epidemiology report that for 50 years had tallied occurrences of infectious diseases nationwide. Former Health Minister Rafael Orihuela says the loss of the weekly report has deprived the government of information needed for a quick response to outbreaks of disease. "I am not talking about a failure of the government to adopt innovations in healthcare," said Orihuela, a Chavez critic. "I am talking about a failure to maintain basic healthcare standards." Chavez has also been accused of appointing cronies to manage public health. Efforts to arrange an interview with Minister of Popular Power for Health Jesus Mantilla, who served with Chavez in the military, were unsuccessful last week. Politics and polarization fuel the healthcare debate. Depending on who is speaking, Venezuela is either suffering from the pangs of a new dawn in socialist healthcare or from the monumental incompetence of top-level bureaucrats. But even government officials acknowledge the public health system in recent months has been on the verge of collapse, evidenced by problems in maternity and postnatal care. Since the mid-1990s, the death rate of women giving birth has risen 18%, to 59 in every 100,000 deliveries, according to UNICEF. That's four times the rate in Chile. Venezuela's infant mortality rate of 18 deaths for every 1,000 live births in 2007 was down from 20.5 in 1998, but still double the rate of Chile and higher than other Latin American countries such as Colombia, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Gonzalez, the university professor, fears that the situation could get worse because maternity hospitals such as Concepcion Palacios are having increasing difficulty finding young pediatricians to pursue neonatal specialty training due to low pay and lack of resources. "It's not that before Chavez things were great," he said. "It's that things have deteriorated." chris.kraul@latimes.com Copyright Los Angeles Times, 2008

VENEZUELA: Peruvian leaders cry foul as Chávez exports healthcare

· 400,000 Latin Americans take up free surgery offer · Humanitarian schemes are political front, says Lima __________________________________________________________ Rory Carroll in Caracas and Andres Schipani in La Paz __________________________________________________________ The Guardian, UK March 24, 2008 The plane door opened and the elderly visitors, all visually impaired and in some cases blind, shuffled out slowly and carefully into Venezuela. Disease, age and poverty had stolen their eyesight but now they were in the land of Hugo Chávez and that was about to change. A scheme called Misión Milagro - Mission Miracle - had flown them here from Peru for free surgery which would transform their lives. A portrait of Venezuela's president gazed down from the airport terminal. "It is thanks to Chávez we are here," beamed Rosario Vilcavilca, 88, a peasant farmer in a traditional highland skirt. Mission Miracle has helped 400,000 impoverished Latin Americans see again and cast Venezuela's revolutionary leader as the region's humanitarian benefactor. Critics, however, see an agenda behind this and other Venezuelan-linked initatives. They claim Chávez is trying to export populist leftwing rebellions and further tilt the region away from US influence. Peru waded into the fray last week by accusing Venezuela of funding Peruvian militants under cover of humanitarianism. It said dozens of anti-poverty centres which have sprung up across Peru to promote Mission Miracle, among other schemes, were fronts for political agitation which may have fuelled protests against the government's free market economic policies. Many centres were linked to a radical leftist organisation known as the Continental Bolivarian Committee, claimed the prime minister, Jorge del Castillo. "No sovereign country needs to accept actions of other sovereign countries that are done under the table" he said. "Venezuela should act through normal channels." The president, Alan García, has backed a congressional investigation into the allegations that Chávez is trying to destabilise one of South America's few centre-right governments. Peruvian police have arrested nine suspected militants who allegedly received cash and directions from Venezuela via leftwing allies Bolivia and Ecuador. Most of the suspects were said to be former members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a guerrilla group which had faded since the 1990s. The anti-poverty centres, whose bank and telephone records are expected to be checked, deny any agenda beyond helping people access education and healthcare. Venezuela's ambassador to Lima, Armando Laguna, said Caracas was not offering financial or ideological support to Peruvian militants and said if Peru had proof it should expel him. There is an unashamed political tinge to the eye-surgery visits to Caracas. Patients are greeted at the airport by officials wearing T-shirts with revolutionary slogans and ushered aboard red buses. Some of the Peruvian arrivals said their gratitude to Venezuela's president would boost support for Ollanta Humala, Chávez's Peruvian protege who narrowly lost a presidential bid and has vowed to run again. "We're all Chavistas on this bus. Viva Humala!" said Santiago Sanchez. But it did not add up to subversion. These elderly Peruvian visitors, stricken with cataracts, glaucoma and other ailments were about to have their sight restored courtesy of a pioneering initiative to spread the benefits of Venezuela's oil wealth. Upon returning home they would sing Chávez's praises but seemed unlikely to foment rebellion. Venezuela also denied another Peruvian allegation - that Venezuela's new embassy in La Paz, Bolivia, would stir indigenous unrest across the region. "It will be a simple building, bigger than the one we have at the moment as we need more space but the rumours about it being a place for training and propaganda are completely false," said Luis Oblitas, a diplomat. There is no doubt Chávez is seeking to project his influence across South and central America and the Caribbean. He is estimated to have spent up to £18bn on foreign aid largely through subsidised oil and soft loans. He has also promoted trade deals to lure nations out of Washington's ambit. The question is whether he is breaking laws and infringing sovereignty, something the US practised for decades by sponsoring rightwing coups and shoring up dictatorships. Opposition movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua claim Chávez has made clandestine payments to their governments to shore up his anti-American alliance. Prosecutors in Argentina are investigating a suitcase filled with $800,000 in cash allegedly destined for the election campaign of President Cristina Kirchner, another Chávez ally. Both vehemently deny it. More seriously, Colombia has alleged that Venezuela's president gave, or planned to give, $300m to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). Chávez has scorned the claim but makes no secret of his sympathy for Marxist guerrillas who are deemed narco-traffickers and terrorists by Europe and the US. Hawks in Washington want Venezuela added to the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, bracketing it with Iran and North Korea. So far the Bush administration has demurred rather than risk disrupting Venezuela's oil flow. For impoverished Latin Americans such as Luis Nieto, a 67-year-old Ecuadorean who is almost totally blind and has been shortlisted for surgery through Mission Miracle, the politicking is irrelevant. "If Hugo somehow benefits, fine, good for him." What matters to Nieto is having his vision restored. "If I can see again," he said, a smile creasing his face. "Now that, that would be something." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008