In Venezuela’s former oil capital, there’s poverty in life and death

‘If a family member dies, we can’t even bury him with dignity... how can this be our reality?’

A coffin opened by grave robbers at the Sagrado Corazon de Jesus in Venezuela (Images Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

The hospital had run dry of painkillers and antibiotics, leaving Neiro Vargas moaning in agony. The 43-year-old security guard had been brought in with a gunshot to the neck. On the seventh day, his heart gave out.

But in Maracaibo, the indignities of life no longer end at death. An economic free fall more severe than the Great Depression has crippled this onetime oil boomtown, and those who have stayed are bracing for worse under painful new US sanctions. Venezuela’s second-largest city – and its industrial engine – is now the epicentre of the socialist nation’s societal meltdown. The collapse of civilization here is perhaps most evident at death.

On the afternoon of Vargas’ passing, Maracaibo University Hospital, suffering the same major power outages plaguing the rest of the city, was stiflingly hot. His destitute family was unable to immediately pay for a funeral. So doctors dispatched his body to “the basement”. The un-air-conditioned morgue. Even when the power flickers on, none of the morgue’s eight freezers work. On a recent morning, insects swarmed the seven decomposing bodies left on slabs and on the floor. A dead baby lay rotting in a cardboard box.

As temperatures in this tropical city soared above 32C, Vargas’ corpse spent three days on the morgue floor, while his wife, Rossangelys, borrowed money to cover a makeshift coffin and transport it to their home. In the family’s living room, in a lawless part of town pocked with abandoned homes, the family held a grim wake. The narrow, black casket lay across two metal stands. Mourners averted eyes from the deceased’s infested face. Rossangelys tried, and failed, to control the smell by filling gaps in the coffin’s wood with caulking.

They could afford no burial plot. So they dug up the bones of Vargas’s long-dead brother in a local cemetery strewn with broken caskets desecrated by graverobbers. Rossangelys wept by her husband’s resting place. The expelled coffin of her husband’s brother lay in ruins nearby. “I’m just feeling so much rage,” she says. “So much rage for what we have to go through now in this city, in this country. If a family member dies, we can’t even bury him with dignity. How can this be our reality?”

Children play on a polluted beach along Lake Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

Maracaibo, the “Beloved Land of the Sun”, was a city of firsts. The first Venezuelan town lit by electricity. The first to open a cinema. In 1914, Venezuelan Oil Concessions struck crude on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, the petroleum-rich Caribbean estuary that laps at the banks of the city’s jagged skyline. Oil would change everything. A regional port bloomed into a metropolis of 2.6 million. By 1950, Zulia state – with Maracaibo as it capital – accounted for more than half of Venezuela’s GDP. Fuelled by wealthy donors, its cultural life thrived. Maracaibo boasted three symphony orchestras and the continent’s largest museum of contemporary art.

A woman passes a group of shuttered businesses in central Maracaibo, Venezuela (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

But the depression that began here in 2013 has accelerated into a meltdown, the product of falling oil prices, failed socialist policies, mismanagement and corruption. In 2008, when prices and production were high, Maracaibo crude was generating an estimated $138m (£110.6m) a day. Output has collapsed to roughly $8.5m (£6.8m).

By some estimates, as many as 700,000 residents – nearly a third of the metropolitan population – have abandoned the area in three years, joining the larger exodus of hungry migrants fleeing Venezuela. Venezuela’s national power grid is failing, and its oil production collapsing. A country blessed with the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves is suffering severe shortages of gasoline.

A food kiosk sits empty on a once-busy street in Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

The government of President Nicolás Maduro, bankrupt and weakened, has sought to protect the capital, Caracas, from the worst of the crisis. In a trade-off, the government has let Maracaibo fall. Since January, electricity here has been rationed to no more than 12 hours a day – when there’s any power at all. Lines for gasoline stretch more than a mile; waits last up to 2 days. The queue at the pump on University Street one recent afternoon measured 86 cars. In one street market, a desperate university professor was trying to sell his possessions – T-shirts, jeans, a lamp – for food.

At the sprawling Zulia Museum of Contemporary Art, bathroom pipes and sinks have been stolen, as have printers, computers, audio equipment and a truck. Phone cables were also taken – making landline calls nearly impossible. The museum’s main hall has been shuttered, its leaking roof leaving pools of stagnant water. Amid a budget crunch, the staff has dropped from 150 employees to 14 – and half of those are unpaid interns. A dozen exotic palms have died out front because the museum’s gardener emigrated.

Empty frames line a wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

The Maracaibo Symphony, unable to cover its payroll, has shrunk from 90 members to 11. “Our musicians have left,” says one player, who speaks on the condition of anonymity because she is afraid of government reprisals. “They’re playing in subways in Buenos Aires, or the streets of Lima and Quito, for coins.” She fights tears. “We don’t have enough musicians to play Beethoven anymore,” she says. “This has been my whole life. It is so hard to see it crumble.”

Most traffic lights across town are dark – for want of electricity, but also spare parts. That’s less of a hazard than it might be, because with the flight of so many people, there are far fewer cars, and almost no city buses. Some neighbourhoods are effectively ghost towns. Maracaibo’s six newspapers have closed.

Now, we are a dead city. A zombie state. And those of us left here are dead men walking

Eveling Trejo de Rosales, former mayor of Maracaibo 

In March, desperate looters ransacked more than 500 businesses – supermarkets, electronic stores, hotels. Many never reopened. The Zulia state chamber of commerce says 30,000 business have closed in 10 years. Hundreds more are shuttering every week. “Maracaibo was a city of lights, a city of nightlife, a thriving city blessed by the Caribbean sun,” says Eveling Trejo de Rosales, Maracaibo’s former mayor. “Now, we are a dead city. A zombie state. And those of us left here are dead men walking.

Jose Moreno motored his boat towards the centre of Lake Maracaibo. The 31-year-old fisherman pointed to the rusting husks of oil drills that were built to draw crude from the lake bed. “This is the graveyard of the wells,” he says.

A man passes the contaminated shoreline of Lake Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

This Connecticut-sized body of water was once Venezuela’s economic lifeline. Now it’s an environmental disaster. The vast majority of the thousands of oil wells that pepper the lake stand broken and useless. Raw crude and natural gas bubble to the surface. The Venezuelan oil industry was built on Zulia’s light crude. The centre shifted two decades ago to the thicker oil of the Orinoco Belt farther south, but Lake Maracaibo remained vital to the national economy. Its decline is one of chapters. In the early 2000s, Hugo Chávez, the late father of Venezuela’s socialist state, broke the unions at the state oil company, PDVSA. Trained engineers, rig workers and managers were replaced with political appointees. They ran the company into the ground.

Oil leaks are abundant and dangerous in the city of Cabimas, across the lake from Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

In 2008, when global oil prices crashed, Chavez nationalized firms that supplied, maintained and provided transportation to the lake’s drills. As the government under Maduro sank deeper into its financial hole, repairs slipped, then virtually stopped. Maduro claimed victory last year in an election widely viewed as fraudulent. The United States has backed Venezuela’s opposition in its efforts to oust Maduro and hold new elections. The United States was the largest buyer of Venezuelan crude. In January, the Trump administration prohibited US companies from purchasing the oil. For an industry already nearing a breaking point, it was like pouring hot water on third-degree burns.

A fisherman has a smoke after work on the lake in Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

Zulia produced 1.55 million barrels a day in 2001, according to Caracas Capital Markets, a Miami-based firm that focuses on the Venezuelan oil industry. By 2018, production had fallen to 250,000 barrels. Five thousand wells were operational in the lake in 2002. Today, union workers say, fewer than 400 are functioning. The Trump administration this month broadened the embargo, blocking all property and assets of the government and its officials, and prohibiting any transactions with them, the central bank or the state oil company.

Jaime Acosta worked for a private contractor to PDVSA that operated six oil perforators. The company shut down two months ago because the state oil company wasn’t paying the contract. “I would agree with the sanctions if they end up helping us,” says Acosta, 62. “But to be honest, at this point, the sanctions are only making it worse.” Without his wage to live on, he says, his wife and children have left for Colombia to find work. “In Zulia, us oil workers were the ones who drove the economy,” he says. “Now our families are broken.”

In the shadow of Maracaibo’s half-empty high-rises rests the shantytown of Miracle Heights North. Four hundred families – a third of the residents – have left in recent months, and the exodus is accelerating. Hyperinflation has put all but the most basic foodstuffs and medicines out of reach, leaving those who remain thin, hungry and sick. In the absence of a functioning government, gangs and thieves rule the neighbourhood.

People escape the heat and humidity in the polluted waters of Lake Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

Neiro Vargas, the security guard, was walking home from his 14-hour graveyard shift when he was caught in the neck by a stray bullet. He was one block from his front door. “The government doesn’t do anything,” Vargas’s wife, Rossangelys Olivares, says. “It simply doesn’t care about us.”

Violence isn’t the only killer. The power shortages, and the worsening access to running water, aren’t just inconveniences – they’re potentially deadly hazards. Parents, unable to wash their children with water and soap, are struggling to control an outbreak of scabies. This year alone, 16 people in the neighbourhood have died, community activists say, including the elderly and children with illnesses caused or worsened by the lack of clean water, unreliable power and the unrelenting heat.

Streets are dark during a blackout in Maracaibo (Michael Robinson Chavez for The Washington Post)

Three blocks from Vargas’ home, neighbours watched one recent afternoon as a small group of people carried the body of 11-year Tiany Chacin into her home in a coffin cobbled together from old pieces of furniture. A stomach parasite had reached her brain. Before she died, her mother says, the girl was vomiting worms. This year, her family has had almost no access to potable water, saysher mother, Yulimar Chacin, 33. They were left to drink from a stagnant drain. Since cooking gas is scarce and expensive, Chacin says, she could not always afford to boil it. “We had no other way, no other way to get water,” she says. “It’s darkness here,” the rail-thin woman says between sobs. “We are alone.”

© Washington Post