As Venezuela’s hospitals collapse, the government fires, muzzles doctors

Venezuela seems to have found a solution for its crumbling hospitals: Silence the critics.

In recent days, several outspoken doctors have been fired, hounded or threatened for trying to raise alarms about the failing healthcare system. The crackdown comes as the country’s healthcare crisis has become a principal battleground in the fight to oust leader Nicolás Maduro.

Keyner Celis, a 25-year-old doctor at the José María Benitez hospital in Aragua state, said he’d grown tired of watching people die because defibrillators didn’t work or due to the lack of anti-seizure medication. But when he made his frustrations public he was fired, even though the hospital is critically understaffed.

“We’re hanging on by our fingernails and have nothing to work with,” Celis said. “We have patients who have to wait for five to six months for surgery because we don’t have basic supplies, we don’t have any medicine.”

Celis claims that five to eight people die every day at his hospital due to the shortages.

“Sometimes we have to operate with the lights of our cellphones because there’s no electricity,” he said.

The breakdown of Venezuela’s healthcare system isn’t new and neither is the pressure on doctors. The Venezuelan Medical Federation says at least 26,000 medical professionals have left the country in the last 12 years, driven out by miserable salaries and hyperinflation. Those who have stayed say they’re often caught between their Hippocratic oath and a politicized management that sees all criticism as a betrayal of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

The battle over healthcare has become more heated over the last two months, after Juan Guaidó, the 37-year-old head of congress, was recognized by Washington and more than 50 other nations as the country’s sole president.

One of Guaidó’s key arguments is that 20 years of single-party rule, first under Hugo Chávez and now Maduro, have led to an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that’s on full display in decrepit hospitals. Maduro, in turn, argues that there is no “crisis” and that the opposition is amplifying the country’s problems to lay the groundwork for a military coup under the guise of a “humanitarian intervention.” He also claims that U.S. financial and oil sanctions have cost the country more than $30 billion, which could be used to import food and medicine.

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But in order to make its case, the government needs to shut down dissenting voices, said Jose Manuel Olivares, a neurosurgeon and opposition deputy now living in exile in Colombia.

In the past two weeks, two doctors have been fired, one is being hunted by the police and another is facing threats of firing. Olivares says they all have one thing in common: They provide data for the “National Survey of Hospitals” — a periodic report that shines a light on the healthcare system.

“It seems like they’re trying to dismantle our network,” Olivares said in Bogotá.

The last survey, released in February, found that about half of all doctors said they didn’t have basic hospital and emergency room supplies, and 35 percent of surgery wards said they didn’t have the tools and drugs they needed.

Their work is crucial because Venezuela has quit providing even basic information. While most countries, for example, produce weekly epidemiological reports, Venezuela hasn’t issued one since 2016. Infant mortality rates and homicide statistics are also something of a state secret. Venezuela’s Ministry of Health did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Feder Alvarez, a 33-year-old doctor, has lost his job three times for speaking out, most recently in 2016 after he complained that the X-ray machine and laboratory at the hospital he worked at in Aragua hadn’t functioned in eight years.

Alvarez said that as cases of malaria, measles and HIV have exploded the government has remained silent.

“For the regime it’s easier to persecute us then to actually listen to what we have to say about the conditions we’re working under,” he said.

Last week, a United Nations human rights technical commission has been visiting local hospitals and jails to see the problems firsthand. But doctors complain the commission has been getting highly selective, sanitized versions of reality. Some hospitals on the U.N. tour have been freshly painted and stocked with medicine and supplies and food that are usually absent. Critical doctors have been kept from talking to the commission.

Provea, a Venezuela-based human rights group, said the “makeup that the dictatorship is putting on hospitals and jails” ahead of the visits “shows the indolence and cruelty of this de facto government.”

After one doctor, Ronnie Villasmil, managed to share his concerns with the commission his home was raided and he had to go into hiding. He was also fired from his job and ejected from the post-graduate program he was in, Alvarez said.

“Today I had to flee like a delinquent and my mother cries for me,” Villasmil wrote on Twitter Saturday. “Asking for respect and dignity for my patients is an act of humanity it’s not a crime.”

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Just how precarious life in the hospitals is became clear during the 72-hour blackout that hit the country earlier this month. Olivares said the network of doctors reported that 55 percent of hospitals didn’t have functioning backup generators and 73 percent of hospitals also ran out of water, as the country’s pumping stations went offline. At least 26 people died during the blackout as their ventilators failed, incubators quit working and elevators — needed to rush people to surgery — were inoperable, he said.

Neomar Balza, a 32-year-old hand surgeon, was working at Venezuela’s premier public hospital, the José Pedro Carreño in Caracas, until he was fired earlier this month. Even there, at what’s supposed to be the nation’s model hospital, problems were rampant, he said.

In particular, he recalls a time when a child was rushed to the hospital only to be told the imaging lab wouldn’t be functioning until the following day. The young patient was scanned the next morning but he died five days later. Balza blames the delays. Driven by frustration, he held a press conference along with other doctors in February. Two weeks later he was fired and, he says, beaten up by hospital security guards.

On Tuesday, he was scouring Caracas looking for antibiotics for his own son — another victim of a collapsing medical system.

“They don’t want people to know what is already the worst kept secret in the country,” he said of the information blackout at hospitals. “They have us working with our hands tied behind our backs.”

This story was originally published March 19, 2019 at 6:16 PM with the headline "As Venezuela’s hospitals collapse, the government fires, muzzles doctors."