Gripped by desperation, some escape Venezuela crisis by killing themselves, report says
As Venezuela regressed from one of the richest nations in Latin America to one of its poorest, millions of its citizens, about a quarter of its population, have sought to escape their increasingly harsh living conditions by leaving the country behind to seek a better future.
But a significant number of Venezuelans have opted to taking their own lives while seeing no other way out of their desperation.
Venezuela, which for many decades posted one of the lowest suicide rates in the region, has seen an alarming boost in recent years. “It now is a social phenomenon,” said Roberto Briceño Leon, director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a non-governmental organization. “What we found is that there is a very close relationship between the growing number of suicides and the humanitarian crisis.”
Overall numbers are sketchy, given the Nicolas Maduro regime’s tendency to hide statistics that portray it in a bad light. But according to the observatory’s research, whose first preliminary findings were released in a 2020 report, the numbers of suicides jumped by more than 150% from the beginning of the crisis in 2015 to 2018, increasing the country’s rate from 3.8 per 100,000 inhabitants to 9.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Experts at the observatory believe that the rate of increase might be leveling off, given that millions of Venezuelans under duress have been able to leave the country, but warn that the numbers could also be higher, given that a significant portion of the suicides are hidden under a large number of violent but unexplained deaths, which in 2021 totaled more than 4,000.
Suicide cases are routinely labeled something else, said Briceño León. In a recent case, a man took his life by jumping from an overpass, but officials only reported that his death was caused by “poly-trauma.” In other instances, officials only listed the cause of death as gunshot wound, without providing an inkling of whether the person was murdered or had committed suicide.
The number of self-inflicted deaths confirmed by the observatory in 2021, not counting those listed as unexplained, totaled 1,164, or 4.3 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
But the real rate could be quite higher than that given the under-representation, said Gustavo Paez, national spokesman and investigator at the observatory who has been researching the suicide problem.
It’s possible that the real rate could be around 7.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, which would signal a small improvement from the 2018 numbers, but would still be significantly higher than the levels Venezuela had at the start of the crisis, Paez said.
One of the factors that is helping contain the trend is the massive migration of Venezuelans to neighboring countries as well as to Spain and the United States, which totaled more than six million by the middle of last year.
“Remittances from family members abroad are helping many homes in this country to survive,” said Paez. But also “within the massive migration wave there were potential suicide victims” who escaped their dire conditions by leaving the country.
As experts at the observatory began to study the phenomenon, they also found some major trends repeating in a large portion of the cases, among them the emergence of so-called altruistic suicides, committed by elderly people sufffering from serious illnesses who, not wanting their family to spend precious resources on them, decide to take their own lives.
“They simply refuse to take what is often expensive treatment and lay down to die,” Briceño Leon said. “Others don’t wait around for their illness to take them and commit suicide to save their children from the pain and the cost of their treatment.... They kill themselves thinking it is what’s best for others.”
There are also instances where the victim suffers from clinical depression and is unable to afford medication, Briceño Leon said. The situation leaves some of these mental patients in a condition of overall helplessness and seeing no way out of it, and some decide to take their lives.
The perception that there is no longer any possibility of having a future is one of the main themes behind the phenomenon and it strikes the young as well as the old. Even the well educated are falling victims to the trend as they see the standard of living sharply decline.
“A university professor, for example, is only making about $8 a month, what kind of life can you have with that?” Briceño Leon said.
Venezuela saw its GDP constrict by more than 75% between 2015 and 2020, far surpassing the 26.7% downfall the U.S. saw during the Great Depression. Caused by massive corruption and devastating economic policies that destroyed most of the country’s output capacity, the crisis ruined the lives of millions of Venezuelans.
It also destroyed the country’s formerly burgeoning middle class, keeping 96.2% of the population under the poverty line and condemning 79.3% to live under extreme poverty conditions, according to a study published in July 2020 by the Andrés Bello Catholic University.
Non governmental organizations attempting to deal with Venezuela’s ongoing humanitarian crisis say that nearly half of the population, around 14.8 million, are still in desperate need of receiving aid, around 9 million of which need it to be able to eat.
This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 4:13 PM.
