The sick must provide their own medical supplies as havoc grips Maracaibo, but shelves in the looted shops are bare
The air in the crowded emergency ward was already thick with the rusty smell of dried blood when the door burst open and two men barged in, screaming for help.
Between them, they carried a third man: barefoot, bare-chested – and bleeding freely from a deep wound which had nearly severed his right arm.
Two doctors ran over to help; one examined the wounded man while the other told his friends to go and find bottled water and sutures; there were none left in the hospital.
The nationwide blackout which struck Venezuela on 7 March caused chaos across the country, paralyzing airports and hospitals, cutting phone and internet services, and shutting down water supplies.
But nowhere was the havoc as intense as in the country’s second city, Maracaibo, which was convulsed by a wave of looting and violence on a scale unseen for decades.
According to the city’s chamber of commerce some 500 businesses were sacked in the unrest, and countless people injured in clashes between looters, security guards, gang-members and the security forces.
Video posted on social media showed chaotic scenes in which crowds forced their way into shops to steal food, medicines and valuables.
“It was total madness,” said Ricardo Acosta, a vice president of a business association in the surrounding Zulia state.
At the city’s University Hospital, the scene in casualty was like something from a war film. Dozens of patients and their families were crowded into the sweltering ward, a few lying on beds, others slumped on the bloodstained floor.
The hospital is Maracaibo’s largest – and one of just two with their own emergency generators, although power was connected only in the emergency ward.
Most of the patients had been injured in the wave of plundering – but others were victims of Venezuela’s chronic medical shortages and crumbling healthcare system.
Next to a man with knife wounds on his arms, legs and head, lay José Luis Faría, who hovered in and out of consciousness, 24 hours after suffering a heart failure.
Neighbours had found him unconscious in the street outside the house where he lived alone after his family joined the 3 million Venezuelans who have fled the country’s political and economic crisis.
Nobody could reach Faría’s one remaining relative – a nephew – because he had been unable to charge his mobile phone battery in the blackout, so the neighbours loaded him into a car and sought medical help.
After two other hospitals turned them away, El Universitario admitted Faría, but as often happens in a country beset by chronic shortages, the sick man was told he would have to provide his own medicine.
“He’s still not improving, but we finally managed to reach his nephew who is looking for saline solution and a drip. The doctor says the danger is that he has a heart attack,” said Faría’s neighbour, Misael Larreal.
For a brief moment, Faría regained consciousness, and asked where he was. He looked around at the bloody patient on the next bed – and passed out again.
By mid-afternoon, the temperature in the stifling ward had reached 42 degrees. To avoid overloading the generator, the hospital’s air conditioning system had been turned off, so medical staff set up an improvised waiting area in the lobby, where a weak breeze came through the open doors.
The man with a wounded arm was screaming in pain; the skin on his arm had already turned grey. After a couple of hours, his friends had returned with some bottles of water, suture – and the news that they had been unable to obtain any anaesthetics.
Weakly, the man replied: “It doesn’t matter – I can’t feel anything any more.”
Every few minutes, doctors emerged shouting the name of a patient, but instead of updates, relatives were given a new list of medicines or supplies which they would somehow have to find.
Zulia is one of the poorest regions in Venezuela, and medicine – and even basic food staples – are often far too pricey for ordinary people.
One woman sat crying. “What are we going to do?” she said. “I don’t have a bolívar to buy anything and all the shops are closed. What can we do?”
The woman explained that her husband had joined the plunder at a local butcher’s shop after seeing neighbours run past carrying cuts of ham, eggs and a bunch of plantains. But before he could escape, she said, a group of armed men had arrived, firing handguns in the air and robbing the looters.
“He fell and cut his leg. The wound isn’t deep but the doctors say he needs stitches, and a tetanus shot,” she said.
Venezuela has one of the highest rates of caesarian sections in the world, but at the Castillo Plaza maternity hospital, mothers were told they would have to have a vaginal birth whatever their condition.
Outside the emergency ward, a woman called Alicia said her new-born grandson desperately needed to admission to an intensive care unit because he had a problem with his lungs. “He wasn’t ready,” she sobbed.
But there was no electricity in the only hospitals with ICUs and El Universitario had no facilities for children. In a phone call the next day, Alicia said the baby had died.
Back at the University Hospital, there was still no electricity, and the emergency room was still crowded. Some of the men wounded in the looting had been discharged – only to be replaced by others with similar injuries.
A man arrived with a deep machete wound in the back of his head, and another in the leg. He was turned away; there were no doctors left to see him.