BOLÍVAR: THE HARDSHIPS OF A WEALTHY REGION

By Karla Ávila Morillo

Bolívar state is currently going through a terrible situation that results in environmental, economic, social, material and human damage and losses. The needs have surpassed the capabilities of a region that used to be prosperous.

Whenever Bladimiro Morillo, founder of Ciudad Guayana, talked about his arrival 50 years ago to what is today Puerto Ordaz, he described it as a “huge weedery”. Thanks to the planning of foreign and local workers, it went from a remote jungle to a capital and became an icon of development, productivity, planning and urbanism.

San Félix, the port that blossomed thanks to imports and exports on the banks of the confluence of the Caroní and Orinoco rivers, was the main economic motor between 1865 and 1909. The port’s activity gave rise to a great axis of mining and the arrival of Iron Mines of Venezuela and the Orinoco Mining Company.

In this region of southern Venezuela, dreams were achieved by meeting the production goals of basic industries. It was the historical production of metric tons of minerals by the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (Corporación Venezolana de Guayana, CVG) that positioned the country at the top of the world economy.

Currently, in 2019, the difference is stark. What exists now is a depressed region, plagued by corruption and lack of basic services.

The focus is on the lack of the minimum public services required by citizens to live with dignity. This violates their human rights and is the reason why there have been over nine thousand protests in the country, of which a little more than four thousand have been for basic services, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict (Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social, OVCS).

Invisible services

In a survey of 114 inhabitants of Bolívar state, 98 of whom live in Puerto Ordaz (86% of those surveyed), 97.4% reported fuel shortages, 93% complained about poor waste management and 89.5% had problems with Internet access.

A significant 70.2% consider that public transportation is poor, 68.4% find it difficult to secure domestic gas, 68.4% experience frequent failures in mobile telephone services, 67.5 % do not have access to fixed telephones service from the state-run National Telephone Company of Venezuela (Compañía Anónima Nacional Teléfonos de Venezuela, CANTV) or the access is irregular, and 36% of citizens also report sewage spill on public roads.

“The lack of public services in the region has had an impact on the way of life of its citizens. For example, the emergency services telephone number (911) is not working properly. The police service, the health service, the domestic gas service —they’ve all deteriorated.”

Public services are decisive in people’s daily lives. That’s why we, a group of women, created this observatory to monitor the problem, because we need people’s support. We need them to speak up about their needs so that we can collect the information required to address these lacks,” Aliana Estrada, coordinator of the Observatory of Public Services in Guayana, said.

We don’t see the light

There is a misconception that in Ciudad Guayana power service never fails because the hydroelectric plants that provide electricity for the whole of Venezuela are located there. However, the truth is that, in sectors like Nueva Chirica in San Félix, there has been no electricity for up to 20 continuous days.

In the streets of Ciudad Guayana, you can see the chaos regarding public transportation. There are few units in the streets, all of them full of people who wait for up to three hours in order to get on a bus.

Furthermore, there are robberies both at the stops and inside the vehicles, the costs are high and some routes are no longer available. Likewise, the dangerous use of improvised buses, such as “kennels” —cars with a sort of cage as cargo area— and trucks whose real purpose is to transport construction materials, have caused the death of many passengers.

Yoel Navarro works in Puerto Ordaz, but he lives in San Félix. On several occasions, he has had to walk more than 10 kilometers to go home: “While I’m walking, I beg for some luck, for a compassionate person to stop and give me a ride home. Sometimes those miracles happen, but not always. The trip that usually takes 15 minutes on public transportation can take me three hours on foot if I’m fast.”

Guillotine that curtails education

The educational situation, rarely mentioned to public opinion, is also affected. The enjoyment of the right to education of children and adolescents is compromised due to the deficient functioning of the educational system in view of the complexity of the current context, where we can find schools with poor basic services or Schools with poor basic services or no basic services at all.

There is significant school non-attendance, which forces teachers to develop new strategies in order to finish the school year somewhat successfully. Doris Guzmán, president of the National College of Teachers, Caroní section, says that there is a 50% dropout rate at all school levels.4

In addition, parents and guardians comment on the lack of qualified teachers, since many of them have had to migrate as a result of the Complex Humanitarian Emergency. This contributes to low quality education which, in the medium term, results in students with significant shortcomings in their fundamentals, since they do not complete the curriculum that they should, which in the future will be an obstacle for their higher education.

Quality of life or death

Southern Venezuela is divided among those who love the region and are determined not to let it die and those who are the opposite. The first, they start ventures unrelated to mining and practice solidarity, organization, perseverance, discipline and resilience as values to improve a society that has suffered devastating effects on its essential capacities. The others, they are involved in power struggles to control natural resources and strategic territories and give rise to generalized violence, corruption, restriction of freedoms and the establishment of mafias.

Alí Daniels, from the non-governmental organization Access to Justice, claims: “The situation of public services in Guayana seems like a kind of economic and social apartheid, since the hardship of the other regions of Venezuela turns Caracas into a scenery where nothing happens, where everything is fine. What happens in the interior of the country, Guayana included, is not only discriminatory, but it also reveals the perversity of the authorities, who sacrifice the rest of the country so that Caracas maintains the facade of a government that constantly violates human rights .”

Life in these regions of the country is not easy —it is as complex as in border regions. The regional impact in terms of restrictions on economic, social and cultural rights hinders all citizens with different levels of intensity, but it still affects them all.

A huge breach has opened up between those who have means and those who do not. In the same street, you can see the city’s trendy nightclub crowded with cars and, less than five meters away, a long line of over three hundred vehicles that can spend up to three days in line to be refueled. That is the contrast that is lived in Guayana.

The activist claims that “in Guayana, human rights

“For example, we already have complaints made visible by the Coalition of Organizations for the Right to Health and Life (Codevida) about kidney patients who not only are asked to bring the supplies for dialysis, but they are also asked to bring fuel for the emergency power system of the health center. Health has been privatized, because the burden of their own health has been placed in the patients’ pockets.”

Are massively and systematically violated, which puts people’s lives at risk.” In the state’s south, close to Brazil, where the municipalities of El Callao and Gran Sabana are located, the situation is the same or worse in terms of basic services, but fuel shortage is what affects the citizens the most. In areas such as Tumeremo and Santa Elena de Uairén, people have spent up to seven days without been able to fuel their vehicles.

The lawyer concludes that “in Bolívar, there is also the mining activity, which has turned the rest of the population into economic hostages, because it has altered the prices and values of products, making the cost of living in the region higher than in the rest of the country because gold is worth more than bolívares”. The greatest desire of Bolívar state residents is that the basic services improve, but they also complain about poor conditions of streets and avenues, garbage accumulation, dark neighborhoods and homes without gas supply nor Internet service.