Like an AmeriKan emergency room, I would do anything to avoid it:
"Gunmen wreak havoc in Caracas emergency rooms" by Hannah Dreier | Associated Press August 15, 2014
CARACAS — At first, the operating room doctors thought the quiet man in jeans was a distressed family member. One shouted at him to leave as another fought to save the unconscious gunshot patient on the table.
The anesthesiologist was the first to see the man’s gun. He dove to the floor, and then listened as dozens of shots rang out, thinking, ‘‘So this is how I die.’’
For years, hospitals were one of the few safe havens in this mind-bogglingly violent Latin American country. No longer. The emergency room murder of a 27-year-old patient by the very gang member who allegedly put him there is one of a string of recent attacks that have shattered physicians’ sense of security.
‘‘It’s a scandal, to kill someone inside a hospital. It’s complete social deterioration,’’ said Jose Manuel Olivares, an oncology resident at the University Hospital of Caracas, where Edinson Balsa was slain in June along with his brother, who was waiting in the hallway. ‘‘It was never perfect, but they used to respect some boundaries.’’
Physicians say men now regularly enter emergency rooms waving guns to compel doctors to work miracles on injured companions or provide scarce medicine. In some cases, they go further.
Earlier this year, a man stole into an intensive care unit in Maracaibo to finish the job of killing a gunshot patient, according to the local press.
Two weeks after the brothers were murdered in Caracas, another man allegedly involved in street crime was killed in a hospital across town.
Conditions are worst in the countryside. In the small town of Rio Chico, east of Caracas, the main hospital has a safe room where doctors can hide, medical resident Pedro Blanco said.
A turning point came last fall, when armed gangs took control of a hospital near one of the city’s slums on consecutive days, demanding medical attention for wounded comrades, one of whom arrived dead from a gunshot to the head.
Doctors say the crisis in emergency rooms stems from a growing culture of impunity. Independent analysts report that more than 90 percent of homicides go unsolved here, compared to about 35 percent in the United States.
That doesn't mean the U.S. got it right because they gained a conviction. We've seen that.
The United Nations ranks Venezuela as the second-most-dangerous country outside a war zone, after Honduras, even using widely questioned official statistics.
And Honduras gets hushed up.
Nongovernmental groups calculate that Venezuela, a country slightly more populous than Texas, sees more killings each year than the United States and European Union combined.
Cardiologist Nelson Majano works at the safest public hospital in the country, the Caracas military hospital. A bodybuilder who dares to go out at night wearing a gold chain, Majano said he would not want to work at an institution without armed guards. Thugs trying to enter the emergency room get into scuffles at his hospital’s entrance every month or so, he estimated.
‘‘As the impunity grows, they’re starting to think they can come into the hospitals and do what they like. And they’re mostly right,’’ he said.
They look like they need a U.S occupation, or at least a CIA-instigated coup that would bring to power a good government.
--more--"
I'm sorry, readers, but it is no longer healthy for me to be reading a Boston Globe.
You can decide for yourself whether the Globe has covered Venezuela with enough urgency.
