It smells like a regime change effort:
"Venezuelan women lose access to contraception, and control of their lives" by Julie Turkewitz and Isayen Herrera New York Times, February 20, 2021
SAN DIEGO DE LOS ALTOS, Venezuela — The moment Johanna Guzmán, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child, she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay.
For years, as Venezuela spiraled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth, and now another child?
Ever hear of abstinence?
As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of three condoms costs $4.40 — three times Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of $1.50.
Birth control pills cost more than twice as much, roughly $11 a month, while an IUD, or intrauterine device, can cost more than $40 — more than 25 times the minimum wage. And that does not include a doctor’s fee to have the device put in.
With the cost of contraception so far out of reach, women are increasingly resorting to abortions, which are illegal and, in the worst cases, can cost them their lives.
The situation is a major departure from what Venezuela’s government once promised its women and girls. Hugo Chávez, the father of the country’s socialist-inspired revolution, declared that his government would grant women what others had not: full and equal participation in society.
Chávez brought women into the halls of power and enshrined in the Constitution the right to “decide freely” how many children a couple wished to have. In a region where abortion is largely banned, he stopped short of legalizing the procedure. But birth control was subsidized and widely available.
Chávez and his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, publicly declared themselves to be feminists, but as Maduro’s grip on the country has hardened into authoritarian rule, Venezuela’s economy has collapsed under the weight of corruption, mismanagement and U.S. sanctions.
The nation that was once Latin America’s wealthiest is mired in a crisis economists have called the world’s worst in decades, outside of war, with its population suffering from runaway inflation and widespread hunger, and Venezuelans now face a health system so broken that it can no longer reliably provide basic contraception. Today, amid the collapse of the country’s public health system, birth control is nearly absent from government clinics and available at private pharmacies only at prohibitive prices.
The result has been life-changing for women, who shoulder the vast majority of child care responsibilities, just as the crisis has greatly expanded the challenge of being a parent.
Many women who grew up believing that Chávez’s political movement, known as Chavismo, would springboard them out of poverty, offering them education and career opportunities, now face the task of raising four, six or 10 children at a time when the basics of family care — food, soap, diapers — arrive intermittently or not at all.
Anitza Freitez, a demographer with the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, said this dynamic could shape the country for decades, creating “a vicious circle of poverty.”
As Venezuela’s maternity wards fell apart, maternal deaths surged 65% between 2015 and 2016, according to the country’s health ministry, and then the government stopped releasing data.
When Chávez was elected president in 1998, he inherited a system in which birth control was already widely available.
As Venezuela’s economy — long buoyed by its vast oil reserves — began to tumble in 2014, the result of plummeting crude oil prices and poor financial management, the government’s purchasing power dove.
By 2015, contraceptives, once free at government hospitals and broadly affordable at private pharmacies, began to disappear, and women who could once plan their futures — thanks to contraception — began to lose control.
By 2018, oral contraceptives, implants and patches were nearly impossible to find in several major cities, according to a study by the reproductive rights coalition Equivalencies in Action.
Some couples began to ration or abstain from sex. Others tried to plan around a woman’s menstrual cycle, but it did not always work, and not everyone has a choice.
As the crisis has sharpened, many women say that abuse has, too, making it difficult for them to say no to a partner or to leave a relationship.
As raising children in Venezuela has become increasingly difficult, the number of women seeking abortions has surged, according to interviews with health professionals and community workers across the country.
Before the economic crisis, some doctors would perform abortions illegally in safer facilities, but about half the country’s physicians, some 30,000 people, have left in recent years, according to the Venezuelan Medical Federation, driving women to makeshift clinics.
In the shadows, some women, and a few men, have become part of an expanding group of underground abortion counselors, mostly trying to educate women in how to find and use misoprostol, a drug used legally in other countries to induce abortion, but even with guidance, the experience can be excruciating, often involving a frantic search for the $150 it costs to buy the pills, followed by a hunt for a safe place to hide away to bleed for a few hours.
One night in late 2019, Jessika, 21, a university student, had an abortion in an auto parts warehouse, accompanied by two friends.
Jessika had never been able to afford birth control. She said she got pregnant after an assault by her boyfriend and knew she could not support a child.
“In the country we live in,” she said, “a woman is not afforded the luxury of one more mouth to feed.”
Through her contacts, she reached one of the counselors, who gave her instructions and wished her luck.
Seven weeks pregnant, she bought misoprostol online from a man who called himself “José Vende Todo,” or “José Who Sells Everything.”
She knew her mother would not approve, and that she could not have the abortion at home. So she went to the warehouse, on loan from a friend, holing herself up in a white-walled office with a couch and a single window, keeping it closed so no one would hear her scream.
She took the first two pills at 7 p.m. and the second dose two hours later. Soon, she doubled over in pain and began to bleed profusely. Her legs shook, she cried out, and then she fainted.
When Jessika came to, her friends urged her to go to the hospital.
“Don’t take me anywhere,” she said.
She was terrified of the police.....
With good reason, for she could end up in a Russian penal colony (at least they give you a book to read).
What is left unmentioned in the article above is the effect of U.S. sanctions and covert warfare in Venezuela.
Related:
A bargaining chip so treasure washes up on shore?
Also see:
I view the big losses in just-completed municipal elections as rigged because the hero of Brazil has challenged the CV narrative and won't take the shot nor let his nation be looted -- although maybe you should cry for Argentina.
"In Bolivia, bodies are piling up at homes and on the streets again, echoing the horrific images of last year, when a deadly surge in coronavirus infections overwhelmed the country’s fragile medical system. The Bolivian police say that in January they recovered 170 bodies of people thought to have died from Covid-19, and health officials say intensive-care units are full. “When 10 or 20 patients die, their beds are full again in a few hours,” said Carlos Hurtado, a public health epidemiologist in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s largest city. The resurgence of the virus in Bolivia is part of a larger second wave throughout Latin America, where some of the world’s strictest quarantine measures are giving way to pandemic fatigue and concerns about the economy. While the number of new cases is falling, deaths remain at near-record highs in many parts of the region, just as some governments begin vaccination efforts. Brazil and Mexico have each been averaging over 1,000 daily Covid-19 deaths for weeks; their total pandemic death toll is now surpassed only by that of the United States. Deaths in Brazil have matched their midyear peak, while in Mexico they are far higher than any earlier peak, though they have begun falling in recent days. In Bolivia in the middle of last year, mortality figures reviewed by The New York Times suggested that the country’s real death toll was nearly five times the official tally, indicating that Bolivia had suffered one of the world’s worst epidemics. About 20,000 more people died from June through August than in past years, according to a Times analysis — a vast number in a country of about 11 million people. Bolivia is now reporting an average of 60 coronavirus deaths per day, approaching the numbers from last year’s peak....."
$ociali$m literally $tinks.
April’s winner will succeed President Lenín Moreno as trade talks continue, and it is time to get out of South America.
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Hot wind blowing in Honduras:
"After two hurricanes, Honduras braces for long recovery" by Delphine Schrank The Washington Post, November 27, 2020
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Category 4 Hurricane Eta and Category 5 Hurricane Iota cut similar paths across Central America this month, a one-two punch that killed scores of people and displaced hundreds of thousands. More than a week after the second storm, vast areas of Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala remain flooded. Some areas are accessible only by boat. Remote communities are relying on food dropped by Honduran and U.S. military helicopters.
Now a region that had already been hammered by the coronavirus and a deep economic contraction is facing a recovery that could take years.
"Honduras is facing probably the greatest catastrophe of its history," said Carlos Madero, secretary of the Ministry of General Coordination of the Government, charged with managing the response. "We never thought and never imagined that we would have three emergencies of this magnitude in one year."
The government has begun to sketch out a plan in three phases, Madero said. The most pressing is emergency and humanitarian relief, to help the tens of thousands of evacuees who still need shelter, food, water and other basic necessities.
Phase 2 would involve rapid rehabilitation and repair of homes, roads and bridges. The storms destroyed or damaged more than 850 square miles of farmland, threatening one of the few economic activities that had remained relatively dependable during the pandemic. A third phase would address "sustainable reconstruction" amid what Madero described as "a change in the climate that will have a direct impact on us poor countries. ... Honduras is the photographic example."
Geoengineering in favor of the Great Re$et?
It's unclear how much the recovery will cost. Madero said the government is talking with the United Nations, individual countries and multilateral banks: "Once we have a sustainable reconstruction plan, it will be presented to the international community for support."
The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates the recovery of damaged areas across Central America will take at least two years.
No country has been hit harder than Honduras, where at least 3.7 million people, or more than a third of the population, have been affected, and no region of Honduras has suffered more than the flood-prone valley surrounding San Pedro Sula, the country's second-largest city and industrial center, where the storms caused the Chamelecón and Ulúa rivers to breach their banks, sending surges crashing into densely populated working-class neighborhoods.
"This has overwhelmed the city's capacities," Mayor Armando Calidonio said. "It's difficult to confront this alone."
Communities have been flayed and flipped inside out, houses burst open, their contents dumped in the middle of the road, leaving muddy piles of ruptured sofas, smashed televisions, broken fridges.
"We lost everything. Absolutely everything," said Charlie Rodríguez, a vegetable vendor, one of 368,000 Hondurans who evacuated their homes for higher ground, according to the government. Many remain indefinitely crammed into schools or churches, around gasoline stations, under highway bridges or in trucks partitioned with sheeting to fit three families. The overcrowding has negated months of government warnings to stay physically distant during the pandemic.
The combined death toll for Honduras from the two storms stands at 91, but rescue workers expect the number to rise as communication networks are restored, the waters recede and bodies are discovered. On Monday, about 289,000 people remained incommunicado.
--more--"
Time to cross the border.
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Oscar Lopez of the New York Times says lawmakers in Mexico approved legislation that could sharply limit cooperation with American narcotics agents, delivering a stinging rebuke to the United States after its short-lived arrest of a former Mexican official brought tensions to a boil.
Everybody pushes us around now.
They did it amid a virus surge and the deaths rose after the shots were administered.
Of course, Mexicans were mainly worried that their leader wouldn't take COVID-19 seriously because for nearly a year, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had minimized the pandemic, claiming that religious amulets protected him, refusing to wear masks, and even drinking from the same clay pot as supporters so it was only a matter of time until he tested positive for COVID-19, some Mexicans said, and this was the real rub:
"Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador returned to his daily morning news conferences Monday following a two-week absence after catching coronavirus, but vowed not to wear a mask or require Mexicans to use them. “There is no authoritarianism in Mexico ... everything is voluntary, liberty is the most important thing,” López Obrador said. “It is each person’s own decision.” López Obrador revealed he received experimental treatments, which he described only as an “antiviral” medication and an anti-inflammatory drug. The president also revealed that he twice tested negative in late January in rapid tests that are widely used in Mexico, before a more thorough test — apparently PCR — came back positive the same day....."
Really had to work at it to find a positive, huh?
UPDATE:
