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FEBRUARY 1 2015 / THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH26

PETER FOSTER in Caracas

FOR JOSE PEREZ, a Venezue-lan taxi driver from Caracas, the hardest part about watch-ing his wife die from heart failure was knowing just how easily she could have been saved.

The surgeons at the Caracas University Hospital were ready to operate on 51-year-old Carmen, but because of the shortages of medicines now ravaging Venezuela, they had no stocks of the prosthetic artery that would have saved her life.

For a day, the family enjoyed a glimmer of hope after a nationwide search uncovered one such device, but Carmen needed two and a second one was nowhere to be found. She died two days later.

It is life-and-death stories like these that illustrate the depth of the economic crisis now confronting Venezuela, a crumbling socialist-run petro-state that looks in danger of being tipped over the edge by the crunch in world oil prices.

For Venezuelans like Mr Perez and tens of thousands more awaiting medical treat-ment around the country, the magic realism of Hugo Chavez’s great Bolivarian socialist revolution has turned to bitter reality less than two years after the former leader’s death from cancer.

“It’s the government who is responsible for my wife’s death, not the doctors,” Mr Perez, 63, told The Sunday Tel-egraph last week. “Things are very bad in this country, and

T

they are getting worse. I feel that we are in a dictatorship. At the start I believed in Chavez, now I can’t look at him. He is in the best place now.”

Mr Chavez might be dead, but as one of Latin America’s most charismatic political performers, he is far from for-gotten. His placid features still stare out from billboards in Caracas, while Venezuelan tel-evision still plays his rambling speeches denouncing Amer-ica, capitalism and the West.

He promised the people the riches of the revolution, and for a while he was able to deliver, thanks to his country being blessed with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

But now, as the people queue at the pharmacy and

the supermarket for basic necessities like baby formula, flour, milk and toilet paper, the promises sound like empty boasts.

Even the middle classes, previously insulated from many of the country’s gather-ing economic woes, are feel-ing the pinch as poorer people come from the slums and suburbs in search of restricted goods, forming queues in pre-viously upmarket areas.

In a shopping centre in the Sabana Grande district last week, women queued outside a pharmacy for nearly two hours to buy two four-roll packs of toilet paper. In what has become the ultimate indignity for the Venezuelan public – and a huge embar-rassment for the regime –

shortages of toilet paper mean it is now strictly rationed.

In public, the shoppers are stoical, wary of speaking ill of a regime that has a track record of taking revenge on its critics, excluding them from the handouts and government jobs that became the hallmark of Chavez’s rule.

But in private, the anger is intense. “In Venezuela, the country with the world’s larg-est oil reserves, you have to queue for the right to wipe your backside,” said a queu-ing taxi driver, who declined to give his name.

For Nicolas Maduro, the president, a former bus driver who Chavez designated as his successor and who won a dis-puted election in 2013, the

response to the crisis has been a mixture of denial, wishful thinking and angry denuncia-tions of international capital-ism waging an “economic war” on Venezuela.

But with Mr Maduro’s approval ratings now at just 20 per cent, it seems a growing number of Venezuelans no longer believe his claims that outsiders are always to blame.

Having promised a 15 per cent wage and pensions increase during last month’s annual state of the nation address, Mr Maduro last week announced emergency meas-ures to relax currency restric-tions on importers of key goods, including everything from toilet paper to tuna fish. But with real inflation now

running at nearly 100 per cent, according to Robert Bottome of the VenEconomia think-tank, and with Venezuela’s oil revenues being squeezed further by international oil prices, the measures were equivalent to trying to open an umbrella in a hurricane.

Sharply lower oil prices caught Venezuela off guard, with “no rainy day fund, no contingency plans”, wrote Mr Bottome in his latest weekly report on the economy. “In short Venezuela is in the midst of a crisis unlike anything in its history.”

The country is almost com-pletely reliant on oil sales to pay for imports of goods that it no longer manufactures after decades of living as a petro-state. With Venezuelan oil

prices dipping below $40 (£27) a barrel this week, those rev-enues are shrinking fast.

In the streets of Caracas, there is a superficial normal-ity. Cars still clog the roads, as it costs only 3.5 bolívares – roughly 37 pence – to fill a saloon car with petrol – and many of the shops appear well stocked.

But look more closely and the “Potemkin village” aspects of Venezuela’s economy become clear. McDonald’s has no potato fries to serve because the company’s sup-plier cannot find the money to import real potatoes, so instead it serves a cardboard tasting substitute made from yucca. In a branch of the Far-matodo pharmacy, one entire wall is stocked just with tooth-

paste and mouthwash and another with bottles of Pepsi, following a government direc-tive ordering stores to fill the shelves with anything to give the appearance of plenty. Curiously, for all the tooth-paste on display, there are no toothbrushes.

For families like that of Car-men Perez, and 13 other Ven-ezuelans who doctors at the Caracas University Hospital say have died as a direct result of medical shortages, the cri-sis is no longer about incon-venience, but the worth of a human life.

In another consulting room, we listened as the father of a boy with leukaemia was told that the hospital had only three of the five chemotherapy drugs his son needed, and that one of those was a substitute that would cause horrible side effects. As a young doctor pointed out though, the boy was lucky to be getting any-thing at all.

Such is the speed of Vene-zuela’s downward slide that policy analysts, Western diplo-mats, economists and opposi-tion activists interviewed by The Sunday Telegraph this week all admitted that no one knows where, or when, it will end. At the hospital they know only that if things don’t improve fast, more lives will be lost.

“There are 600 to 700 peo-ple on the cardiac waiting list,” said a doctor, who detailed shortages of every-thing from gauzes to sample tubes. “If they don’t receive the surgeries they need, more of them will die.”

Clockwise from above: Jose Perez, with his family and a picture of his dead wife; empty shelves at the hospital; and in the supermarket; Venezuelans queue for hours outside a shopping centre

MERIDITH KOHUT

DAVID BLAIR

A CHEMICAL WEAPONS expert who may have been developing poison gas to defend the biggest city under Isil control has been killed in northern Iraq, the US said yesterday.

Salih Jasim al-Sabawi – also known as Abu Malik – died in an air strike near the city of Mosul on Jan 24.

A statement from US Central Command described him as a “chemical weapons engineer” who had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Malik is believed to have worked for Saddam Hussein’s poison gas programme before it was dismantled in the Nine-ties. He was based at Al-Muth-anna, formerly Iraq’s main production centre for chemi-cal weapons.

After Saddam’s downfall, Malik was part of al-Qaeda’s network in Iraq from 2005. “He later joined Isil and his past training and experience provided the terrorist group with expertise to pursue a chemical weapons capability,” said US Central Command.

His death would “diminish Isil’s ability to potentially produce and use chemical weapons”, it added.

Experts point to the signifi-cance of the location of Malik’s death near Mosul. With a population of about 1.5million, Mosul is the big-gest city in northern Iraq and the largest population centre in Isil’s hands.

In recent weeks, however, Kurdish peshmerga forces have begun to encircle the city aided by American and British air strikes. Mosul may be the target of a

counter-offensive later this year.

Malik’s main task may have been to prepare poison gas to hold the city, according to Hamish de Bretton Gordon, formerly the commander of the British Army’s defences against chemical and biologi-cal weapons.

“In my opinion, Isil will do anything to avoid losing Mosul,” he said.

“Malik will have had the technical knowledge to be able to make chemical weap-ons. This was obviously a tar-geted attack.”

Isil has used mortar bombs loaded with chlorine gas against the Iraqi security forces. This form of gas, made from a civilian cleaning agent, is usually ineffective.

In theory, Bashar al-Assad’s regime sacrificed its entire arsenal of chemical weapons last year.

In reality, Mr Assad is suspected of omitting about 200 tons of mustard gas from Syria’s official declaration to international inspectors.

If any of that has fallen into Isil’s hands, the group could develop the ability to gas its

enemies. “The real worry is if Isil has got hold of some of

the mustard agent which may be missing,” said Mr de Bret-ton Gordon, who now works as managing director of Avon-Protection, a security com-pany.

America and its allies have been using drones and manned aircraft for targeted strikes on Isil commanders.

John Kerry, the US Secre-tary of State, said last week that half of the group’s leaders had been killed and that Iraqi ground forces, supported by nearly 2,000 air strikes by America and other coalition nations, had reclaimed more than 270 square miles of terri-tory from Isil.

Smoke rises near Mosul, where Abu Malik was killed, last week