Eight months pregnant, Bastardo faced forbidding choices in a nation whose economy has collapsed: Give birth in Venezuela, where newborns are dying at alarming rates in shortage-plagued maternity wards.
GUIRIA, Venezuela — A taxi dropped Maroly Bastardo and her two small children by a cemetery not far from the shore in northeast Venezuela. She still had time to change her mind.
Years of economic mismanagement by the socialist government have crippled the oil-rich nation with hyperinflation, shortages and misery. An estimated 4 million people — about 12 percent of the populace — have fled the South American country in just the past five years. Since 2016, almost 25,000 Venezuelans have arrived in Trinidad, according to government figures, many without documentation. The United Nations last year estimated 40,000 Venezuelans were living in Trinidad, straining the government's ability to assist them.
Reuters reconstructed Bastardo's ill-fated journey in interviews with her family members, friends and the relatives of others missing from the Ana Maria, along with authorities and people involved in the human smuggling trade.Bastardo grew up in El Tigre, an interior boomtown in Venezuela's famed Orinoco Oil Belt, the source of much of the nation's oil wealth.
With another baby on the way - a little boy they planned to name Isaac Jesus - Berra left in February for Trinidad. He found a job frying chicken and laid plans for his family to follow. Bastardo would require a Cesarean section, her third. The prospect of giving birth in the local hospital terrified her, her mother said.
"Any woman who gives birth in a Venezuelan hospital is running a risk," said Yindri Marcano, director of the El Tigre hospital. Luis took charge of securing their places in a smuggler's boat. A construction worker, he and his wife had already emigrated to Trinidad and had helped other relatives make the journey in recent years.
Smugglers hunkered down for a few weeks, according to people involved in the boat trade in Guiria. The family's crossing was delayed. "People are now more desperate," Acosta said."I always told Luis that they shouldn't go if there were too many passengers on board." "After the first sinking, Maroly was afraid, but she still wanted to be here with us," Berra said in a phone interview from Trinidad.
In an early morning Facebook post, Robert Richards, an American fisherman, said he had found a"young man" on Friday afternoon, floating 50 kilometers offshore of Trinidad,"fighting for his life." Photos accompanying the post showed a figure in a life jacket bobbing near a piece of floating debris. Richards said the man had"been in the water for 19 hours...on a boat that sunk the night before with 20 other people on board, so far no other survivors.
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