Who Killed Maikel Mancilla Peña?
Finding the basic requirements of daily life has become the main preoccupation of Venezuelan families—and it can be a matter of life and death. At 14 years old, Maikel Mancilla Peña had been battling epilepsy for six years. His condition was under control, just about, thanks to a common anti-convulsive prescription drug called Lamotrigine. It had long been a struggle for his family to get it, but as the gap between the real cost of the drugs and the maximum pharmacies were allowed to charge for them grew, it became impossible to find them.
On February 11th this year, Maikel’s mom Yamaris gave him the last Lamotrigine tablet in their stash. None of Yamaris’s usual pharmacies had any anti-convulsants in stock. She worked social media— which in Venezuela these days is filled with desperate people trying to source scarce medicines—but no luck. She drove hours to track down a lead, but came up empty-handed.
In the following days, Maikel experienced a series of increasingly violent epileptic seizures, as his family watched helplessly. On February 20th, he suffered respiratory failure and died.
Maikel’s case is not unique. The collapse of the health-care system and the scarcity of medicine is costing lives every day. Psychiatric patients struggling with schizophrenia have to go without anti-psychotic meds. Tens of thousands of HIV-positive people struggle to find the anti-retrovirals they need, forcing them into the kind of stop-and-go treatment patterns that doctors warn risk bringing on AIDS. Cancer patients can’t find chemotherapy drugs. Even malaria—which had essentially disappeared from Venezuela a generation ago and is easily treatable with inexpensive medicines—is making a deadly comeback.
The Racer
While Venezuelans were dying for lack of simple, inexpensive pills, their radical socialist government was spending tens of millions a year to keep a native son, Pastor Maldonado, competing in the Formula 1 global auto-racing circuit. You could be forgiven for not having heard of Maldonado—a mediocre driver who managed to win a single race in five years in the sport. Still, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, spent some $45 million each year to keep Maldonado racing under its logo. Why an oil company without a retail arm and with monopoly rights to Venezuelan oil needs to advertise in the first place was never clear.
Yet Maldonado, whose habit of crashing in race after race earned him the nickname “Crashtor,” was only forced out of the F1 circuit this year, when PDVSA, hit by the oil crash, failed to come up with the sponsorship money.
Venezuelan oil largesse has been scattered around the globe, from the $18 million handed to the American actor Danny Glover in 2007 to produce an ideologically appropriate film (still to be delivered), to the millions of Venezuelan dollars spent financing leftist parties and movements from El Salvador to Argentina to Spain and beyond.