I was struck by three media reports yesterday.

Firstly, a Reuters report about the terrible humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, once one of the 20 richest countries in the world and the richest in Latin America with free education and free medical services for her citizens but now a poor, backward, broken and bankrupt state!

This Reuters special report was about eight-month pregnant hair-dresser Maroly Bastardo’s forbidding choices in a nation whose economy had collapsed.

Give birth in Venezuela, where newborns are dying at alarming rates in shortage-plagued maternity wards. Or board a crowded smuggler’s boat bound for Trinidad, the largest of two islands that make up the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago where her husband had landed there in February, found work and beckoned her to join him.

Neither Bastardo or two of her children with her could swim. Barely three weeks earlier, 27 people had gone missing after a migrant boat went down in the narrow stretch of water separating Venezuela from Trinidad. The 20-kilometer strait, known for its treacherous currents, is nicknamed the Dragon’s Mouths.

But the 19-year old hairdresser was determined. On May 16, she and the kids packed into an aging fishing vessel along with 31 other people, including three relatives of her husband.

The craft, the Ana Maria, never arrived. No migrants or wreckage have been found. Read the rest of this entry »