Full article at the link. Long, but worth the read. God speed, Machado, I hope you get great news on the 16th.
The 12th time Reinaldo Balocha got malaria, he hardly rested at all. With the fever still rattling his body, he threw a pick ax over his shoulder and got back to work smashing stones in an illegal gold mine.
As a computer technician from a big city, Mr. Balocha was ill-suited for the mines, his soft hands used to working keyboards, not the earth. But Venezuelas economy collapsed on so many levels that inflation had obliterated his salary, along with his hopes of preserving a middle-class life.
So, like tens of thousands of other people from across the country, Mr. Balocha came to these open, swampy mines scattered across the jungle, looking for a future. Here, waiters, office workers, taxi drivers, college graduates and even civil servants on vacation from their government jobs are out panning for black-market gold, all under the watchful eyes of an armed group that taxes them and threatens to tie them to posts if they disobey.
It is a society turned upside down, a place where educated people abandon once-comfortable jobs in the city for dangerous, backbreaking work in muddy pits, desperate to make ends meet. And it comes with a steep price: Malaria, long driven to the fringes of the country, is festering in the mines and back with a vengeance.
The countrys economic turmoil has brought malaria back, sweeping the disease out of the remote jungle areas where it quietly persisted and spreading it around the nation at levels not seen in Venezuela for 75 years, medical experts say.
It all starts with the mines. With the economy in tatters, at least 70,000 people from all walks of life have been streaming into this mining region over the past year, said Jorge Moreno, a leading mosquito expert in Venezuela. As they hunt for gold in watery pits, the perfect breeding ground for the mosquitoes that spread the disease, they are catching malaria by the tens of thousands.
Then, with the disease in their blood, they return home to Venezuelas cities. But because of the economic collapse, there is often no medicine and little fumigation to prevent mosquitoes there from biting them and passing malaria to others, sickening tens of thousands more people and leaving entire towns desperate for help.
There were no lights because the government had cut power to save electricity. There were no medicines because the Health Ministry had not delivered any. Health workers administered blood tests with their bare hands because they were out of gloves.
The illegal mines spill out over dozens of miles, leaving a pockmarked stretch of earth where the jungle gives way to countless craters and scars.
Some are no more than tiny pools where two men sift the mud with pans, like a scene from the California goldfields more than a century ago. Others drain wide marshes with tangled networks of tubes and pumps. In another spot, hundreds of wildcatters had dug out a gaping maw of red and white soil. It sinks 15 stories deep and runs the length of a football field. They call it Cuatro Muertos, or Four Dead Men.
It was not supposed to be this way. The gold reserves were once controlled by a Canadian company before President Hugo Chávez expropriated them and pledged to use their profits to fund his Socialist-style revolution.
But the expropriation followed the pattern of mismanagement and neglect that many others did during the Chávez era. The state eventually abandoned the territory around the mine, and the potentially lucrative profits. Wildcatters have moved in, and so have the armed groups that now call themselves the law here.
But at least there is food.
As the country convulses from food shortages and riots, as hungry mobs ransack grocery stores, restaurants and bakeries, the mining town of Las Claritas, only a short drive from the mines, lives in a state of relative plenty.
The promise of a different Venezuela one where there is ample food and work that pays enough led Yudani González to abandon a program to become a preschool teacher in Ciudad Bolívar, the provincial capital where unemployment is rampant. Instead, she headed to a ramshackle jungle camp where she cooks for miners with one hand, and cares for her two young children with the other.
Danneris Flores, a government employee moonlighting as a mining camp cook, sat nearby. She is an administrative assistant in a state-run health clinic, but Venezuelas currency has tumbled so far that her salary amounts to about only $1 a day at the current street value.
So she asked for a vacation and used it to work for a couple of weeks at the mines.
Her brother-in-law, who works for the state oil company, Pdvsa, does the same thing. In a short stint at the mines, Ms. Flores said she could earn twice her monthly wages. She counted the days until she would be home to see her three children, whom she had left after closing my eyes and making my heart small.
Josué Guevara, 20, gave up last November on his university studies in industrial engineering in a city about 10 hours away. He once pictured himself as a manager at the state-owned aluminum company, Alcasa. But his family members who worked there could barely afford food, he said.
Now I have other goals, he said, standing at the edge of the Cuatro Muertos mines, where he lives and works today.
Using gasoline and other chemicals to extract the gold, Mr. Guevara earned 500,000 bolívars around $500 at black-market exchange rates about 33 times the countrys minimum wage, during a lucky two-week stretch. But when he got malaria this spring, he did what many miners do: He returned to his hometown to recover, bringing the disease with him.
Is the malaria really coming from the miners? asked Aníbal Flores, 28, a miner who sleeps in a hammock between two polls beside the mine. But where else can we go to make money? The city? There is no food there.
Lately, many Venezuelans have taken matters into their own hands.
Five hours away in the newly infected town of El Dique, residents were collecting 100 bolívars from each household to hire a fumigator to come spray their homes.
In the mine, where malaria tests are sometimes unavailable, miners said they had developed an exam of their own: Drink two bottles of beer. If a sharp pain is felt afterward in the liver, where the parasites reside, then the patient has malaria, the test goes. Health officials said the measure was futile.
Mr. Balocha started as a palero, a stone breaker, getting the smallest cut of the take. But it was still more than what his salary bought in the city after inflation had whittled it away, he said.
He recalled the first time he got malaria, too, the chills like you were lying down between two blocks of ice.
The first time you get malaria is the ugliest, Mr. Balocha said. You cant control the tremors. You feel like you will die. You feel like you are a zombie.
But he would become a millionaire here, he joked, and one day he would head to Europe with a Latin American woman, he added far from the mines, the malaria and the Union.
He sighed, looking up at the sky.
In the mine, happiness is only temporary, he said.
