Without human rights officers at the ports of entry or legal system that protects the refugee, Venezuelans migrating to the Caribbean island find relief from hunger and shortages. In return, they are exposed to labor exploitation and the constant persecution of corrupt authorities. On many occasions they end up in detention centers with inhumane conditions, from which only those who pay large amounts of money in fines are saved. The asylum request is a weak shield that hardly helps in case of arrest. Yet, the number of those who try their luck to earn a few dollars grows.
The country with the largest oil reserve in the hemisphere neglects its people with HIV-positive and lets them die. Since 2012, medicines are scarce and the pandemic is spreading unabated in Venezuela. That is why dozens of patients have embarked on a 4,000-kilometer epic journey in order to save their lives and reach for the promised land where they will find both employment and health.
The porous border has loaded the inhabitants of the Colombian Amazon with the cases of its Venezuelan neighbors. Shortage and indifference has led patients to seek treatment even in Bogotá. Meanwhile in San Fernando de Atabapo, the transmitting mosquito has folded people back into their homes. But "God exists." So says a mural that receives visitors at the port.
A collaborative journalism project on the economic and political relationship between Venezuela and China, patched together from official documents.
The narrow victory of the No in the plebiscite called by the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, to endorse the peace agreement reached by FARC in Havana, Cuba, represents a stop along the way, perhaps the last stop, before the internal conflict ceases. With the imminent conversations that ELN will also initiate in Quito, the relatives of the persons disappeared in the state of Barinas wonder if their relatives, alive or dead, remain in the hands of FARC.
In November 2015, Efraín Campos Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, nephews of President Nicolás Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, were arrested in Haiti while negotiating to send a shipment of 800 kilos of cocaine to the United States of America. At September 8 and 9 hearings, the party nights that they had with two informants of the DEA were evident. We went to the brothel they visited and we told the story from our point of view.
For three months, a reporter of Armando.info followed the lead of a seller exclusively engaged in diverting oncology medicines from state institutions to the black market, where they can be sold at 300 times higher prices. Her motivation was some basic questions: Are they angels or opportunists? How do they organize their networks? Still with unresolved doubts, she finds that it is a trade that has become possible only in the aftermath of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, in the midst of chronic shortages and bureaucratic controls.
Two US citizens arrived in Venezuela this year on closed dates, and both were left in prison to face terrorism charges. Since then, their destinations began to diverge. Deportation is expected for one of them; a long season in Venezuelan dungeons for the other. But, above all, it is an exercise to test the definitions of 'terrorism' and 'news' for the propaganda apparatus of the chavista government, archrival of Washington. While the capture of one of them deserved a press conference by the Minister of Interior, the other went unnoticed. Why? Who is who in these parallel stories?
A handshake between Hugo Chávez and Jiang Zemin, President of China, sealed a commercial relationship between Caracas and Beijing that totals two decades of cooperation marked by thousands of dollars and debts, half efficiency, and much opacity. Now, hundreds of official documents obtained by Armando.info and processed together with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) reveal, through a series of stories, how this exchange flowed, which was not always advantageous for Venezuela.
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