CARACAS — Red roses and a burning candle frame the small white casket Wendy Dulcey is caressing at a hospital morgue in Caracas.
It contains the remains of her baby son who died on December 1, 39 days after he was born — a cruel fate befalling far too many in the crisis-hit South American country.
With seven years of back-to-back recession and the highest inflation in the world, Venezuela’s hospitals are creaking skeletons of their former selves, with a critical shortage of doctors and nursing personnel, surgical equipment and medicine.
According to the latest official figures available, infant mortality in Venezuela increased almost a third in 2016 from the previous year, to 11,…
Keep on reading: In crisis-hit Venezuela, maternity wards have become death traps