I was hanging out with some neighbors in the hallway recently. We live in one of the short turquoise buildings of a mixed commercial-residential complex in this northeastern city, supposedly a model of urban development.
We decided to make tea combining resources from our four apartments. We couldn’t scrounge up enough sugar. Someone had frozen pineapple and passion fruit peels. Someone boiled water.
Everyone brought their own cup, each with a different design. Mine, with a picture of a cow, was the ugliest. We sat on the floor of the hallway outdoors and in the shade of a tall mango tree.
The infusion was surprisingly tasty, considering the ingredients. One of the guys said, “Yeah, and it helps a little with the hunger.” That’s Manuel. He’s a law student and the youngest in the group. He used to be buff.
My brother, a lawyer who once had a fat neck, nodded. “We don’t even have the mangoes to round off dinner,” he said. I looked at the tree. We live on the third floor, so we’ve always been able to grab its highest fruits fairly easily. In season, they usually go to waste. This year, the tree’s already bare.
“It’s better to go to sleep, so you don’t feel the hunger,” said María, a lawyer who worked as an undocumented immigrant in a restaurant in Spain but returned after two months, horrified by the working conditions there. I said, “Do that, and you end up dreaming of food.”
I was speaking from experience. Taking another sip of tea, I thought about that time when after watching a “Game of Thrones” episode I dreamed of a medieval feast, with a huge pig in the middle of the table, several cakes and mead. Other times, I dream of a supermarket with fully stocked shelves. That usually happens after a long day of standing in line in the sun at a store, hoping for a delivery truck to arrive.
Coffee and milk became luxuries for me a few years ago, but the really scary scarcity — of things like bread and chicken — hit my middle-class home at the beginning of this year. There was a week -when I had to brush my teeth with salt.
Nine out of 10 Venezuelans can no longer afford to buy enough food, according to a study by Simón Bolívar University. The I.M.F. has forecast that inflation would exceed 700 percent this year.
We gossiped about the people we’d been noticing were getting skinnier. The list was long. It struck me how backward this was — how being fat is a sign of wealth again. Detecting the parasitic bourgeois has never been easier.
The bourgeois, the wealthy and the private sector are the groups President Nicolás Maduro blames for Venezuela’s recession. But it’s years of economic mismanagement under his and Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution that have done us in.
Daniel, an engineering student who plans to leave the country as soon as he gets his degree, mentioned the old lady who sells corn and corn flour in front of our building. Her prices go up every week. She, too, is getting skinnier. Daniel said he saw her trying to catch pigeons. Dogs are next, I said.
María said she gets the worst of it right after jogging. I know the feeling: I’ve stopped working out. We shared other coping strategies, like waking up late — a half joke, since only rich kids who don’t have to work can afford to do that. We agreed that our best hope, really, is the Organization of American States and its Democratic Charter thing.
News of the crisis in Venezuela has gotten so big that the O.A.S., a bloc comprising most states in the Americas, has been discussing what to do with us. No one really believes that the Venezuelan opposition’s effort to remove Mr. Maduro from office by referendum, although progressing, is going to succeed.
“Did you see what Almagro said?” Luis Almagro is the O.A.S.’s secretary general. He has blamed Mr. Maduro for the crisis and has called on the O.A.S. to consider taking the steps necessary to “restore democratic institutions” in Venezuela.
“Yeah, it looks like they’ve invoked the Charter.” Under the charter, the O.A.S. can suspend a member state that fails to preserve the democratic order. Mr. Almagro seems to be hoping this threat will convince the Maduro government to accept humanitarian aid from abroad, which it has pre-emptively ruled out.
I realize these diplomatic processes can take months: It’s a whole continent trying to find consensus on a complicated subject. But Manuel, Daniel, María, my brother and I, all professionals or trying to become professionals, don’t know what the hell we’re going to eat tomorrow, and so you’d think those diplomats would start cramming two sessions into one day or something. Hurry up, O.A.S. guys, we’re hungry.
Carlos Hernández is a Venezuelan economist and part-time writer.