Rudy Jose Arzolar Olivero lives in eastern Venezuela and has been crying inconsolably for weeks over the death of one of his 7 children.

“They could have saved him in the hospital, but they didn’t take good care of him. They didn’t listen to us,” complains the 47-year-old man from his humble home in the sector of Las Delicias de Caicara de Maturín, Monagas state.

On April 7, his son, Manuel Arzolar, 12, passed away taking waste to a landfill near your house.

Like many residents of this part of the country, Rudy and his family went to the local rubbish dump to collect glass, plastic and iron which they later sell for a few bolívares in order to survive. There they also look for what to eat.

“There is no work here,” the father of the family explains in an interview with BBC Mundo.

“After I finished, I came home and my kids stayed. Soon after, my daughter came running and yelled, “Dad, I think it’s Manuel poisoned because he’s on the ground and can’t move,’” he adds.

The case of Manuel Arzolar has shocked all of Venezuela.

“It is more profitable to go to the dump than to work”

His death symbolizes the extreme poverty in which many Venezuelan families have fallen since the early 20th century economic crisis which has plagued the country for ten years.

GETTY IMAGES Groups of Venezuelans have also been seen rummaging through the rubbish near the Venezuelan border with Brazil.

Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s economy shrank by more than 75% and at least 7 million people emigrated to other countries, a figure that represents a quarter of the oil nation’s total population.

“There used to be poverty, but I’ve never seen people eat out of the garbage in my life”, responds an elderly neighbor who prefers to remain anonymous.

“People helped each other with agriculture and you could half live with a job. Now, in what is now Venezuela, it is more profitable to go to the dump and sell plastic than to work for a salary of 45 bolivars ($2) a month,” he added.

Rudy says he recently tried to get a job at the mayor’s office, but turned it down when he realized he would make more money collecting the landfill than the US$2 which they offered him as salary.

COURTESY OF THE ARZOLAR FAMILY Rudy Arzolar.

While the Venezuelan economy has grown over the past year, the improvement has not reached the poorest sectors of society, according to economists, some of whom predicted that growth in 2022 was unsustainable and the latest numbers have given them the reason

According to the Venezuelan Finance Observatory (OVF), the South American country’s economic activity contracted by 8.3% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2022.

Father and mother

Rudy and his family say they have felt the economic collapse and remember better times.

“I have land. Before I sowed and sometimes we ate with it, but now I have nothing. I don’t have money to buy seeds or fertilizers,” says Rudy.

The former farmer confesses that it is now more difficult for him to support his family, as lately he acts as “father and mother” to his children, who are between the ages of 8 and 24 and also eat at the dump where Manuel died .

CUIDARTE FOUNDATION Ana García, Manuel’s sister.

“My wife, Katiuska, passed away one year and four months ago due to gallbladder complications. Probably He also died from that dump”, he adds with some courage.

Ana García, 24, is Rudy’s stepdaughter and remembers that for a while her mother was harvesting the crops, she had a salary and her family could live better.

“But then the situation in the country got worse, he lost his job and we lived off the garbage again.”

After her mother’s death, she also helped raise her younger siblings.

“The doctors ignored it”

It was Ana who found Manuel recovering at the dump and took him to Caicara Hospital where they did a gastric lavage to make him vomit.

GETTY IMAGES Venezuela is experiencing the worst economic collapse in a warless country in nearly half a century, leading more and more Venezuelans to look for food in the trash.

Caicara Hospital Center doctors ordered his transfer to Manuel Núñez Tovar Hospital in Maturín with a medical order requesting another “urgent” gastric lavage. He lost his pulse and would not stop convulsing.

“I asked if they would do another wash and they didn’t, despite giving them the order they gave me. They just put him on a stretcher and then he died four hours later,” said the young woman.

“My little brother would live if he had been treated (Good). They didn’t catch on quickly.”

Rudy also alleges that there was medical malpractice.

“My son died after eating rubbish from the dump, but also because the doctors ignored him,” he adds.

At the hospital, they told him he had died of food poisoning.

“He liked going to school”

BBC Mundo contacted Maturín’s Mayor’s Office and Manuel Núñez Tovar Hospital to find out if they had investigated the young man’s death, but by the date of publication, they had not received a response.

Ana remembers her brother as a happy person, who wanted to study and get ahead.

GETTY IMAGES Many Venezuelan children, like the one in this photo, work with their families to collect iron and metal objects to recycle and sell.

“Manuel was in second grade. He liked going to school. He was also happy to go because he played theredespite sometimes leaving without eating,” he continues.

But today they are about distant memories for his family.

“Most live off the rubbish dump”

Yolanda Pérez, vice president of the Cuidarte Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping street children in Venezuela, assures that extreme poverty in the country has increased “massively” over the past four years since the foundation was founded.

“Extreme poverty, especially in the Las Delicias de Caicara de Maturín sector, is impressive. The first time I came here, talking to people, I realized that there’s a whole street where most of them live off the dump”, he tells BBC Mundo.

“Families go to the landfill to collect plastic or glass, after which a truck drives through the sector to collect the material. The truck leaves and then returns in two weeks or a month to pay people what they owe. The collectors do not receive the money immediately”.

The report “Regional Panorama of Food and Nutrition Security in Latin America 2022” published by the UN last year indicates that at least 6.5 million people are hungry in Venezuela.

According to the same source, andl 4.1% of children under the age of 5 in the country suffer from acute malnutrition.

After his son’s death, Rudy has had the support of the Cuidarte Foundation and the local government. The family assures that their situation is now better than a few weeks ago.

But they want the change to be permanent so Manuel’s story doesn’t repeat itself.

“Now we want to support Rudy by getting him a job so that he can support himself and his children,” explains Yolanda Pérez.

Ana also wants the government to help her father work his land so he can “at least” grow food for them to eat and stop cleaning up.