Aging and Abandoned in Venezuela’s Failing State
Professor Alejandro Gutiérrez in his office at the university. “They left, but we don’t know if they will come back,” he says, of the students. “We, the professors that still remain here, continue to dream.” Photographs by Andrea Hernández Briceño for The New Yorker.
On January 23rd, Venezuelan firefighters broke into the home of Pedro Salinas, a renowned engineering professor in the northwestern city of Mérida. Emaciated and dishevelled, the eighty-three-year-old retiree was found lying on his living-room floor, in a state of severe malnutrition. The corpse of his wife, Isbelia Hernández, who died of a heart attack, lay beside him. For weeks, neighbors had noticed that Hernández, the younger of the two, seemed besieged with worry. She told one of them that the couple was finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. Two days had elapsed since the couple had been seen. When the building manager tried to collect a payment for their monthly gas bill, no one answered the door. When he returned the following day, he was again met with silence. He alerted Hernández’s daughter, who left Mérida several years ago, and she called the fire department from Spain.