Venezuelan Charity Battles Child Malnutrition

In Altos de Milagro Norte, an impoverished neighborhood north of Maracaibo in western Venezuela, Carolina Leal, founder and director of the Alimentando un Sueno (Feeding a Dream) foundation, says his foundation receives at least two cases of malnourished children a week.

Some 50% of Venezuelan households live in poverty, according to a national poll carried out by the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, and 41% of those polled said they skip one meal per day.

Leal speaks frankly and says she was a loyal supporter of the revolution and the late former president Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, but after seeing members of her community starving to death, she stopped supporting them.

"I come from defending the revolution... I got tired of seeing people die of hunger... The politicians have been the destruction of our country," Leal said as she carried a one-year-old boy who was in her care after being abandoned by his biological mother.

Children holding food containers walk to the soup kitchen, queuing to eat. Leal, along with a foundation worker, hands out bowls of soup. The foundation serves about a thousand children, mothers, and elderly people from various neighborhoods in Maracaibo.

Leal expresses his frustration and regrets that the government is using poor families in the run-up to the elections.

Venezuela will hold a presidential election at the end of July, where Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and is seeking his second reelection, has presided over economic collapse, with a loss of 73.3% of Venezuela's gross domestic product since he has been president, according to researchers from the Institute of Superior Administration Studies in Caracas.

Hunger is a familiar specter in Venezuela, which suffered years of hyperinflation in the second half of the last decade as the government of Maduro printed money to pay its debts amid a slowdown in oil prices.