MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Venezuela's elderly demand better pensions

Retired health care and education workers make around US $ 1.45 a month

Retired Venezuelan health care workers Wednesday staged a protest in demand for better pensions, claiming that what they were earning were “miserable salaries” with which they were being “starved to death”

Former health care and also education workers marched through Caracas Wednesday demanding “decent” salaries and pensions which should allow them to live through the current humanitarian emergency Venezuela is going through.

Demonstrators were summoned by the National Foundation for the Defense of Pensioners convened at Caracas' La Moneda square near the headquarters of the Venezuelan Institute of Social Security and not far from the Miraflores Presidential Palace.

With banners reading “Maduro is misery,” the protesters demanded respect for their rights and claims after having given their “best years of their lives” to the country.

“The government remains committed in a systematic, continuous, and progressive way, in the extermination of the elderly,” activist Luis Cano said. A pensioner earns 7 bolivars a month, which is equivalent to only US $ 1.45, “when at this moment the basic basket has already passed 400 dollars, but we are sentenced to a pension of 7 bolivars.” Cano also regretted the announcement Tuesday by the administration of President Nicolás Maduro of a 3-bolivar bonus which will raise their incomes from 7 bolivares to 10, which was perceived as “a humiliation and a mockery of a sector as vulnerable as we older people are.”

Cano insisted their right to protest was guaranteed by the Constitution, as was their right to a salary “to live with dignity and cover basic needs for himself and his family”.

With pensions not enough to provide for foods, medicines and clothing, other demonstrators pointed out the price of transport went up daily. In addition to that Social Security authorities were “swindling” workers who were charged a monthly fee but got nothing in return.

There are almost 5 million pensioners and a million retirees in Venezuela, whose economy has been “dollarized de facto” to survive hyperinflation.