A US Navy hospital ship moored off Colombia has started giving free medical care to Venezuelan refugees, in a move likely to rile officials in Caracas who deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis in their own country — and have long been suspicious of the close relationship between Colombia and the US.
As well as treating Colombians, US medical teams aboard the USNS Comfort are to attend to Venezuelan refugees, particularly at the ship’s next stop in Riohacha, a city near the border between the two countries.
About 3 million Venezuelans have fled political turmoil and economic hardship at home, including 1 million who have taken shelter in Colombia, which has struggled to deal with the exodus.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Last week, authorities in Bogota opened the first refugee camp to house nearly 500 Venezuelans.
Venezuela has been seized by a worsening health crisis amid a dire shortage of drugs, vaccines and sanitary products and outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Last year authorities recorded 406,000 cases of malaria — a disease which Venezuela had come close to eradicating in the 1980s — an increase of 69 percent from 2016. Measles is also on the rise, and both diseases have spread across the border, worrying Colombian health officials.
The USNS Comfort, which is on a three-month mission that has already taken in Ecuador and Peru and is to end next month in Honduras, arrived at Colombia’s northwestern port city Turbo on Wednesday.
Patients in Turbo and Riohacha, where the ship will dock this week, can receive medical assistance from the crew of more than 900 doctors, nurses, military technicians and volunteers, with installations aboard vessel as well as on shore.
The ship is equipped with a dental suite, four X-ray machines and an optometric lab, and carries 5,000 blood packs — a marked improvement on the rudimentary hospitals in the two cities. Two helicopters ferry patients between land and the ship.
The mission has been billed as a reflection of the “enduring promise of friendship, partnership and solidarity with the Americas,” according to a statement from the US Southern Command.
However, it has stoked tensions in the region, with China — one of Venezuela’s few allies — hastily dispatching its own hospital ship to Venezuela in September ahead of the US mission.
“This is how you undertake diplomacy in the world,” Venezuelan Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino said at the time. “With concrete actions of cooperation and not stoking the false voices of those who beat the drum of war.”
Tensions between Washington and Caracas have been ratcheted up recently, with US National Security Adviser John Bolton labeling Venezuela as part of a “troika of tyranny” alongside Nicaragua and Cuba.
“It’s pretty brilliant PR, isn’t it?” Adam Isacson, a security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank, said in response to the deployment.
“We could just as easily, at similar cost, send a huge contingent of civilian doctors, working on land where the people are, to help tend to the Venezuelan population. But sending a military ship — even though it’s white with a big red cross on it — sends more of a message about projecting US power,” he said.
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