Paper short abstract:

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of public and social policies pertaining to the rights of care in Venezuela, with the purpose of exploring the conditions that have led to the current crisis, resulting in a clear transformation of the social organization of care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of public and social policies pertaining to the rights of care in Venezuela, with the purpose of exploring the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that have led to the current crisis, resulting in a clear transformation of the social organization of care, marked by the fragmentation of family units due to large-scale migration projects and the collapse of the welfare state. To accomplish this analysis, we concentrate on ethnographic material collected during an initial fieldwork in Spain in 2022 and a subsequent fieldwork stage in Venezuela in 2023. The objective is to identify the care and subsistence strategies that transnational families deploy to sustain the lives of older people currently residing in Venezuela, who are affected by two interrelated aspects. The first pertains to the diaspora, 25% of the total population have left the territory and 95% of this figure is composed of people between 15 and 45 years old, which means an important part of the families -who historically have assumed care work- have migrated and the older population remains isolated to a greater extent. The second aspect refers to the chronic condition of a complex and multifactorial crisis that continually renews its contingencies, limiting the possibilities of care and subjecting older people to conditions of vulnerability that endanger their lives.