Jjanuka: cómo la ciudad enferma a una comunidad Warao abandonada

Jjanuka sits on the edge of San Félix like a wound that won't close. For thirty years, this Warao settlement has occupied the periphery of the city, and in that time, the people who once lived by water have learned to survive in a place that seems designed to make them sick. The air here carries dust from unpaved roads mixed with the stench of a contaminated creek that runs black with sewage. There is no asphalt, no proper drainage, no gas for cooking. The garbage accumulates. The hospital, when residents can reach it, has no supplies. This is how Jjanuka endures: breathing becomes an act of resistance.

The lungs of children in this community are under constant assault. Violeta Guaruya, who coordinates indigenous health services at the Hospital General Nacional Guaiparo, sees the same pattern in her patient records month after month: bronchitis, asthma, respiratory infections that should be manageable but aren't. The culprits are everywhere at once. Unpaved streets kick up dust that never settles. Wood fires burn inside zinc-walled shelters with almost no ventilation because the city's collapse in basic services—no gas, no electricity—has forced families back to cooking over open flame. Stanislao La Cruz, the community captain, describes it plainly: "We cook with whatever we can find." The smoke from these fires mingles with smoke from burning garbage in the ravine behind the settlement, and it settles into the barracks where people sleep, eat, and try to raise children. Traditional remedies no longer touch this kind of sickness.

But the air is only part of the story. The anthropologist José Cañizales calls what has happened to the Warao a "traumatic sociocultural transformation." These are people of the river, the Delta—people whose bodies and diets and entire way of being were shaped by water and fish and the plants that grow in wetlands. Jjanuka has no river. There are no morichales, the palm groves that once fed them. The diet has collapsed into yuca from a small communal garden, pasta, wheat flour, processed foods that provide calories but almost nothing else. The immune systems of the population have weakened under this nutritional siege, which means that when contaminated water and filthy air introduce pathogens, the body has almost no defense. The city's infrastructure is not simply inadequate; it is an active agent of harm, reminding residents with each fever that they live in the city but are not protected by it.

The skin infections are relentless. In spaces where personal space is a concept that barely exists, where families crowd into small barracks, scabies and fungal infections and bacterial skin infections spread like inevitability. Children develop permanent scars because there is no clean water to wash clothes, no topical treatment to prevent infection from deepening. These are not isolated cases. They are the texture of daily life. The varicella outbreak that swept through Jjanuka in late 2024 exposed how fragile everything is. In most places, chickenpox is a manageable childhood illness, prevented by vaccine. In Jjanuka, where malnutrition had already weakened every child's body, it became a crisis. The community had no vaccines, no epidemiological containment, no choice but to isolate themselves and rely on traditional remedies that could not hold back the virus.

Andrea Beria was the captain's wife and the face of that emergency. She spoke to journalists about the impossible mathematics of survival: a doctor writes a prescription, but there is no money to fill it. "They give you only a receipt," she said, "but we have no way to buy the medicines. If you don't buy them, you die there." Her words made visible what statistics hide. A few months later, Andrea herself became the subject of a different kind of story. She had diabetes—a disease that is treatable, manageable, survivable in almost any other context. But in Jjanuka, it became a death sentence. The insulin required refrigeration, and electricity in the settlement is intermittent or absent. The medications cost money the family did not have. The hospital demanded visits that required her to travel while already weakened, a journey that itself became dangerous. The system offered no home visits, no preventive care, no way to meet her where she was. She died not from an exotic pathology but from the systematic failure of every institution that should have protected her. Her death was not a medical outcome; it was proof that bureaucracy and the absence of infrastructure can be as lethal as any virus.

The Hospital General Nacional Guaiparo is where Jjanuka residents go when their bodies have exhausted their own resources. Stanislao La Cruz has stood in those hallways. He knows what the hospital is: a place where nothing is free, where you must buy the syringe, the IV fluid, the medication yourself. For someone who survives on a small garden plot and occasional work cleaning other people's houses, the promise of public health is a technical fiction. The hospital's doors open to indigenous citizens, but that status means nothing in the pharmacies outside, where the real battles happen. Violeta Guaruya, the coordinator of indigenous services, has begun using her own money to feed her patients because the hospital cannot. "The one who has no food does not eat," she says, and the simplicity of the statement is devastating. The hospital treats the pneumonia or the acute diarrhea, but it sends the patient back to the same conditions that made them sick. There is no follow-up, no preventive medicine that reaches into the difficult terrain of Pinto Salinas. The law on the books—articles 110 to 114 of the health code—promises culturally appropriate, integral care. What arrives instead is a medical team every four months with some deworming medication, while the causes of sickness remain untouched.

Yet Stanislao La Cruz continues. Each morning, he tends the yuca plants in the communal garden, waters them with water from a corroded pipe, and in that small act of cultivation, he insists that there is still a future. In Jjanuka, resistance is not heroic. It is the only law that actually functions, the one that gets obeyed every single day in a city that has chosen to ignore them.