Illegitimate Family

When Esperanza Rojas was 15, she fell in love with 19-year-old Agustin Infante. After an eight-day courtship, they set up housekeeping in a Caracas slum. They gave no thought to matrimony, but then neither had Esperanza's mother nor her older brothers and sisters. The love affair was stormy, filled with arguments and fights, and twice Esperanza went home to mother, each time swollen with child. Now, four years later, Esperanza and her two children live with her mother in a wood-and-cardboard shack, and she accepts her deserted, unwed state as quite natural. "She just had bad luck," says her mother. "It could happen to anyone."

In Venezuela, as in most of Latin America, it could happen and it does with great frequency. Nearly half of Venezuelan children are born illegitimate--and that statistic does not count those born out of wedlock but recognized by the father. Only a third of all Venezuela's women are married, and another 20% live as concubines. Divorce, once rare in the predominantly Catholic country, has doubled in two decades. In a pastoral letter last fall, Caracas' Jose Humberto Cardinal Quintero and all Venezuela's bishops tried to remind Venezuelans of the "dignity and obligation of fatherhood." Says Caracas Lawyer Aristides Calvani, a sponsor of child-care legislation: "Many of our people do not get married; their fathers did not, and neither did their grandfathers. It has always been this way."

One trouble is that Venezuelan men often place machismo, the Latin American he-man obsession, above matrimony. Man's role, they believe, is to beget children, not support them. And their women are none too insistent; many actually believe that marriage "ruins a man." As a result, some 176,000 children were abandoned last year alone, left to become wards of the state or delinquents of the streets. The government's Venezuelan Children's Council spent $10 million last year to care for 96.000 homeless minors, 90% of them illegitimate. With too many mouths to feed, mothers in the backlands sometimes sell or give their daughters to the first man who comes along.

To meet the "crisis of fatherhood." Venezuela's Mental Health League offers a six-month course in child care and home life, and the Catholic Church now plans night schools in literacy and parenthood for at least 75,000 young couples. And Venezuelan judges are getting tough with delinquent fathers. Under new laws passed by Congress, fathers guilty of nonsupport face a sobering choice: voluntary support of their offspring, a jail sentence, or a forcible child-care deduction from their weekly wages.

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