One family's tragic tale: their story became a symbol of the nation's collapse: after three days with no food, the family was growing weak.

• Author: Casey, Nicholas
• Position: Venezuela

Kevin Lara Lugo, the 16-year-old boy who died from eating foraged food to ward off starvation, lived in Maturin, a once-prosperous oil boomtown in northern Venezuela.

His mother, Yamilet Lugo, worked at a cutlery factory until it shut down in May 2016, unable to get the raw materials to make plastic. It joined many factories across the country that have gone idle.

Then came the next blow. Jose Rafael Castro, Yamilet Lugo's boyfriend and the only other breadwinner in the household, came home with bad news: The construction supply factory where he worked making cinder blocks had let him go because the owners could no longer find cement.

That left the family unable to buy what little food was available. First, they ate mangoes. By summer, the family had turned to yuca, a common root vegetable, which grew in a plot owned by a relative a short bus ride away.

"This was our food morning, noon, and night," Yamilet Lugo says. By July, there was no money even for the bus fare to the field, so they looked elsewhere. By July 25, the day before Kevin's birthday, the family hadn't eaten in three days and everyone was growing weak.

Kevin and Castro heard about an abandoned field a 45-minute walk from their home where other neighbors had been foraging for bitter yuca. But bitter yuca is dangerous to eat because, unlike regular yuca, it contains toxins. The plant can be dried to extract the toxins, which they tried to...