Sick Venezuelans flee to Colombia in mounting refugee crisis
In a cramped hospital near Colombia’s border with Venezuela, migrants fill stretchers bearing the wounds of the deteriorating nation they left behind.
An 18-year-old woman rubbed her swollen belly after fleeing with her infant daughter when the wounds from her C-section began to ooze pus. A young man whose femur had torn through his skin in a motorcycle crash needed antibiotics for an infection. An elderly retiree with a swollen foot arrived after taking a 20-hour bus ride from Caracas because doctors there told his family the only treatment they could offer was amputation _ without anesthesia or antibiotics.
“If you want to sign, sign. But we are not responsible for the life of your father,’’ Teresa Tobar, 36, quoted the doctors in Venezuela as telling her when they handed over the papers to authorize her father’s surgery.
As Venezuela’s economic crisis worsens, rising numbers are fleeing in a burgeoning refugee crisis that is drawing alarm across Latin America. Independent groups estimate that as many as 3 million to 4 million Venezuelans have abandoned their homeland in recent years, with several hundred thousand departing in 2017 alone.
Many of those migrants are arriving by foot in Colombia and landing in the Andean nation’s emergency rooms with urgent medical conditions that Venezuelan hospitals can no longer treat.
According to health officials, Venezuelans made nearly 25,000 visits to Colombian ERS last year, up from just 1,500 in 2015. At hospitals in border cities like Cucuta, patients are packed side by side on stretchers that spill into hallways, not much unlike the deplorable conditions they fled back home. Authorities project that Venezuelan admissions to Colombian hospitals could double in 2018 and say the nation’s already overstretched public health system is unprepared to handle the sudden swell.
“We are not in a position to assume the cost of the comprehensive care for the migrants arriving,’’ said Julio Saenz, an adviser on migrant affairs to Colombia’s Health Ministry. “That’s a very big concern.’’
The Venezuelans are fleeing an increasingly authoritarian government that has been unable to halt skyrocketing inflation that renders wages nearly worthless and forces millions to go hungry. In Cucuta, ground zero for an exodus that has spread across Latin America, migrants say their nation’s rapidly deteriorating health system is also forcing them to leave as everything from simple antibiotics to critical chemotherapy drugs become hard to find or impossible to afford.
“I said to myself, ‘I have nowhere else to go,’’’ recalled Grecia Sabala, a 32-year-old mother who journeyed to Colombia seeking treatment for cervical cancer after doctors in Venezuela were unable to provide chemotherapy and her city’s only radiation machine broke. “I’m going to the border to look for a cure.’’
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has refused to allow humanitarian aid to enter the struggling nation, denying there is a crisis and contending that permitting international relief could pave the way for foreign intervention. But what little data officials have released indicates Venezuelans are facing mounting health challenges. Cases of infant and maternal mortality have risen sharply and longeradicated maladies like diphtheria have re-emerged.