Trapped in a troubled land
Joel Bustamante was fed up with the soaring cost of living and the shootouts and petty crime in his working-class neighbourhood. He was ready, he decided, to do as so many of his fellow Venezuelans have done and flee the crisis-torn country. He lined up a factory job in Chile, bought a plane ticket and packed his bags.
All he needed was a new passport. He ordered it six months before his scheduled flight. Plenty of time, he was told. But days of waiting turned into weeks, then months. To this day, eleven months after that flight left for Chile without him, Bustamante, a 24-year-old cab driver, continues to wait.
“I’m in complete disbelief,” he said. “If not for this mess, I’d be gone.”
Of all the shortages that plague Venezuela today — of food and medicine, even money — the lack of passports is in some ways the cruelest. For sheer hardship, it can’t match the kind of suffering inflicted by a scarcity of, say, drinking water or high-blood pressure pills, but it has the surreal effect of making people feel like they’re trapped, like they’re prisoners in their own dysfunctional land.
Hundreds of thousands are marking time, as the passport emergency slows down an unprecedented exodus. Ever since the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez’s interventionist policies sank the economy into full-blown crisis, Venezuelans have been leaving in droves. They land in neighbouring Panama or head north to the U.S. or try their luck in Spain.
President Nicolas Maduro’s government has acknowledged the passport problem, and last week launched a new “express” online option that offers to deliver one within 72 hours for more than double the standard price. It’s unclear how many have managed to try the expedited process; the website’s been crashing. The reason the passport agency, known as Saime, has given for the shortfall is that it doesn’t have enough “materials.” It might be the government just can’t afford to buy all the paper it needs. Phone calls and emails to the agency and the Interior Ministry weren’t returned.
On some days, hundreds queue up outside Saime’s headquarters in Caracas, arriving as early as 5 a.m. Even for those with more mundane reasons for wanting a passport — to visit family or travel for business — the process can be excruciating.
Sofia, a 58-year-old retired school teacher, has taken four 100-mile bus trips from the city of Valencia to Caracas in her quest to be in Spain for the birth of a grandchild this month. The last time she asked if the elusive materials had arrived, she said, “they practically laughed in my face, saying, ‘Don’t you realize this is Venezuela?’ ” Scores are stuck abroad too. “Basically, I’m imprisoned in Canada,” said Elena, 43, who is a legal resident there and has been trying for two years to renew her passport so she can travel with her two children; like many interviewed she asked that her last name not be used.
Waiting outside Saime headquarters before dawn, Jose Azuaje, a 36-year-old office manager, said he applied nearly four months ago for papers for his asthmatic son. Desperate to have him treated in Colombia, he returns again and again for fresh word on his request.
“You can’t do anything,” a bleary-eyed Azuaje said. “You’re trapped.”