World News Brazil state asks top court to halt Venezuelan migration

Some Venezuelans, alarmed by Maduro’s measures, speed up plans to flee

BRASILIA, (Reuters) - The government of the northern Brazilian state of Roraima yesterday asked the country’s supreme court to halt the entry of Venezuelan immigrants, increasing pressure on the federal government to resolve a growing regional crisis.

Roraima’s request followed a weekend of violence in the state, where tens of thousands of Venezuelans have arrived in recent years, fleeing economic and political turmoil in their country.

“As a result of the grave conflicts over the weekend, the state of Roraima submitted a fastrack request ... seeking the temporary suspension of Venezuelan immigration through the border,” the state government said in a statement.

The supreme court rejected a previous request by Roraima, as the Brazilian constitution mandates an open border.

The court is unlikely to agree to the new request. Still, local tensions have been mounting in the growing Latin American crisis, with countries across the region taking a tougher line against fleeing Venezuelans.

For instance, Venezuelans entering Ecuador and Peru will soon be required to show hard-to-get passports, rather than the more ubiquitous national identity cards, governments of both countries announced last week.

This weekend in the Roraima border city of Pacaraima, four people beat a shop owner and some locals said the assailants were Venezuelans, which prompted a mob to destroy the tents of immigrants camped in the streets and set fire to the belongings they left behind. Some 1,200 Venezuelans retreated back over the border, local officials said.

President Michel Temer on Sunday announced an increase from 31 to 151 in the contingent of soldiers helping keep order at the bor- der, while also pledging to speed the relocation of Venezuelan immigrants to other Brazilian states. Temer has repeatedly refused to close the border. “The closure of the border is unthinkable because it is illegal,” Sergio Etchegoyen, Brazil’s minister of institutional security, said on Monday.

He added that soldiers were now patrolling the border, and that the situation had improved.

“There’s tension, but there’s no conflict,” he said.

Angered by a perceived lack of federal support to deal with the migration crisis, Roraima has repeatedly turned to the courts, hoping judges will force Brasilia’s hand.

Earlier in August, a federal judge in Roraima ordered the border closed until the state could create “humanitarian” conditions to receive Venezuelans, but the decision was soon overturned by a federal appeals court judge. (Reuters) - Carpenter Jose Narvaez had planned to flee Venezuela and emigrate to the nearby Caribbean island of Aruba towards the end of the year, until Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro unveiled his plan to turn around the crumbling economy.

Now the 43-year-old Narvaez wants to leave as fast as he can.

Maduro on Friday stunned the South American nation by announcing a 96 percent devaluation and vowing to peg the bolivar currency to Venezuela’s new ‘petro’, a cryptocurrency that experts have cast doubt on as a functional financial instrument.

“I am looking for flights to leave on Wednesday, any way I can,” Narvaez said in Venezuela’s western oil hub of Punto Fijo, home to massive but deteriorated oil refineries. “I am sure this is going to get worse because the man’s ideas lack all logic.”

Maduro, who argues that he is the victim of a Washington-led “economic war” designed to sabotage his administration through sanctions, said that using the petro will abolish the “tyranny” of the dollar and lead to an economic rebirth in Venezuela, an OPEC member state home to the world’s biggest crude oil reserves.

But many Venezuelans fear the measures - whose