Forced to leave their children behind
Exodus from Venezuela in search of a better life abroad leaves families divided
BOGOTA (Colombia): When Emili Espinoza was finally able to make a video call to the three-year-old son she hadn’t seen since fleeing Venezuela, the little boy named Elvis didn’t recognise her.
“No,” he told her. “My mum is sleeping.”
That cold denial sent a shiver of sadness down her spine. She reminded him of the chocolate-covered bananas she used to buy him, hoping to trigger a memory. But his young mind couldn’t grasp the recollection.
His mother wasn’t the 28-year-old woman with almond-coloured eyes staring at him through a cell phone screen, he insisted, but the young lady who happened to be taking care of him that afternoon and was napping a few feet away.
Like thousands of other Venezuelan migrants what the UN calls the largest exodus of people in South America’s modern history, Espinoza had made an agonising choice six months ago: To leave without her three children. She did not have the money to bring them and had no idea what trials she might face in Colombia. So she left them with her brother in the hopes of earning enough to feed them and, with time, reunite.
It’s a pattern that echoes other migrations throughout the world, from Central America, the Caribbean and Asia: Heads of households are fleeing first, with hopes – sometimes frustrated – that their families can soon join them.
The result is a profound alteration of families, with sometimes devastating consequences.
Co-workers at the health foods restaurant in Bogota where Espinoza cleans tables tried to console her, saying the child was simply confused and likely associated the word “mother” with any one of the female neighbours or relatives in Venezuela now helping take care of him.
“He would consider that person his mother and not me,” she said, weeping at the memory.
An estimated 2.3 million Venezuelans have fled their nation’s hyperinflation, food and medical shortages over the last three years, according to the United Nations.
About 1 million have landed in neighbouring Colombia after making long treks by bus and foot.
In one survey by Colombian officials, 73% of the more than 250,000 migrant families questioned said they had left relatives behind in Venezuela.
Another smaller survey by the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group, found 52% of 312 Venezuelans recently arrived in Colombia reported being separated from at least one child they usually live with.
“The rate of family separation and separation of parents from children is just staggering,” said Marianne Menjivar, the IRC’s Venezuela and Colombia director. “These are people who have multiple layers of trauma and the child separation is one more.”
Experts who have studied migrant families say the same factors typically drive the decision to flee without children, regardless of country of origin: Uncertainty about the journey, worries about job prospects in a new country and a belief that the separation will only be temporary. A rise in female migration in recent decades has also led to larger numbers of children separated from their mothers.
Perhaps nowhere has the issue been more visible than at the US-Mexico border, where families make wrenching decisions over whether to bring children on long treks – often covering hundreds of miles and finally across scorching, isolated deserts.
Even families who cross into the US together often find themselves separated, whether by agents at the border or deportation orders issued years or decades later.
The impact can vary depending on age and length of time apart, said Joanna Dreby, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Babies and toddlers are at an age where bonding is considered crucial and little is known about the long-term impact of separation.
“They may come, as they get older, to understand the rationale,” Dreby said. “But it doesn’t change the feelings of resentment they grapple with.”