Mass migration looms as Venezuelans flood Brazil
STARVING MIGRANTS SWAMP BORDER TOWNS WHILE AUTHORITIES PREPARE FOR HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
Rosibel Diaz used to affectionately call her 4-year-old son “my chubby boy.” She couldn’t stand it when he started going hungry.
So in November, Diaz packed up her family’s possessions and boarded a bus with the boy and her 11-month-old daughter to escape Venezuela’s famished interior. She now lives under a blue tarp in a trash-strewn alleyway of this Brazilian border village, where she begs for food.
“I won’t go back,” said the rail-thin mother, who lost her job as a home nursing aide four years ago. She leaned against a pole, feeding a piece of bread to the baby. “We are surviving here,” she said.
Survival for Venezuelans such as Diaz is becoming a matter of flight. About 10,000 Venezuelans are streaming into Brazil every month in search of food and medicine, authorities say, camping out on the streets and swamping government services in Amazon frontier towns illprepared to receive them.
Oil-rich Venezuela has been an immigrant destination for much of its history. Now it is a place to flee. Chronic food shortages, rampant violence and the erratic and often paranoid behaviour of President Nicolás Maduro have turned the country’s border crossings and beaches into escape valves.
It is an exodus by land, sea and air. Venezuela’s wellto-do can leave on planes, if they haven’t already. Rickety boats ferry small groups of migrants to Curaçao, Bonaire and other Caribbean nations a short distance from Venezuela’s north coast. But those numbers are dwarfed by the tens of thousands pouring into Brazil and Colombia each month — either for emergency shopping trips or a long-term stay.
Venezuela’s economic meltdown and political chaos have left its neighbours fearful of a large-scale humanitarian crisis that could bring even greater numbers of needy migrants.
Every month seems to bring a new low. Maduro attempted to outlaw Venezuela’s largest banknote in mid-December, a measure that he said would strike at foreign powers conspiring to sabotage his socialist government. Instead, cash dried up, retail commerce froze, and Maduro suspended the move as rioting and looting erupted.
“We are working with the understanding that things will get worse,” Gustavo Marrone, the highest-ranking immigration official in Brazil’s justice ministry, said in an interview. “The immigration issue can only be fixed when you deal with the problem at the origin, not at the destination.”
Brazilian government services are buckling under the weight of the sudden influx of Venezuelan migrants. Their arrival has overwhelmed Roraima, a poor, sparsely populated state.
Venezuelans account for 60 per cent of all hospital visits along the border, according to the Health Ministry in this northern state. Infections from sexually transmitted diseases are skyrocketing from the arrival of so many Venezuelan prostitutes. In December, Roraima’s governor declared a state of emergency and appealed for federal assistance to cope with the crush of border-crossers.
Venezuelans can enter Brazil without a visa and remain for 90 days, but even Venezuelans who don’t have passports can skirt formal checkpoints to enter the country illegally. Pacaraima is surrounded by an indigenous reserve that straddles the border, making it easy to cross into Brazil.
Although they can easily enter Brazil, Venezuelans can’t work legally unless they apply for an immigration or refugee visa. Because the visas are hard to obtain, many Venezuelans have taken informal jobs selling food, cleaning car windshields at traffic lights or unloading trucks at the border. The unregulated work has heightened tensions with locals, who say they are unable to compete with the Venezuelans’ low wages.
The crisis is similar in the Colombian cities along the border with Venezuela.
Colombian authorities last year registered six million visits by Venezuelans crossing into their country, many of them to purchase food and other goods that have become scarce back home.
There are no formal immigration checks at the busy crossings, so Venezuelans can freely enter Colombia as tourists, and it is unknown how many aren’t going back. But Christian Kruger, Colombia’s top immigration official, said many Venezuelans are remaining in the country to work illegally.