As Venezuela exodus swells, more migrants face removal
CUCUTA, (AP): WHEN COLOMBIAN police caught Victor Colmenares selling coffee without a work permit on the dusty streets of Cucuta, they ordered him to get inside a truck filled with Venezuelan migrants being quietly removed from the country.
The 20-year-old construction worker trembled as the unmarked truck approached Colombia’s border, thinking about his pregnant wife still in Cucuta and the dangers he might face back in the country he’d fled.
“I was incredibly afraid to go back to Venezuela,” Colmenares said. “People are robbed there. People are killed. I cannot go back.”
EXODUS OF VENEZUELANS
As the exodus of Venezuelans fleeing their country’s economic and humanitarian crisis grows, neighbouring Colombia is responding by tightening checks aimed at curbing the number of migrants in the country illegally.
In border cities like Cucuta, police are rounding up Venezuelans illegally hawking Popsicles in public squares or working as prostitutes in brothels and taking them back to Venezuela.
PRICKLY QUESTION
But the removals, although often legal, raise a prickly question: Should migrants be sent back to a country the United States and others have condemned as a hungerstricken “dictatorship?”
“We can’t tell everyone, ‘Come, stay here,’” Christian Kruger, the director of Colombia’s migration agency, said in a recent interview. “There is no country in the world that can support unlimited migration.”
About one million Venezuelans fled the country from 2015 to 2017, according to the United Nation’s International Organisation for Migration, and hundreds of thousands more have left in the first three months of this year.