‘ The situation in Venezuela is criminal. People are dying daily’
Last week, shocking pictures showed people searching piles of rubbish for food in Venezuela, a country that was once rich. Laura Dixon reports from Colombia, where 1.2m migrants have fled
Hermelinda Gayo is a nurse and a mother. She has just arrived in the Colombian capital Bogotá, after nearly 30 hours on various buses. Everything she brought with her fits in a small rucksack. Everything else she owns is back home in Venezuela. So is her 15-year-old daughter who uses a wheelchair – Hermelinda felt it was too risky to move her.
She came because she was desperate. The situation in Venezuela is now so bad that she says even professional people, who were once middle class, are digging through rubbish bins for food.
‘ The situation is critical,’ she says. ‘ There are people dying every day, from fevers, from diabetes. There are no antibiotics. As a nurse I saw terrible things. Mothers desperate for help for their children would shout at you, they’d threaten you if you couldn’t do anything.’ Hermelinda’s daughter also has asthma, and it was a constant battle to get the medicines she needs. She is hoping to be able to send them home from Colombia.
Hermelinda, 49, is one of three million people who have fled the political and economic crisis in Venezuela. Inflation is so bad – at more than a million per cent – that the figures are hard to comprehend. Migrants say they no longer have enough money to buy a ticket by the time they reach the front of the bus queue. Food is scarce – one mother told me they hadn’t seen apples in eight years – and for many meat is an unimaginable luxury.
It hasn’t always been like this. Venezuela was for many years the richest country in
Latin America. The capital Caracas had a weekly Concorde flight to Paris and international businesses made the country their regional HQ. If Venezuela was famous for anything, it was for abundant oil reserves, beauty queens and a love of plastic surgery. It has beaches, mountains and, before the crisis, had vibrant cities with a rich culture.
But under President Nicolás Maduro, who came to power in 2013, the economy has faltered and poverty levels have soared to nearly 90%. Food is so scarce that one report found Venezuelans had lost an average of 24lbs in weight in a year. It has darkly become known as the ‘Maduro diet’.
Yet after years of crisis, there is now a glimmer of hope: Juan Guaidó, the leader of the National Assembly, has declared himself President amid allegations that Maduro rigged the last elections. Guaidó has been recognised by most democracies in the West, including the US and the UK, as the rightful interim leader – but Maduro is refusing to relinquish power, and has the backing of China, Russia and Iran. Everyone is waiting to see what happens next.
At the Foundation for the Attention of Migrants refuge in Bogotá, change cannot come too soon. Sister Teresinha Monteiro says the daily flow of people arriving at their gates desperate for help continues. ‘Every day they arrive. Many come walking from Cúcuta [550km away on the border], even when they are pregnant.’
On the morning I visit, Odalie – 24 and six months pregnant – tells me she has walked from the border with her brother. She is dressed in old trainers and jeans open at the zip to accommodate her growing bump. She’s put on red lipstick, perhaps to feel like her old self, and fights back tears as she tells me she had to leave her eight-year-old twins behind – she felt it was safer for them to stay with her mother until she was settled.
‘Now there are a lot of women and children [coming]. Mums and kids, or grandmothers with the children,’ says Sister Monteiro. ‘Because of the situation in Venezuela, they can’t stay any longer.’
Hermelinda was one of the lucky ones. She was able to sell a gold ring to buy a bus ticket to safety. But as her bus climbed the Andes and crossed the rugged ‘páramo’ wetlands, she was horrified to see a tide of people making the journey on foot.
‘I counted 480 people trekking in the cold. Children walking in the páramo. I don’t know how they survived.’
The refuge will allow Hermelinda to stay for three nights for free while she looks for a job; if she can’t find work in Colombia, she’ll join others heading south, to Peru, Ecuador and Chile. She says there is humiliation in the chaos that has taken hold in Venezuela. She once had a good life, a house that ‘had everything’. She earned enough to pay for her daughter’s physiotherapy and medicines, as well as Italian and violin lessons. Now she believes there’s nothing left.
‘ Venezuela is failing,’ she says. ‘ The streets are dirty, the buildings abandoned. It’s a country in ruins.’