Venezuelans cross border to Colombia, useless cash in hand
BOGOTA, Colombia — Jorge Gutierrez leaps onto a packed bus in Colombia’s capital, proudly announcing that he comes bearing gifts from neighboring Venezuela.
He holds up a thick wad of bolivars— the nearly worthless currency of his crisis-racked homeland — and then asks for a small donation in exchange for each 100-bolivar note.
“Do you know what I can buy with this?” he says as the bus rumbles down a street in Bogota. “Absolutely nothing, gentlemen.”
This creative stunt has become a common scene in Colombia as a record number of Venezuelans pour across the border seeking a better life.
An estimated 550,000 Venezuelans have migrated to Colombia, crossing a spottily policed 1,242-mile border. Of those, some 200,000 have come in just in the last six months, threatening to overwhelm Colombia’s limited resources.
“No country is prepared to deal with an emerging phenomenon of this magnitude,” said Julio Saez Beltran, an adviser at Colombia’s Ministry of Health.
Venezuela, a country of 30 million, sits atop the world’s largest oil reserves but has been suffering a political and economic meltdown since global crude prices fell sharply three years ago. Shortages of food and medicine under the socialist rule of President Nicolas Maduro are dire, and Venezuelans struggle to afford basic goods and services with incomes that fall short.
With jobs short in Colombia, some Venezuelans sell sweets and arepas, a traditional cornbread. Many turn up as panhandlers in the mass transit system.
Eager to find work abroad, Gutierrez, 32, arrived in October with his wife, baby daughter, and a backpack crammed with 2 million bolivars that he saved up. But the stash of bills is worth just $20 on Venezuela’s commonly used black market, so he kept it.