Fri, Jun 23, 2017 page6

• Venezuelans fleeing turmoil seek refuge in Colombia

  ‘CONSTANT FLOW’: Lower and middle-class Venezuelans cross the porous border into Colombia, while better off people prefer Spain or the US, where they seek asylum

  • AP, BOGOTA
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  While Venezuela plunges further into political and economic ruin, the flight of its citizens is accelerating, reaching levels unseen in its history.

  Experts believe nearly one-10th of its population of about 31 million lives outside the country.

  For better-off professionals the preferred destination is Spain or the US, where Venezuelans are overstaying their visas in droves and lead asylum requests for the first time — 18,155 last year alone.

  However, for many poor people fleeing Venezuela’s triple-digit inflation, hours-long food lines and medical shortages, Colombia is the journey’s end.

  The neighboring Andean nation has received more Venezuelans than any other nation.

  Estimates indicate more than 1 million have arrived in the past two decades, reversing the previous trend of Colombians fleeing war heading to Venezuela.

  The most desperate cross illegally through one of hundreds of trochas, unpaved dirt roads along Venezuela’s porous 2,200km border with Colombia.

  “When you talk to Venezuelans, they all say: ‘I want to come,’” said Saraid Valbuena, 20, who made the journey with her husband and their then-one-month-old daughter earlier this year. “Even though you come here to sleep on the ground, people want to come because they know with a day or two of work at least they’ll eat.”

  The influx shows no sign of waning and has worried Colombian officials enough that they are crafting contingency plans in the event of an even larger spike or a repeat of a crisis like the one in 2015, when Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro expelled about 20,000 Colombians overnight.

  The Colombian government has sent a delegation to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey to learn how to respond to a sudden wave of mass migration.

  The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is also studying how prepared their offices in Colombia, as well as Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago, are to deal with a potential swell of Venezuelan migrants.

  “Since about a year-and-a-half ago, it has been a constant flow,” Venezuelans in Colombia Association president Daniel Pages said. “They need to leave in order to live.”

  Officially, Venezuela denies its citizens are fleeing to Colombia.

  As recently as February, Maduro said Colombians were still pouring en masse into Venezuela.

  Venezuela has not released migration statistics in more than a decade.

  Valbuena and Genensis Montilla, a 26-year-old nurse and single mother who left her three children with their grandmother in Venezuela, share four tiny bedrooms made of cinder blocks with 12 others.

  They have scrounged used jackets to withstand Bogota’s damp, Andean climate. One of the flattened mattresses in a bedroom was pulled from the trash.

  “Every day I wake up wanting to leave, but I can’t,” said Montilla, who in Venezuela lived in a comfortable home with her children, but earned less in one day at an emergency room clinic than the cost of a tube of toothpaste.

  On a typical day, Montilla and five others take a bus to a wholesale food market where they purchase mangoes to sell them at less than US$1 each.

  Decades ago, 4 million Colombians poured into Venezuela at a time when their own nation was engulfed in an armed conflict with guerrillas and Venezuela’s oil-rich economy was booming.

  Many of the Venezuelans arriving today have Colombian roots, but those who do not find gaining legal status difficult.

  Unlike nearby Peru, which has offered Venezuelan arrivals temporary work visas, Colombia does not provide any sort of humanitarian legal status to Venezuelans.

  Refugee visas are available, but can take more than two years to process.

  In the early years of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution, fleeing oil executives and other wealthy Venezuelans arrived in Colombia in such numbers that they drove up real-estate prices and made getting into elite private schools even more difficult.

  However, the newest arrivals come with little more than the change in their pockets.

  Though many come from Venezuela’s lower and middle classes, Montilla and her friends said they have seen skilled professionals like architects and engineers arriving in Colombia and sleeping in bus stations.
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