Venezuelan migrants who lost their jobs amid the coronavirus crisis were promised a warm welcome back home by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Instead, they are sleeping on cement floors in sweltering quarantine camps, where they are beaten if they complain.
When Edgard Lopez on Saturday boarded a cramped bus in Bogota, he thought he was days away from seeing his family for the first time in three years. He had just lost his job at a cleaning-product factory which closed for the duration of the lockdown imposed by Colombian authorities.
Instead, Lopez is detained at an armed forces’ border checkpoint with hundreds of others, including children and expectant mothers.
“They said they would test us and if we came out negative we could keep moving toward our destinations. It was all a lie,” Lopez, 37, said in a text message.
“They turn on the water only twice a day for two hours and there are 330 of us. If I had known it’d be like this, I would have never come back,” he added.
As swathes of the Colombian economy shut down, thousands of Venezuelans are returning only to be detained by security forces.
The Venezuelan government has imposed quarantine measures on returning migrants as it tries to prevent the pandemic from overwhelming its run-down health system, but it is ill-prepared to deal with them.
The country has confirmed 166 cases of the disease and seven deaths.
“All must be received with love, warmth and all preventive measures,” Maduro said of the returning Venezuelans on state TV on Sunday. “Now, they’ll know they have a motherland, a free and supportive country, ready to greet them with open arms.”
More than 6,000 migrants have returned in the past week, said opposition lawmaker Gaby Arellano, who is assisting returning compatriots. Many more are likely to come.
Since Colombia’s 1.8 million Venezuelan migrants often live in hostels that charge rent by the night, and mostly work in the informal economy, the crisis made many of them homeless almost immediately.
The Venezuelan Ministry of Information did not respond to requests for comment.
Luis Camargo has been held at the same border post for four days since he crossed on his way back to his wife and children in the state of Zulia in western Venezuela. The only food he gets each day is a corn flour patty in the morning and a couple spoonfuls of rice for lunch, he said.
“Some tried to escape today and were taken by the guards. Their families don’t know where they are,” Camargo, 37, said on Monday in a text message. “Another who criticized the government was beaten.”
Those at the border camp have been told they would be held for at least 14 days, the normal incubation period for the virus. Yet the country’s fuel shortage, which has paralyzed much of Venezuela’s transport, could make their return home to families even longer.
“It’s very risky to keep these people with no symptoms and who test negative in refuges,” Laidy Gomez, the governor of the border state Tachira said in a Web cast. “If they’re not infected with coronavirus during this quarantine, then they could easily be the target of another disease as consequence of a total lack of public services.”
San Antonio del Tachira, where many of the migrants are being detained, “is a small town which doesn’t have the proper infrastructure,” Freddy Bernal, a Maduro ally in charge of peacekeeping on the Venezuelan border with Colombia, told state TV.
“We’re doing a superhuman effort to give these people some level of comfort,” he said.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was