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'Different shades of utter resignation': Venezuelans fleeing hardship at home are finding more struggles abroad by Christopher Woody on May 29, 2018, 6:19 PM Advertisement
 Protracted political, economic, and humanitarian crises in Venezuela have spurred mass migration, with Venezuelans from across the social spectrum fleeing for neighboring Brazil and Colombia, to other countries in the region like Chile or Peru, and as far away as the US and Spain. To escape what they face at home, many Venezuelans endure more hardship abroad, sacrificing their meager savings for transportation to places where, in part because a lack of documentation, they struggle to find work, lodging, and legal status — challenges exacerbated by discrimination and xenophobia. Geoff Ramsey, the associate for Venezuela at Washington, DC-based research and advocacy group the Washington Office on Latin America, spent April inside Venezuela and on the country's borders with Brazil and Colombia, meeting with Venezuelans seeking relief from their country's collapse, government officials trying to deal with the exodus, and others trying to address the situation. Ramsey spoke with Business Insider in late May, describing the bleak outlook for Venezuelans who are leaving their homes in search of a better life abroad. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. SEE ALSO: 'Truly just devastating stories': The bleak outlook from inside Venezuela's deepening crises The bulk of the fleeing Venezuelans are going to Colombia  Christopher Woody: Regarding the situation on the border [of Venezuela], can you go into more detail about the conditions you encountered along the Colombian and Brazilian frontiers? Geoff Ramsey: Yeah, so they're very different. The bulk of the Venezuelans that are fleeing the country ... the ones who can't afford to travel farther, I should say, are going to Colombia. Colombian authorities estimate that there are about a million Venezuelans in the country today, and you very much get that sense on the ground. In Cucuta on the border, there are tens of thousands of Venezuelans working in the informal sector, in many cases sleeping in the streets. The government, every night, comes through with trucks, and security forces round up people in the streets who are believed to be Venezuelans and can't provide identification, and they're shipped off to the border where they cross the next day. I think there are real problems with ... the Colombian government's handling of the Venezuelan exodus, because since February they've essentially made it impossible for Venezuelans to cross into the country without proper documentation and proof of further travel, and it's a real problem, because in Venezuela, as I'm sure you know, it's extremely difficult to access papers. People can't afford passports because of a combination of the paper shortages and corruption. ... While passports should ... essentially only cost something like 30 bolivares, if I'm not mistaken, Venezuelans are paying something like $800 to $1,000 to get access to a passport, so that's prohibitively expensive for most Venezuelans. [According to the official Venezuela exchange rate, 30 bolivares is US$3, though the currency is worth considerably less at the more frequently used black-market exchange rate, which is now about 995,000 bolivares to the dollar, according to the website DolarToday.]
Across the street an overflowing food pantry, there's a government-run shelter with capacity for hundreds that stands empty  Ramsey: In Cucuta there's actually only two shelters. There is one that's being run by the church and another that's being run by the government in coordination with the Red Cross, and there this really just, I think, twisted dynamic where right across from the government-run shelter, there is a food pantry that serves about a thousand breakfasts every single day to the Venezuelans that have come across the border ... and it's flooded. There are just every single day about 1,000, or I would say over 1,000, Venezuelans flooding into this food kitchen and into the streets, and the church people who run it are forced to close the doors and feed whoever they can, and right across the street you have the government shelter, [to] which ... they only allow entry for Venezuelans who have their documents in order, and of course that's very few Venezuelans. So you have this dynamic where there's right across the street from this overflowing food pantry or ... essentially a shelter, you have the government-run shelter that has capacity for 300 or 400 people and is, on any given day, almost assuredly empty. When I was there there were two people in it. So there's shelves stocked full of food. There's bunks, shower facilities, and it's all completely just unused, and that's just because the Colombian government has adopted these measures that have, without actually saying so, closed the border to Venezuelans who are crossing without their passports.
"He was saying that these indigenous Venezuelans that are crossing into Brazil are locusts"  Ramsey: ... The response of the federal government in Brazil has been entirely led by the military, and on one hand that's good because the military has a reliable logistical capacity. They can move large quantities of aid, but it's also problematic because the government has tasked the military with providing security at the various shelters that operate on the border, and these are soldiers. These are not people that have much experience in providing direct humanitarian aid, and you see it on the ground. When I went to the indigenous shelter in Pacaraima, which is directly on the Venezuelan border, I was taught a new word in Portuguese by the captain in charge of the shelter that I spoke with. ... He was telling me that he thinks that these Venezuelans, these indigenous Venezuelans who are crossing the border, are "gafanhotos." And I was asking what that meant, and he was saying, "Oh, they're coming, and they're eating, and they're moving on." And I was like, "Oh, so you mean they're like ... their tribe is nomadic, related to their customs?" And he was like, "No, no," and he put it into his phone on Google Translate, and he showed me that "gafanhoto" actually means "locust," and he was saying that these indigenous Venezuelans that are crossing into Brazil are locusts, because he thinks that they're using up state resources and don't have any intentions for providing for themselves, and I think that really pairs with reports that I've heard from our partners of open discrimination from the military and a refusal to recognize local traditions in the indigenous shelters and a lack of respect for indigenous authorities in these shelters. I think it's sort of an underreported aspect of the Brazilian response to the crisis, and one that I try to just put a pin in for everybody, because in many ways Brazil deserves praise for what it's doing, but there's problems there as well.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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