An exodus from Venezuela has prompted Latin America's biggest migration crisis in decad... - 0 views
-
Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.
-
In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.
-
Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.
- ...16 more annotations...
-
In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.
-
y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.
-
Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.
-
leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country
-
Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.
-
Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.
-
bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.
-
The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands
-
Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.
-
They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”
-
The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.
-
Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.
-
“Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.
-
You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”