How many miles are you willing to walk to flee hunger? For some Venezuelans, escaping the country’s food shortages and poverty has meant walking hundreds, even thousands, of miles.
Many Venezuelans have sought refuge in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, or Chile, often by foot. Some have walked 5,000 miles to reach Argentina. They are known as “los caminantes”- the walkers. These are people who are too poor to afford a bus ticket to neighboring countries. They walk 1000s of miles to reach big cities where there are more job opportunities or they have family members in farther countries.
I have seen this firsthand. On a bus I rode from Cuenca to La Troncal, Ecuador, a Venezuelan refugee entered to sell chocolates. With each sale, he includes a Bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, as a souvenir. Hyperinflation has made the Venezuelan currency worthless, yet refugees have given it value by making it a souvenir. As he goes up and down the aisle, he explains he was an engineer back in Caracas. His paycheck no longer covered basic necessities, so he fled his country. Now, his only wish is to make enough money to send to the family he left behind. This man is just one of the five million Venezuelans who have fled their country in the past 6 years.
Grafitti in Ecuador depicting President Maduro as a donkey along with the words “Venezuela your only hope is God.” As well as two migrants, one of them an engineer and the other carries a bag with objects that remind him of his family.
But the long history of outmigration from Venezuela has now changed. The response to COVID-19 in Ecuador, Colombia, and other countries is forcing Venezuelan refugees to return to a country that was already broken before the pandemic. With a fragile health system and inadequate access to food, the arrival of the coronavirus promises to leave devastating effects in Venezuela. While the country is rich in oil, its infrastructure and government are weak and will not be able to save it from the pandemic. To understand the challenges the country will face, it’s important to understand what led to the mass migration of millions of Venezuelans.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, and the country’s economy is highly dependent on them. Oil revenues made the country one of the richest nations in Latin America from 1958 through the 1990s. During Venezuela’s economic boom, the revenue received allowed former president Chavez to increase spending and borrowing. Yet Chavez did not invest those funds in public infrastructure or economic diversification. When oil prices dropped by 70% in 2014, the economy collapsed. The coronavirus pandemic led to an unprecedented demand for oil dropping the value of oil, which will only worsen Venezuela’s economy. This is a perfect example of the ‘resource curse’, in which countries that are rich in natural resources, often in minerals and oil, have greater levels of poverty, inequality, and corruption. The country’s path to instability was further worsened by political corruption, international sanctions, and overspending. The inability of the government to address these issues has led to hyperinflation, hunger, violence, and a mass migration of people from the country.
Despite the economic crisis, Venezuela’s current leader, President Nicolás Maduro, has continued an ambitious Housing Mission to build at least 5 million homes by 2025. Yet, even such an ambitious program is hardly enough to meet Venezuelan’s basic needs. One Venezuelan refugee who received one of the homes expressed resentment towards the President’s plan: “Qué importa si nos dan una casa, si no tenemos nada de comer” — “What does it matter if they give us a house, if we don’t have anything to eat.”
Prior to COVID-19, finding food in Venezuela had already been an arduous task. A recent study by the United Nations World Food Program found that one in three Venezuelans do not get enough food. Many of them involuntarily engage in “The Maduro Diet,” named after President Nicolás Maduro, which mainly consists of root vegetables and beans.
Empty supermarket shelves, long lines for basic goods, and an accelerating inflation have led many to turn to violence to find food — and this was all before COVID-19. Young boys joined gangs to scavenge for food scraps. In Chacao, a neighborhood in Caracas, children in gangs used machetes, knives, slingshots, and broken glass to fight other gang groups over food found in restaurant’s garbage. In the city of Macay, thieves stole two horses from a veterinary school and slaughtered them for their meat. Others targeted food trucks. Such desperate acts of food looting have become common events in Venezuela even before the pandemic.
Things have only gotten worse. On March 16th, President Maduro issued a national quarantine. Since then, security forces have stopped vehicles, including food trucks, from passing state borders in an effort to halt the spread of the virus. The virus is also testing the crumbling healthcare sector of the country, where many hospitals already lack running water, soap, medications, and masks, many of the essential materials needed to combat the disease. In an NPR interview, Dr. Julio Castro, based at the Central University in Caracas, reported that “Sixty-six percent of the biggest hospitals in Venezuela do not have running water. They just receive water once or twice a week. They don’t have water, and they don’t have soap either.” The lack of the most basic resources will most definitely strain medical professional’s ability to care for COVID-19 patients.
In Latin American countries, national lockdowns have put many Venezuelan refugees out of jobs, leaving many of them without money to buy food or pay rent. The governments in the countries they have sought refuge in have failed at providing any support to Venezuelans. Without anyone to protect them, many Venezuelan refugees are being forcibly evicted from their homes because they are unable to pay rent. With no other option left, many are returning to Venezuela.
On Twitter, President Nicolás Maduro has acted “nobly” in welcoming back returnees “We’re looking out for our compatriots who are victims of xenophobia and have decided to return to Venezuela, their homeland. Here we open our arms to them as we have done with millions of people who have found in our country a land of peace & hope. Welcome!” While his words seem reassuring, the reality of hunger, inadequate hospitals, and poverty, that already existed, but will only be made worse by COVID-19, is a dark threat that looms in the future of many of the thousands of returnees.
Screenshot of Nicolás Maduro’s tweet on April 5th, 2020
On National TV, President Maduro announced his plan to test each returnee for COVID-19, stating that if they test positive, they will remain at the border until they are healthy. But in Tachira, a bordering state with Colombia, unsafe conditions in the facilities housing returnees have been reported. Everyone arriving at the border, sick or not, is being forced into abandoned buildings where they must share a dirty room, with no beds, with 10 to 20 people. Many are without food, water, and sanitary bathrooms. Instead of being welcomed with the appropriate care, returnees are faced with a high probability of catching the virus due to the crowded and unsanitary living conditions.
COVID-19 promises to deepen the Venezuelan crisis. And the road to recovery does not seem likely to start anytime soon. Major governmental and economic reforms to diversify the country’s economy need to occur to relieve Venezuela’s financial crisis. A good start would be removing President Maduro, who has governed without transparency for the past 7 years. Media outlets are state-run, so reporting on the cases of COVID-19 has been limited and inaccurate. As of April 29, 2020, the number of confirmed cases in Colombia is 5,949 and in Ecuador the number is 24,258. Yet, only 329 cases have been reported in Venezuela, which may be far from the truth given the media’s history of misrepresentation of information, inadequate healthcare, and inability to run COVID-19 tests.
Even in the United States, where resources are more abundant, hospitals are still overrun with COVID-19 patients and many supermarket shelves are empty. The pandemic has exposed the United States’ fragile infrastructure. But how can the Venezuelan government provide food or medical assistance during the pandemic when it didn’t have any to begin with? While these are uncertain times, one thing remains clear: No amount of oil can help feed the people of Venezuela.