On a crowded Colombian street packed with holiday shoppers and bathed in the sounds of Christmas music, Larry Centeno sat on the sidewalk and wept.
The 44-year-old, his wife and grown daughter all fled Venezuela earlier this month, and each headed to a different Colombian city in hopes that one of them would land a stable job.
“It’s hard here being alone,” the former electrician said as he wiped away tears and tried to sell small cups of black coffee to passersby. “But in Venezuela there was nothing for us anymore. They stole our hope.”
The number of Venezuelans who have fled to other parts of South America has increased more than seven-fold in the last three years, as hunger, chaos and helplessness are sparking a mass exodus.
According to a new report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there were more than 629,000 Venezuelans living in nine major South American countries in 2017 — up from just 85,000 in 2015.
The number of Venezuelans emigrating to other countries in South America has increased seven-fold in the last three years, according to the International Organization for Migration.
International Organization for Migration Courtesy
The trend is remarkable in a region that’s usually a net producer of migrants to places like Europe and the United States.
Colombia is a case in point. Amid decades of a bloody civil conflict, millions of Colombians fled abroad, including to Venezuela. But in the last three years, there’s been a staggering 10-fold increase in Venezuelans coming to Colombia — spiking from 44,615 in 2015 to an estimated 470,000 in 2017.
Places like Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Argentina have also seen the Venezuelan population more than triple.
And those numbers exclude the growing number of Venezuelans seeking asylum.
"The Venezuelan people are starving and their country is collapsing," President Donald Trump stated before the United Nations on Sept. 19, 2017. He later called on other countries to do more to address the crisis in Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro, which "has inflicted terrible misery and suffering on the good people of that country."
The White House
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, from 2014 to 2017 more than 100,000 Venezuelans sought asylum protection in foreign countries — half of those applications were filed this year.
“People are leaving Venezuela for all sorts of reasons,” said UNHCR spokeswoman Regina de la Portilla. “Some are fleeing armed groups, others because they’re being persecuted for their political vision, and others because of the lack of medicine, food and other basic necessities.”
Larry Centeno, 44, once had his own construction company in Venezuela. Now he makes a living selling coffee on the streets of Colombia’s capital. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald
Venezuela is being eviscerated by four-digit inflation and a shrinking economy. Food and medicine shortages sweep through the country. Despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, many are going hungry.
Jesus Montesinos, 42, said he once had an enviable job running a theater in northern Venezuela. But as the bolívar currency became worthless, and food became hard to find, he dropped from 308 pounds to 132 pounds.
He crossed into Colombia in August fearing for his health, and with the mission of sending money back home to support his family.
“The social, economic and cultural conflicts are killing the country,” he said. “And the government doesn’t want to acknowledge that it’s part of the problem.”
President Nicolás Maduro and his socialist administration blame the woes on an “economic war” waged by the opposition and shadowy foreign forces. While the United States has slapped the country with financial sanctions in recent months, economists say it’s the country’s draconian price and currency controls — along with declining oil revenue — that have turned the once-proud nation into the hemisphere’s basket case.
In the heart of Bogotá’s tourist district, on the steps of the Gold Museum, a group of four Venezuelans, dressed in the red, blue and yellow of their national flag, played traditional folk songs in hopes of earning some spare change.
All of them were teachers and educators back in Yaracuy, in northern Venezuela, and all fled without their families. The men said that on a good day they might make about $10 in spare change — the equivalent of their monthly salary back home.
Orlando Muñoz, 33, who was playing the maracas, said he sold his most valuable possession, a refrigerator, to buy a one-way bus ticket to Colombia.
While he said he would go home “immediately” if things got better, he described his decision in stark terms.
“We’re not here because we want to be — we had to escape,” he said. “We’re fleeing from the quiet death of hunger.”
Asked what the name of the band was, the drummer shrugged as if it was an unnecessary luxury.
“We don’t have a name,” he said. “I guess you can just call us Venezuela.”
For the most part, Latin America has opened its arms to this new breed of economic refugees.
Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Colombia have all carved out special visa programs that have made it easier for Venezuelans to seek temporary residence and find work.
Chile and Ecuador also have lax immigration policies that have made them a safe haven for Venezuelans.
Larry Centeno, 44, once had his own construction company in Venezuela. Now he makes a living selling coffee on the streets of Colombia’s capital. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald
Centeno, who was selling coffee, used to have his own construction company before the economy collapsed. He said the last straw for him came on Dec. 10 when the government won 305 out of 335 mayor’s seats amid opposition abstention.
“Everything is so corrupt there,” he said. “The only brave people left are the students, but they’re carrying flags and the army has guns, so what can they do?”
He and his immediate family crossed the border on a bus with $140 to their name. Once a proud entrepreneur, he now keeps himself on a pauper’s budget: $4 a night for a room and $1.50 a day for food. The rest of his earnings (about $15 a week) he sends home to support relatives.
Asked how long he thinks it will be before he can return to Venezuela, he starts to cry again.
“We can’t even say how long it will take us to rebuild the country,” he explained, “because we have no idea how long this problem is going to last.”
Follow Jim Wyss on Twitter @jimwyss
A Venezuelan folk band plays on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. The number of Venezuelans in Colombia has increased 10-fold amid that nation’s economic collapse. Jim WyssMiami Herald
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article190769629.html#storylink=cpy
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment