The Decibel - Inside the life-or-death journey of one Venezuelan family

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Over 7-million Venezuelans have left their homes since 2017, when Nicholas Maduro seized power and the state started to collapse. Most refugees have tried to start anew in nearby countries, like Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. But an increasing number are headed north on a dangerous trek that will take them to U.S.’s southern border. It’s a journey that is hugely shaped by policy decisions being made continents away.Kerli Vasquez and her family are on this journey and met Doug Saunders, the Globe’s international affairs columnist, on the road. Doug tells us about the years they’ve spent trying to re-establish themselves in multiple different countries, and are now en route to try and reach the U.S.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Doug, what are we watching here? So this is a video that was sent to me a couple weeks ago by a Venezuelan family who've been on the road for years. And this is them reaching the border of Colombia and Panama after a day-long difficult hike through the jungle. They're about to enter what's known as the Darien Gap, which is an area of pretty much impassable jungle in southern Panama that takes five to six days to hike across

and is known as one of the most difficult hikes in the world. So what we're hearing in that video they sent me is them congratulating each other, congratulating the coyote, the human smuggler, who helped them across the jungle. And they're signing something there. They're signing. There's banners there sort of saying,

congratulations, we made it. And thank God and all that sort of thing. And it's a rite of passage for many. It's only a tiny slice of Venezuelan migrants who do make that crossing across Panama in an attempt to enter the United States. But it's a big deal. And it's increasingly, such as for this family,

what's being done because it's a last resort, because they've exhausted all other possibilities. If this group of mostly women and children make it through the treacherous Darien Gap, they still have six countries to pass through until they reach their destination, the southern U.S. border. And even if they get there, there's no guarantee they'll be able to get in. Globe and Mail international affairs columnist Doug Saunders recently spent weeks in Colombia talking to Venezuelans making the journey. This is the first part of his year-long series devoted to the global migration crisis. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Doug, thank you so much for joining me today. A real pleasure, thanks.

So one of the women in the video is named Carolee Vasquez. How did you and Carolee meet? We were in a place called Neco Klee, which is sort of washed up old beach resort on the Caribbean Sea, which is where you get on the jet boats that take you across that harbor to the area where you can hike to the Panama-Colombia border. That's on Colombia's north coast. So it's on Colombia's north coast. So it's on Colombia's north coast. And at the point when I was there, there was something like 20,000 people living on the beaches

and in flop houses there. And so when it's turned into a boom town because of migrants from various places, Cuba and Haiti, but especially Venezuela, looking to go north. And more specifically, following the policies of the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, all sorts of countries along the way, and calculating where they should go and what they should do. And this family, Kelly Vasquez and her mother Iris, and 12 more of their family members were living on the beach under four or five tents that they pitched under a bunch of

tarps under bamboo poles and so on. And this was the reunion of this family after five years of being scattered all across South America in their efforts to find a place to settle. And when was this? When did you meet them on the beach? That initially was in late November, which was a significant time because the U.S. federal courts had just ruled against the legality of a policy known as Title 42. And what Title 42 is, is a U.S. policy that was created during the pandemic years by the Trump administration officially to prevent disease from being carried across the border. But what Title 42 does is allows U.S. authorities to send back anyone who presents themselves at a land

border of the United States, such as the Mexico-U.S. border, technically also the Canada-U.S. border, and allows authorities to send them back. And at that point in late November, that had happened. The U.S. policies had changed and there was certain hope among that small subsector of Venezuelans who were hoping to go north to the U.S. But the policy would change again twice between then and now.

And one thing we know from the experiences of other countries is that if you create a limited pathway for people to fly in and apply for refugee status or apply in a third country, it cuts back the number of people who are going to your border and trying to walk across. And Curly specifically, what is she like as a person? An extremely ambitious and enthusiastic person. And she's sort of the ringleader of her extended

family, the one who convinces them to go to Ecuador or go to Peru or what have you. And a perpetually optimistic person as well, in spite of absolutely horrifying circumstances that have led her to live in half a dozen different countries. And where is Carolee and her family? Where are they trying to go? Their hope is to get into the United States because Carly's brother, Alexander, made it into the United States last year in 2022. They also hope, in Carly's case, have ambitions to apply for refugee status in Canada, although they don't know much about that. Okay. So you said Carly wasn't able to stay in Venezuela. So why did she leave the country? She and her family are among 7.1 million Venezuelans so far and counting, or a quarter of the country's population, who've had to leave the country because it's become impossible or dangerous to either make a living, to feed your family, to exist within the country.

What's happened in Venezuela to make it that way? So Venezuela was the wealthiest country in Latin America until about 2002 when extremist politics began to take down its oil economy and as a consequence has caused the currency of Venezuela to become virtually worthless. So you have hyperinflation, a currency of no value. Families there who had been middle class, who'd been families of lawyers and civil servants and so on, were saying that they could not get food enough to feed their families every day. And at the same time, there was great violence within the country.

It's impossible to get anything, even like a driver's license or an ID card, without paying hundreds and hundreds in bribes among people who really don't have any sources of income anymore. So it's the dictionary definition of what they call a failed state. And so Carolee is one of these individuals then who decides to leave Venezuela. Where did she head first? She headed for the border of Venezuela and Colombia and then moved onward from there to Bogota, the capital of Colombia, where she encountered her first crisis that forced her to keep moving on on the road. So what happened to make her keep moving? That was the case of her boyfriend and the father of her child

in a situation that involved him becoming abusive. In this case, there was some involvement of a criminal gang. She tried to settle in Ecuador and Peru and Bolivia and Chile and never was able to settle for more than four months. I want to ask you a little bit more about this route that you're talking about here, Doug, because I know that you actually traveled part of this route that a lot of Venezuelans take when they're journeying into Colombia. What is that road?

What is that route like? Yeah. So that road, which is a classic South American sort of mountain road that suffers from rock slides and situations where you feel like you're going to fall off a cliff and that sort of thing. But all along that road, you just see Venezuelan families in clusters carrying all their belongings in garbage bags, single Venezuelans waiting at all the truck weighing stops to jump onto the backs of trucks as they stop. The humanitarian situation on the roads in Colombia has become dire. You run into people who just don't have anything, who haven't eaten for days. A large proportion of the children you see on the road now are suffering from stunting, which is the form of malnutrition caused by having a diet without

protein in it. So you'll see a kid and you'll say, oh, he looks like a healthy five-year-old. And the mother will say, no, he's 11. And that's quite common. You see stunting in a lot of the kids along the road. And you see the impact of millions of migrants on towns and cities along the way. NecoClee, the beach town that we began with, the merchants there and the chamber of commerce there are just jubilant that they've been overwhelmed with Venezuelan migrants because there's now like three times as many small businesses as there were before. But I ran into towns like Pamplona in the mountains where the towns had grown very tired of Venezuelan migrants. And you could see the welcome running very thin.

So it's more surprising that Colombia has been so tolerant of 2.5 million newcomers than that some parts of Colombia have started to sour on them. We'll be right back. So, Doug, I want to ask you about the money involved here. So if people are trying to get to Colombia, like we've been talking about, or even if they're trying to get all the way to North America, how much money does that cost them? Well, here's the paradox. If you are middle class Venezuelan, and same if you're coming from Syria or Ukraine or whatever, and you decide to fly to New York or Toronto and apply for refugee status when you get off the plane, that'll cost you a few hundred. If you want to do it the other way, the overland way, or what the Americans would call becoming illegal, it's not actually illegal.

So you can't become an irregular migrant crossing the border by foot. To do that properly without a very high chance of being sent back or kidnapped or so on would cost you thousands. So it would cost you more. It would cost you considerably more. So you've got to pay smugglers, you've got to pay bribes. Can you just go through, what are some of these costs? First, getting across the Darien Gap is to do it in a way that isn't extremely dangerous and doesn't put you in danger of being murdered or raped or something like that.

It will cost you several hundred per person. And then you reach the northern border of Panama and Costa Rica, and you find that Costa Rica is not allowing in Venezuelans who don't have up-to-date legal papers, which most of them don't. So you need to hike through the jungle around the border crossing and cross between crossing points. But those paths are controlled by gangs and you have to pay the gang $60 per person, including children to take you around that.

And then you find that to get across Costa Rica without being arrested by police and sent back means you need to take a bus. And that bus is $50 per person. And then you discover the same thing, almost exactly the same thing involving borders and buses and so on is prevalent at the next five border crossings. Migrants have a calculus. They're taking risks every single day based on an understanding of probabilities on one side or another.

And if they hear through WhatsApp that there's a you know, one in 10 chance of being able to make it through some program where you apply for refugee status and get flown over, they'll take that chance rather than taking the much greater chance of walking across the border. Yeah, because, I mean, this sounds like an incredibly dangerous journey. What do people tell you, Doug, the people who are actually on this route? What do they tell you about some of the threats that they face along the way? So Carly Vasquez's family were waiting in this beach town in the north of Columbia to bring the remaining members of their family together to make the passage northward. And particularly, it was Carly's sister-in-law, Samary, who is the wife of her brother who'd made it into the United States. And she'd been living with her two tiny daughters in Venezuela. And I met her just as she'd crossed the border into Colombia.

She'd made it a few meters in at 6.15 in the morning. And by that point, she'd already become a victim of kidnapping. What happened? A nice-looking woman had said, look, you've got a large load. You've got a backpack and two girls. Can I carry your smallest daughter? And carried the girl across. And then when they got across, she said, give me all your money or I'm taking the girl with me.

And then started walking back to Venezuela holding her smallest. With her little girl. And she gave her a lot of money, most of her money. And we talked to the woman who'd done this minor act of kidnapping. And she said she was giving most of the money to the Venezuelan border guards who she was effectively working for. Wow. So there's like a little scam there.

One of many little sort of humiliations and privations and crimes that hit these people leaving the country before they've even left the country in this case. I mean, I ran into a woman named Jackney Garcia, who was planning to cross the Darien Gap with her two small boys. As she was about to get on the boat, a United Nations worker stopped her and said, look, you're in great danger because you don't have enough money to pay people to protect you when you're a woman alone. Your chance of being raped as you go across Panama are very high. So the aid worker handed her a box of morning after pills. That was the

solution they could offer. Of course, I kept an eye on the people who were in danger and she made it across without being attacked, but was robbed of all her money. And let's remember, this passage of people northward is unnecessary. It's dangerous. It exists because we haven't successfully solved the problem. And I should say, it's not for a lack, a total lack of efforts by wealthier countries like Canada and the US in doing that. How could this system, how could the system be better? What could we do to improve things here? There has been a number of actually well-designed efforts to try to address it. The smartest of which is what sometimes gets called a neighborhood policy, which is Canada and the United States and the European Union and the countries, wealthy countries of Europe have held meetings where they've pledged money to support

Colombia and Peru and Ecuador and other countries along the migrant trail in order to give them the resources to be able to settle Venezuelans as permanent residents and citizens and so on, recognizing that most of these people do not want to be going on a month's long journey north. And so I guess Canada specifically here, like what role could we have in this? Canada actually has good sized communities of Latin American immigrants and migrants and so on in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal and so on. And we have the capacity to handle a good number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees, and we could have a better program to do that. Canada's sponsorship-based refugee settlement system

is a model for the rest of the world. The United States is about to introduce a similar sponsorship-based system with the help of some Canadians. And I think what we did with the Ukrainian crisis should be an example of what we should be doing for the Venezuelan crisis. This doesn't just help the humanitarian situation for these 7.1 million Venezuelan migrants. It helps stabilize the entire region. The numbers are large enough and the humanitarian crisis is large enough that it could destabilize some of these countries already. Venezuela being a destabilized failed state is a bad thing in the Americas. It sows chaos and danger and violence across the region in ways that could affect all of us.

So it's in our interests, not just as humans to help these Venezuelans, but actually out of economic and political self-interest, there are reasons to be doing it. Just lastly here, Doug, where are Carly and her family now? They have made it to northern Nicaragua. They made it through the Darien Gap, then. They made it successfully. They are an unusually resilient family, and they're able to make enough money to pay the rent by selling things on the street and so on.

But now they're debating whether to continue north to Mexico or go back to Costa Rica and apply for refugee status and see if they can go into the United States through this legal way. And they're trying, using their limited means of sending text messages to figure out what the US policy is. And it's fascinating to watch the day to day political struggles happening in Washington affecting the day-to-day movements and activities and choices of one Venezuelan family living on the road. Yeah. Doug, thank you so much for all your reporting here and for taking the time to talk to me today.

A real pleasure. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.