US Aid Benefits Refugees from Venezuela

Latin America is experiencing one of its worst ever migration crises. This region has experienced multiple population movements in its history. Venezuela has seen a mass exodus of people due to four years of economic downfall and the subsequent impoverishment of the citizens.

The Reasons Behind Venezuela Crisis

The problem has been further exacerbated by the re-election of the dictatorial President Nicolas Maduro. The economic policies of President Maduro and former President Hugo Chavez have mismanaged the country’s vast oil reserves and sent the country spiraling into depression. The government has cut imports by over 75 percent, choosing to use its own currency to balance the $140 billion debt. This is an extremely bad decision in a country that produces almost exclusively oil.

The result has been an enormous lack of services within the country and the decrease in GDP. These policies have remained unchanged or challenged because of Maduro’s stranglehold on the country’s media and legal system, in addition to his brutal responses to protests. Accusations of corruption and conspiracies surrounding drug trafficking have plagued Maduro’s career but haven’t challenged his rule in any meaningful way. The United States has responded to these allegations by sanctioning Maduro but this had relatively no effect on Maduro’s behavior. Realizing this fact, the U.S. turned their attention towards aid that benefits Venezuela refugees.

Refugee Crisis in Venezuela

Hopes for change internally seem bleak and have pushed over two million refugees into surrounding countries. At first, refugees are going to neighboring Ecuador, Peru and Columbia, countries that have been very welcoming in the past. Recently, however, the sheer number of migrants leaving Venezuela has forced its neighbors to take more aggressive policies.

Ecuador began blocking entry to refugees fleeing Venezuela with no passports. This policy came after the country declared a state of emergency due to the crisis. Peru and Columbia also announced their plan to adopt a similar policy and to deport migrants that are already within the country but without proper documentation. The policies of both the Government of Venezuela and its neighbors have trapped Venezuelan migrants in makeshift towns along the border, with limited resources. Most Venezuelan migrants sold their possessions in order to leave their country and have little to nothing in these towns.

The Aid of United States to Venezuela

Fortunately, the United States has played an instrumental role in providing aid that benefits refugees from Venezuela. The U.S had already provided $16 million in aid for the refugees through the United Nations Refugee Agency and another $6 million to help Columbia deal with their influx of refugees.

This money helped establish the infrastructure that is maintaining abovementioned makeshift towns and providing necessary health care for millions of people. Recently, the United States sent a life-saving resource to the shores of Columbia. Secretary of Defence, Jim Mattis, is sending a U.S. Navy Hospital Ship to help treat refugees in Colombia and surrounding Latin American countries. Hospital ships provide surgical care from some of the top military physicians in the world. They are protected by international law and help ease the burden on domestic medical institutions, which could influence many of these Latin American countries to take more beneficial positions towards refugees.

U.S. aid for refugees has a ripple effect on the countries that are hosting them because they have more resources at their disposal. This could change their policies in a meaningful way and end this migration process in the most positive way positive.

– Anand Tayal

Photo: Flickr

Crisis Zone: 10 Facts about Living Conditions in Venezuela

The situation in Venezuela, sparked by political turmoil and hyperinflation, has denigrated into a dire case of global poverty. Despite its former status as one of the richest countries in South America and its access to the largest oil rig in the world, Venezuela’s economy has sparked both a humanitarian crisis and a refugee crisis within South America. Here are the top 10 facts about living conditions in Venezuela:

Food Scarcity & Weight loss

According to a study by three universities in Venezuela, 74.3 percent of the population lost an average of 19 pounds of weight in 2015, and around 9.6 million Venezuelans ate two or fewer meals a day.

Due to past government subsidies of oil production, the people of Venezuela have historically relied heavily on imports of even basic necessities rather than domestic production.

Now that Venezuela’s borders have been closed and its currency devalued, imported resources within Venezuela have become increasingly scarce, making food prices rise significantly.

Population and Inflation

Approximately 81 percent of Venezuela’s 31.5 million people are now considered to be living in income poverty, while over 50 percent are estimated to be living in extreme poverty.

Additionally, the IMF predicts that inflation will reach 13,000 percent in the coming year, making it the biggest recession in the history of the Western Hemisphere — twice as large as the Great Depression.

Education Decline

For a country that once boasted free education for all students under Hugo Chavez’s socialist regime, the education structure in Venezuela is crumbling under the current economic crisis. Many schools in Venezuela have closed or are operating at limited capacity.

Such conditions are due to insufficient salaries for school teachers who are working for just over a dollar a month, as well as lack of school lunches as the government has run out of funds for the state-run program that provided children with free lunch. An increasing number of children have stopped going to school because, without food, they may faint in class.

Of 8 million school children, approximately 3 million students have stopped attending some or all classes. Education professionals within Venezuela fear for a future of uneducated and unskilled workers if this trend continues too long.

Lack of Hygiene

As most families have been scraping by just to put food on the table, those receiving the minimum wage face a choice every time they receive their paycheck: food or hygiene? According to Jonathan Marquez, a security guard and now also a taxi driver, he always picks food, adding water to the little bit of shampoo that he has left to make soap.

Additionally, one reporter from Venezuela spent 86 percent of the monthly minimum wage on eight rolls of toilet paper, after failing to find it in any stores for a whole week.

Businesses Cannot Operate

Number five of the top 10 facts about living conditions in Venezuela is that lack of resources for the individual means lack of resources for small businesses as well. The economic emergency in Venezuela has led to declining business within Venezuela, resulting in layoffs and even many business shut-downs.

Hairdressers only have running water two days a week and hair products are scarce to find; bakers have no flour to make bread; restaurant owners have no customers to cook for and very little pasta to cook.

Lack of Medicine

The medical profession is suffering as well. While doctors can still prescribe medicine, there is hardly any medicine to supply to their patients as the country endures an estimated 85 percent shortage of medicine, according to the Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela. Chronic diseases like kidney disease or diabetes are not being treated due to this limited supply of medicine, which leads to serious health risks.

A box of ten pills for high blood pressure can be more than a retiree’s monthly pension. Even highly preventable and curable diseases can now develop into life-threatening illnesses from the lack of antibiotics and proper treatment.

Water and Electricity Shortages

Drought from the Guri Dam has sparked a country-wide rationing of water and electricity. The hydroelectric plants in the reservoir contribute to 70 percent of the nation’s electricity supply.

While a standardized 4 hour outage was enacted daily, residents have noted that some days there is no electricity for up to 14 hours. In efforts to conserve electricity, Maduro has cut public sector work weeks to two days per week.

Concerning water rationing, faucets only run once or twice a week for most people; however, in harder-to-reach places like Margarita Island, water is only supplied once every 21 days.

Violence and Protests

Street protests and looting have become almost commonplace in Venezuela as people continue to lose faith in their government. In three months, 111 protests were recorded in Sucre — one of Venezuela’s 23 states — as reported by Indice, a human rights group monitoring the protests.

Reporters have noted 5 or 6 protests per week, all demanding basic necessities and fighting through tear gas and rubber bullets to get it.

The South American Refugee Crisis

To escape the turmoil within Venezuela, there has been a mass exodus into neighboring countries, particularly Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile. The UNHCR estimates that nearly 5000 people escape from Venezuela each day, totaling 2.3 million migrants from Venezuela since 2015.

While South American border policies have eased the refugee migration process for many Venezuelan people, neighboring countries are not equipped with the facilities and resources to host refugees in the capacity at which they’re arriving.

Aid and Access

Government restrictions under President Maduro have rejected humanitarian aid by obstructing shipments, particularly targeting medicine, but that does not mean that there is nothing that can be done. Church groups and non-profit organizations like Sanando and the Cuatro Por Venezuela Foundation are doing their best to provide aid to the people of Venezuela.

Cuatro Por Venezuela began in 2016 when four Venezuelan women living in the U.S. decided to deliver relief to their country. They have since provided over 50,000 food servings per year and attended to over 17,000 medical patients. Neighboring countries, such as Colombia, have also been immensely helpful to Venezuelan refugees by providing food and shelter for hundreds of thousands of people.

While the U.S. is still pressing sanctions on President Maduro, Mike Pence has promised $48 million to support regional partners that are taking on the brunt of this crisis.

Giving Hand, Willing Heart

The humanitarian readiness to help is inspiring; however, the onus remains on Nicolas Maduro and the Venezuelan government to open its borders to aid and imports to ensure the safety and health of their people.

The U.S. government and the world is ready to help alleviate the situation in Venezuela. The hope is that these top 10 facts about living conditions in Venezuela will have significantly changed by next year.

– Sara Andresen
Photo: Flickr

The Venezuelan Crisis and Human Trafficking

Venezuela is currently in the midst of a humanitarian aid crisis spanning nearly ten years. As a developing country in South America, Venezuela has rich natural resources but suffers from an often harsh government that has not been cooperative with foreign NGOs in the past. Though NGOs operating in and outside of Venezuela are key to solving serious dilemmas in the areas of health, human trafficking, and education, the important thing in solving the crisis is an improvement of the strained relationship between the country’s government and foreign input.

The Crisis

The Venezuelan Crisis began in 2010 under the presidency of Hugo Chavez and has continued into the second six-year-term of current president Nicolas Maduro. The Venezuelan crisis has its roots in the country’s rich oil reserves, which under encouragement from Chavez (1999-2013), composed the majority of Venezuela’s earnings from exported goods.

Social programs were created with the influx of oil money, but when oil prices dropped in 2014 these programs were scaled back, and many Venezuelans began to struggle. Inflation has continued to rise steadily since 2012 and currently, Venezuela has the highest rate of inflation globally at 18,000% as of April 2018.

The political landscape of Venezuela has been tumultuous, yet ironically rigid in the transfer of power from Chavez to Maduro. Being hand-selected by Chavez to succeed him before his own passing, Maduro’s leadership has been marked with rumors of corruption, election fraud, and instances of police brutality against protestors and the unlawful imprisonment of political rivals.

As the government continues to deny foreign aid and refuses to allow foreign companies to invest in resident NGOs, the situation is becoming a humanitarian crisis worsened by the inability of aid organizations to alleviate the suffering of Venezuelan citizens. Despite these setbacks, multiple agencies are working hard to help the people living in Venezuela.

Due to extreme poverty caused by the Crisis, many Venezuelans are left vulnerable to human trafficking, an issue running rampant in this region of Central America. Those abducted are usually women and children, though men are taken as well. In often cases, the victims have moved from a rural area to an urban location, lured by the promise of higher earnings.

The Venezuelan government has done very little to eliminate this serious issue. The U.S. Department of Labor noted in 2017 that the Venezuelan government did not report any data whatsoever on human trafficking, and did little in the past year to combat the issue besides the arrest of seven individuals involved in human smuggling.

Venezuelans also face police brutality, lack of hospitals and medicine, and a nationwide shortage of food and clean water. As thousands of refugees pour out of the country, foreign NGOs are becoming more desperate to help. Some NGOs have banded together in order to fight the Crisis.

Strength in Numbers

The most significant humanitarian cooperative spearheading foreign relief efforts in Venezuela is Cuatro Por Venezuela, a Houston-based collective of 12 NGOs working together to fight the humanitarian aid crisis. The collective utilizes the resources of a vast web of partners and NGOs operating in Texas, Florida, and Chile.

By utilizing volunteers to deliver food, medicine, and other supplies, Cuatro Por Venezuela is able to work with NGOs in Venezuela to help them assist those in need. Though unable to fund resident NGOs, Cuatro Por Venezuela can still provide supplies and volunteers to Venezuela’s own humanitarian operations.  Cuatro Por Venezuela assisted nearly 100 humanitarian organizations and medical facilities for 14 states across the nation.

Though Venezuela’s government seems likely to deny foreign aid for the foreseeable future, the Venezuelan Crisis can still be alleviated by the collective efforts of NGOs in and outside this central American nation. Cuatro Por Venezuela represents the beneficial results produced when cooperation occurs between humanitarian groups.

– Jason Crosby
Photo: Flickr

President Manipulates Hunger Crisis In Venezuela

On May 20^th the current President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, was re-elected for a second term in office amid a highly controversial election; in fact, one of the largest controversies was food. The country currently experiences one of the worst economic crises in recent history.

Hunger in Venezuela

Soaring prices and mass shortages of basic goods have left grocery shelves empty and most of the country hungry. According to surveys done by Caritas Venezuela, the Catholic church’s aid agency, 46 percent of Venezuelan’s eat less than three meals a day and 14.5 percent of children under five suffer from acute malnutrition.

Rather than finding solutions to fix the hunger crisis in Venezuela, Maduro exploited it to secure votes in the election alongside a multitude of other autocratic measures. While this creates a dismal outlook for the state, there are still many within the country working to alleviate this issue for everyone.

Coercive Elections

The dependency on the despondent economic conditions caused many people to rely on government-subsidized groceries to survive. In order to receive these subsidies, recipients must present a special identity card to local councils loyal to Maduro that hand them out. They were also told they must also present this card on election day at polling stations run by Maduro’s party as a check to see who has voted.

At campaign rallies Maduro made the expectation behind this measure quite explicit: “Everyone who has this card must vote…I give and you give.” This falls in place alongside the refusal of the government to accept humanitarian aid to amend the hunger crisis in Venezuela— with some political analysts suspecting this move as a way for Maduro to maintain control over the population.

Standing Strong

However, many did not give into this manipulation. Around the country, voter turnout was extremely low, at 46 percent compared to an 80 percent turnout rate in the 2013 election. This trend reflects both a call for the boycott of the election from opposition leaders alongside overall apathy in the electoral process.

Many more have fled in the wake of the election results, on top of the 1.5 million that have left since the economic crisis began in 2014. Besides refusing to recognize the election results, the United States is working to support those that have fled through earmarking an aggregate $16 million over 2018 in funding towards countries in Latin American and the Caribbean that have supported the influx of Venezuelan refugees.

Cooperatives of Social Services of Lara State

The efforts of those remaining within the country, such as the Cooperatives of Social Services of Lara State (CECOSESOLA), illuminate who is truly giving to Venezuela’s development. Originally founded in 1967, CECOSESOLA today is a non-hierarchical network of over 50 cooperatives and grassroots organizations of about 20,000 members in the Venezuelan state of Lara.

The collaboration offers a range of important amenities such as healthcare, community-backed loans, funeral services and an alternate supply chain for food. Its food distribution service in particular extends to five states within the country and offers savings of 30-50 percent compared to market value of most goods.

CECOSESOLA have stepped up even further in response to the current hunger crisis in Venezuela. In 2014, the group would see 40,000 people at their weekly Family Consumer Fairs; today, that number has increased to 150,000. Accordingly, CECOSESOLA has worked to increase the number of perishable products they distribute weekly from 500 to 800 tons. In order to meet such demand, over 300 cooperative workers (in total) facilitate these fairs Thursday-Sunday, with days sometimes as long as 14 hours.

Forces of Change

The moving force behind CECOSESOLA’s dedicated efforts to the public are illuminated by interviews conducted between 2012 and 2013 of Gustavo Salas, a CECOSESOLA member of over 40 years and active food market participant: “We cannot treat our counterparts like things that we want to profit from. We must perceive the entire person. In order to do that, we need transparency, honesty, and responsibility. They are the basis for trust, and that is fundamental. Because trust is the foundation for what we call ‘collective energy.’…That is why we say that our process is limitless. We show that is it possible to relate to other people in a different way.”

CECOSESOLA holding together against all odds makes the process truly seem limitless. Between the devastation from the economic crisis, the government’s refusal to accept outside aid, and the most recent election fiasco is setting Venezuela down a trajectory towards becoming a failed state.

The success of CECOSESOLA demonstrates that perhaps the country is not as close to complete economic and social collapse at the grasp of Maduro’s unchecked self-indulgence as it may seem. It’s paving another road where it is indeed “possible to relate to other people in a different way.” The small victories of collective self-sufficiency are combating the hunger crisis in Venezuela and putting the country back into the hands of its people.

– Emily Bender
Photo: Flickr

International Efforts to Address the Venezuela Refugee Crisis

Currently, the world remains in the midst of the most calamitous refugee crisis since the ending of the Second World War in 1945. Owing to the escalating long term economic crisis in Venezuela, there has been a lesser known but equally grave humanitarian emergency plaguing Latin America countries.

Consequently, the Venezuela refugee crisis is contributing to a great deal of destabilization in the region and is putting insurmountable pressures on food security, education, healthcare, and land. However, at present, international aid seems to be more majorly directed toward addressing important issues of the Syrian and Rohingya crisis.

The dictatorial nature of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro’s government is largely blamed for the debilitating state of the Venezuelan economy, especially with the rise in government debt, plunge in oil prices and the 2600 percent inflation rate that hit the country in the 2017. The illiberal policies of the government have been criticized for the financial mismanagement, economic misallocation, and political turmoil impacting the country.

Moreover, the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, is vulnerable to the threat of becoming the breeding ground for an increase in trafficking and organized crime owing to the recent succession of violent clashes and demonstrations.

Due to the Venezuela refugee crisis, over 10 percent of the population has already left the country, with a large number fleeing to neighboring countries like Colombia and Brazil. In turn, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has had to block informal refugee routes and deploy troops to stem the rapid influx of refugees. 600,000 individuals have been displaced, and a record number of individuals are crossing the border every day. A further 60,000 people are also currently seeking asylum in the United States.

According to a recent report by The Hill, the Venezuela refugee crisis could grow to be more severe than the Syrian crisis this year.

At this juncture, it is necessary to mitigate the short term problems of the Venezuela refugee crisis. In 2017, the Red Cross set up a reception facility next to the Simon Bolivar Bridge, an important landmark in the Colombia- Venezuela border, to help contain the massive influx of refugees. A number of first aid tents were also set up to prevent the further spread of chronic diseases in the area. Many Venezuelans are also subscribing to the migration card which enables them to cross the border to get daily rations of food, water, and other important necessities.

Additionally, the EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid pledged that the EU would be allocating 3 million euros toward helping Venezuela, and a further 6 million euros toward assisting Colombia cope with the problem.

A majority of the aid and cooperation is being spearheaded by neighboring countries like Colombia and Brazil. Given the scale of the problem, a regional approach is of vital importance.

Colombia is trying to work in collaboration with the Venezuelan government to deal with the surge in the number of refugees sustainably. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos recently declared that the country is prepared to receive international humanitarian assistance in dealing with the Venezuela refugee crisis. He also proposed that an estimate $30 million would be needed to build an assistance center to house refugees

Hopefully, over the course of the year, international organizations like the Inter- American Development Bank, and the World Bank will amplify efforts in providing more financial aid to sufficiently mitigate the crisis.

Overall, the Venezuela refugee crisis is significant as it addresses the wider context of the political and social ramifications entailed by the refugee debacles in countries like Syria, Lake Chad, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. Solutions are primarily embedded in solving the impacts of mass migration and its associated issues in a more sustainable manner suited to the sheer gamut of the problem.

– Shivani Ekkanath

Photo: Wikimedia Commons