2023-05-17 16:14:32
A resident of San Félix left his job in the mines due to the violence.
As the sun rose, Miguel González, his partner Maryelis Rodríguez and their four young children got off a passenger bus after an 18-hour journey south from the eastern Venezuelan community they desperately wanted to leave.
The parents, their minds still dazed from sleep, grabbed two duffel bags and assessed the needs before entering the station: Diaper change for the 1-year-old. Bathroom for children of 2, 4 and 6 years. Directions to get to Brazil.
“Cab? Taxi?” The taxi drivers asked all those who passed through the Santa Elena de Uairén station, where thousands of people each month walk for the last time through Venezuelan territory.
Half an hour later, the González family, like dozens of others every day, became international migrants for the first time when they stepped out of a taxi in Pacaraima, Brazil.
Brazil has become a popular choice for many Venezuelans in part because of a five-year program that offers eligible applicants work permits and even free flights to faraway parts of the huge country.
Approvals for the program have skyrocketed in the post-pandemic period.
“I want to provide well-being for my children,” said González, who began her plans to migrate in October after witnessing violent clashes near the gold mine where she worked.
“It’s not life” that I have in Venezuela, he commented, because if the family stays there, the children “will not study, they will not have a future.”
The González family applied for Brazil’s “internment” program, launched in 2018 to ease pressure on the country’s far-northern state of Roraima when it dealt with Venezuelans crossing the border after the pandemic escalated. shortage of food and medicine in the country.
The program moves migrants to other cities with better economic opportunities, especially in the wealthy southern states of the country.
It has welcomed some 100,000 of the 426,000 Venezuelans who have migrated to Brazil during the crisis, and the highest monthly rate so far was registered in March of this year: with 3,377.
I worked in the mines
The González family sold their refrigerator, fan, stove, bed and other furniture, packed clothes and diapers into duffel bags and backpacks, and began their journey from their community of San Félix with $500.
They spent $90 to get to Santa Elena de Uairén and $20 to get to Pacaraima, where they applied for the program.
They decided to migrate despite the fact that González had one of the most lucrative jobs in Venezuela and earned around $600 biweekly, and occasionally as much as $1,200, much more than the country’s minimum wage of about $5 a month.
But mining communities are dangerous because of armed groups believed to be colluding with the authorities.
“There are a lot of delinquency. You are and you are not. Do you understand me?” González said.
Those who are accepted into the hospitalization program receive documentation, temporary accommodation, vaccinations and relocation flights. It also offers training on the labor market, laws and rights in Brazil.
Brazil’s monthly minimum wage is currently $265. A survey of 800 households of 3,529 Venezuelans living in Brazil carried out in June and July of last year showed that 76% of them earned up to two minimum wages.
Applicants must submit documentation and undergo a physical examination and interviews.
Another family
On a morning in early April, María Rodríguez, her father, husband, daughter, two sons, twin grandsons and four other relatives were among hundreds of people at the Pacaraima border crossing, following in the program’s footsteps.
He laughed with a grandson with a lot of energy, but his eyes betrayed tiredness.
At dawn, migrants form lines where they wait to obtain or provide information.
They celebrate when they or their new migrant friends are told they can board waiting passenger buses to head about 200 kilometers south to Boa Vista, where they will catch flights to their new communities.
Rodríguez’s group had already waited six weeks in Pacaraima. She had taken shelter from the scorching sun under a makeshift tent and spent the nights in a shelter.
The family closed their unprofitable cheese-making business in Venezuela this year and decided to join other relatives in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, where the men plan to work in construction.
Rodríguez said that another of his children who already lives there has done well in a very short time.
“His children are studying in a good school and I am seeing my other children… struggling to support themselves,” said Rodríguez, 45, as he waited for the portable toilets to be cleaned for the day.
“A big one, even if it is with an arepa all day, but with those babies, how do you tell a child that there is no food?” he said.
Elsewhere in the hemisphere, Venezuelans are making their second or even third migration as economic opportunities in the initial host countries dry up.
Most of those who cross the border into Brazil are migrating for the first time, said the Rev. Agnaldo Pereira de Oliveira, director of the Jesuit Service for Migrants and Refugees in Brazil.
“These are people who have put up with it until now and no longer (could),” added Pereira de Oliveira. “Now come the last ones who resisted in Venezuela out of attachment to their business, to their home. ‘I have a job here, but the living conditions here don’t exist’”.
crowded cities
Brazil’s internment program took shape after a period of tensions in the mid-to-late 2010s, when arriving Venezuelans overwhelmed public services in Roraima, which includes both Pacaraima and Boa Vista.
At one point, a man set fire to two residences where Venezuelans lived, injuring five people.
Southern Brazilian states like Paraná are not without their challenges for Venezuelans. There they must face much colder weather than they are used to, and their lack of fluency in the Portuguese language can sometimes be a barrier to formal jobs, meaning some of them become street vendors or Uber drivers.
In Boa Vista, shelters have been available for a long time, but many adults and children sleep on the sidewalks or outside a bus station. Some find the shelters overcrowded and too hot. Others don’t feel safe or don’t like the mandatory early awakening.
On the western bank of the Branco River, next to Boa Vista, members of the Figuera family cook, wash clothes, splash in the water or rest under the shade of the trees. His hair is sprinkled with sand.
Kisberlín Figuera, 11, her father, stepmother and little sister are in their second attempt to legally move to Paraná. They gave up her first attempt to have the baby born near her extended family in Carúpano, Venezuela.
Kisberlín has learned some Portuguese and has made friends with other migrant girls. They joke and play tag or cards near where they sleep outside the bus station.
She said she misses her family, but the access to water in Boa Vista — in public toilets near the beach — is better than she had at home.
Sitting by the river, she imagined Paraná with “too many parks, a lot of food, a lot of money, a lot of water to bathe, to drink.”
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