A Bridge to Venezuela | The New Yorker
After the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, net emigration from Venezuela began to increase. At first it was a relative trickle. The people who were leaving were, by and large, the wealthy, the business class, those who wanted to protect their investments and properties. Then, as economic prospects deteriorated, along came the middle class, seeking better opportunities, and many of those who left for Colombia could be more accurately described as returnees: the children and grandchildren of Colombians who had emigrated a generation or two earlier, now claiming their citizenship to start anew. These two groups included dissidents, victims of ever-increasing repression. Each disappointing election lost by the opposition (or, more recently, stolen by Maduro) has pushed those who no longer believed in the possibility of change to leave.
Yet no one was really prepared for 2017, when hyperinflation in Venezuela made daily life unbearable. That year the official inflation rate was eight hundred and sixty-three percent; the following year it increased further, to an astonishing annual rate of over one hundred and thirty thousand percent. Faced with this untenable situation, ordinary people across the country simply collected their belongings and began walking, eventually crossing the Simón Bolívar Bridge to Cúcuta, then heading further into Colombia and beyond. What was initially a local concern for Cúcuta – which woke up to streets and paths lined with refugees – quickly became a national, then regional, crisis. It was unprecedented, and if you talk to Cucuteños today, many still shudder when remembering those scenes. Mention the caminantesthe walkers and everyone here knows what you’re talking about.
Keila Vilchez, a Venezuelan journalist who writes for Cúcuta’s main newspaper, The opiniontold me that these people weren’t migrating as much as they were fleeing. “That’s all you can call it,” she said. “Because anyone who decides to walk twenty days, thirty days, forty days to leave their country does so because there is no hope.” The walkers Vilchez encountered in those days while reporting from Cúcuta and on the roads of Colombia’s Norte de Santander state were mostly headed to Bogotá, or to the coast, or to Colombia’s coffee region, after hearing rumors that there might be work there. They took their entire lives with them, rolling their bulging suitcases along the roadsides, children in their arms. They wore sandals or were barefoot. They were desperate: no papers, no money, perhaps the phone number of a relative or an address somewhere in Bogota. Unprepared for the altitude or the elements, many died along the way. In 2018 alone, more than 1.3 million Venezuelans left the country. “As a Venezuelan, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I was,” Vilchez said.
In total, more than seven million Venezuelans, or around twenty percent of the population, have left since 2015. It is no exaggeration to say that this unprecedented exodus has affected all countries in the region: diplomatic tensions, testing of social safety nets, triggering xenophobic reactions, polarization of public opinion and political transformation. The humanitarian emergency has arguably also transformed the political debate over immigration in the United States. How many Americans had heard of Tren de Aragua before it became shorthand for the type of immigrants Trump promised to deport en masse? I was living in New York when Republican governors started sending busloads of migrants to blue-state cities like mine. In the winter of 2022-2023, I volunteered to meet new arrivals at the Port Authority, most of whom were Venezuelans. They were young men and women, families; I remember them as dazed, perplexed, and excited, barely able to believe they were in midtown Manhattan. They needed winter coats, hats, underwear and shoelaces. And much more: a place to rest, a job, a school for their children. Many had crossed the Simón Bolívar Bridge, and all one could do was welcome them and be in awe of how far they had come, each journey a miracle of sorts.
One morning in Cúcuta, I drove to Las Delicias, a neighborhood of about four hundred families on the outskirts of the city, where dirt roads wind along green hills, turning to mud in the rain, and where more than half the residents are Venezuelan. There had been gunfire the previous afternoon, killing two young men on a motorcycle, one of whom was shot in the back and died. The other remained hospitalized. Neither elicited much sympathy from the residents I spoke to; they were thieves, or so they said, and life was too difficult to spend much time pitying criminals. Las Delicias officially became part of Cúcuta in 2015, a bureaucratic change that many hoped would bring much-needed services and infrastructure improvements to the neighborhood, but little has yet come to fruition.
