Latin America Gets Its Own Migrant Crisis
Four months ago, 22-year-old Lusiana Garcia, a mother of two pregnant with her third child, escaped an abusive relationship and an incompetent dictatorship. She boarded a bus in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city, to travel 18 hours to Cucuta, a town about 480 miles away and across the border in Colombia. “I only had money for one ticket,” she told me on the phone through an interpreter. “So I had to carry my children the whole way.”
Garcia and 2.3-million Venezuelans like her have left their country thanks largely to the gross mismanagement of what was once Latin America’s richest nation. The inept dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro has unleashed a crisis that could rival the European migrant crisis of 2015. Like that crisis, this one may well alter the political dynamics of Latin America and usher the kind of toxicity the region has so far largely avoided.
Several Latin-American countries have for the increased flow. Last month, Brazil sent troops to the border to maintain order after Brazilian residents attacked Venezuelan migrants, and Peru declared health emergencies in two provinces where migrants spreading measles and malaria. Maduro has for waging an “economic war” on his country, and insisted the estimated numbers of those leaving aren’t atypical.
