Covid-19 forced tens of thousands of Venezuelans to return home. But crossing the border is not an easy task

Cúcuta (CNN) - The collapse of the Venezuelan economy drove them away. Now the coronavirus is sending them back home.

Since at least 2016, nearly 5 million Venezuelans have fled their country, according to the UN Refugee Agency, fleeing poverty and deteriorating health and social services. But as the coronavirus pandemic closes Latin American economies, many Venezuelans are forced to return to their homes, if their government allows it.

Entering Venezuela in times of coronavirus is not an easy task. Venezuela's embattled president, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed that returning migrants could be deliberately infected by other countries to spread the virus in Venezuela. His government has limited the number of Venezuelans allowed to enter their own country to approximately 1,000 per week.

According to Venezuelan authorities, at least 56,000 Venezuelans returned between March and mid-June. Colombian authorities monitoring border crossings believe that at least 60,000 Venezuelan migrants have returned to the country through the Colombian city of Cúcuta since March alone. They hope that tens of thousands more will try to return in the coming weeks.

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Why are they coming back?

Cúcuta, where three bridges cross the border between Colombia and Venezuela, is the main transit point for many. "It is like a giant hourglass," said Víctor Bautista, migration secretary of the Norte de Santander Department of Colombia, where Cúcuta is located.

"During the last five years we have seen more than 3 million Venezuelans walking around here, all looking for a way out and better opportunities," he said. "And now he turned to Venezuela."

Pedro Roque traveled, often on foot, the more than 3,300 kilometers from Lima, Peru, to the border crossing at Cúcuta. He had lost his job working at a chicken restaurant, he said, due to covid-19. Without a salary, he could no longer pay the rent and decided to go home.

In Peru, average work hours have fallen to 80% in the area around the capital Lima since the start of the pandemic, according to the International Labor Organization.

And the entire Latin American region has seen a nearly threefold increase in the number of people requiring food assistance, according to data from the UN World Food Program.

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As countries with large populations of Venezuelan immigrants such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia adopted strict blocking measures to contain the virus, Venezuelan migrants were left with few options. Most of the immigrants CNN spoke to for this story said they worked in the informal economy with no welfare support to rely on during the shutdown.

In Cúcuta, Roque sleeps under an awning with three other people while waiting for his turn to cross the border. Social distancing is not a priority, he said. "Covid is a respiratory disease, right? If someone walked 35, 40 kilometers a day to come here, for weeks, they have no covid. A sick person would not have survived what we went through, ”he said when asked why he was not wearing a mask.

Makeshift camps where people wait to cross the border do not allow for social distancing. There are no toilets or running water here, and the largest camp consists of cardboard shelters and black garbage bags under which about 1,300 Venezuelans wait their turn to return home.

Colombian authorities say they do not know exactly how many people live in the field. Every time a group leaves, new immigrants take their place.

Waiting for the call home

Few would call Venezuela the ideal place to wait for a pandemic.

Ninety-six percent of the population lives below the poverty line according to a recent independent survey by three leading universities in Caracas. As CNN previously reported, most hospitals in Venezuela lack running water for days, doctors and patients cannot receive the medications they need, and thousands of health workers have left the country in search of better opportunities abroad. .

But people need support and community in times of crisis. An international humanitarian worker who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media said that Venezuelan migrants who had not built support networks in a new adopted country were more likely to return to Venezuela.

"If I have to starve, I want to starve in my own place, with my family," said Roque, the restaurant worker.

This call from home seemed to have nullified any doubts about the risk of spreading the virus. Like Roque, some migrants waiting in Cúcuta told CNN that they believed they had demonstrated their health after surviving the long journey to get there. Others simply said they had greater challenges to overcome than the virus.

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However, to control the spread of the virus, Colombian authorities give a color-coded bracelet to most migrants seeking to enter Venezuela when they arrive in Cúcuta. Roque was red.

Every day, a group wearing a different colored armband must board the buses, which take them to a coronavirus detection facility managed by the Norte de Santander department, where they are isolated and can be screened. coronavirus if they don't feel well. The temperature of each migrant is taken several times a day; if someone has a fever, they are tested for polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Without fever or a negative PCR test, they are allowed to cross the border, provided Venezuelan authorities approve. This agreement between the two countries is informal; neither government recognizes the other and, in theory, the border is closed.

Migrants must be isolated again once they arrive in Venezuela, for a minimum of 12 days before they are allowed to travel home. Maduro's government has created isolation centers in cities near the border, where immigrants must remain.

Only 350 Venezuelans can return to the country on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, for an official total of 1,050 per week, a number that reflects Venezuela's limited ability to quarantine citizens upon arrival, the Venezuelan border authority told CNN. . However, CNN has also witnessed migrants crossing the border on Tuesday, and Colombian authorities say the border is sometimes reopened on short notice.

Maduro's government has said that the rights of citizens to enter their own country are respected, and that the slow pace of admission is necessary to protect the rest of the Venezuelan population from the virus.

The future

On the Colombian side, authorities are already concerned about when the hourglass will tip over once again, and Venezuela's difficulties will again force migrants to leave.

"If these people do not find any form of survival in Venezuela, they could well try to return to the same places where they stayed for the last three years, as in a giant migratory swing where they spend some time in Venezuela and some again abroad" Bautista, secretary of the department's Migration Department, told CNN.

For some, the change has already begun: Adrián López and his family of five are walking back to Bogotá, where Adrián worked in the informal economy.

They had left the Colombian capital in March after the blockade was imposed, and arrived in Cúcuta in early April after a 595-kilometer walk. But in the chaos of their arrival, they never managed to enroll in one of the color-coded groups to analyze the virus. After two months in the migrant camp next to the border, they stopped returning to Venezuela.

"I was starving to death there (in the camp)," Adrian said. “My son is three months old and was born here, he is a Colombian citizen. They can't kick us out. At least in Bogotá, I know the place and will try to find a job, somehow. ”