The first night after being left homeless, due to non-payment of their room and after wandering through a couple of municipal shelters, the Peña Mora family stood at the door of the SAMUR social until 10:00 p.m.
They needed a place to take shelter, the thermometer was touching five degrees and counting.
Marisela Mora (Venezuela, 38 years old) began to despair: “The children were shivering from the cold, they were crying and I didn't have blankets,” says this mother of three children, who confesses that her “heart broke” when she saw so to the kids.
A SAMUR employee warned them of the lack of places.
She suggested they go to the airport, where dozens of homeless people take shelter every night, or to a nearby hospital.
They chose the second.
They went to La Paz.
“We stayed to the side, as if we were going to an emergency, almost hidden so that they wouldn't take us out,” describes the mother.
They spent Wednesday night sitting in the waiting room and on Thursday they got up at sunrise to take the children to the school they attend in the north of Madrid.
Since they arrived in the capital, in November 2023, they have tried to request asylum daily.
Being from Venezuela, a country mired in an economic and social debacle, they have a very high reception rate for humanitarian reasons, but the system is collapsed, there are no appointments and they have not even managed to present the documentation.
Spain received 163,000 applications in 2023, the highest number on record and a third more than in 2022. The City Council complains of the overflow of emergency services due to the traffic jam of asylum seekers waiting in limbo for someone to answer the phone to give them an appointment.
The family arrived in Spain on November 29, 2023 with the hope of finding “a job and looking for a better future.”
It took days for the mirage to disappear.
“We didn't know that it was so difficult to get an appointment at the asylum to start working,” confesses Mora, who calls constantly looking for an appointment.
He spends the day going from one place to another, looking for a room for his family, always with the phone on speaker in his jacket pocket, on calls with the Asylum Office and some police stations that can last several minutes.
Nobody answers.
She phones until 8:00 p.m., even when she knows that business hours end an hour earlier.
This impotence is well known by hundreds of migrants from all over the world who, tired of waiting for a response on the other side of the line, have presented their complaints this Tuesday to the Ombudsman, supported by twenty NGOs, to denounce the impossibility to start the process.
―which by law should be carried out within a maximum period of one month from arrival in Spain―.
Hundreds of migrants seeking asylum file an appeal with the Ombudsman due to the lack of appointments to begin the process.Álvaro García
The Ministry of the Interior affirms that they have increased the workforce from 60 to 300 officials due to the overwhelming growth in applications: 163,218 in 2023, the highest number recorded - although only 12 out of every 100 registrations were resolved in favor of the applicants.
The situation has worsened with the change in the shift system for applying for asylum.
Under the argument of preventing
hackers
from hoarding appointments to resell them, the Government gave each police station the power to choose how to manage the procedures, either by email or by phone, but the staff has not been able to cope.
The Ministry does not contemplate more measures to expedite the asylum processing, they have pointed out to EL PAÍS.
Without solutions from the Executive, the City Council maintains that it does not want to pay the price for a problem that it considers does not correspond to it.
The City Council has expressed in writing: "If the central government does not drain, the City Council loses its capacity to admit new people."
It states that its shelters are at 100% occupancy.
“This municipal attention, which should be temporary, is becoming prolonged and chronic over time,” they write from Cibeles, where they estimate the average stay of migrants in temporary shelters at 48 days.
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The chronology of Venezuela's collapse can be told through the story of the Peña Mora family.
In 2011 they had their eldest son, Ferdinand Santiago Peña Mora, 12 years old - for whom the most overwhelming thing about the current pilgrimage in search of shelter is not doing his schoolwork.
At that time the shortage barely reared its head, but two years later, when 10-year-old David Fernando Peña was born, Mora remembers that “it was already an odyssey to get diapers and milk.”
Her youngest, Diana Marisela Peña, 8 years old, saw the world when the crisis showed its fiercest side.
Her mother “improvised diapers with plastic bags and cloths, she couldn't get milk and they sold sugar by the spoonful.”
The father, who arrived in Venezuela in 1992 after fleeing the guerrillas in Colombia, was a police officer in the city of Barinas, before dedicating himself to construction, which he learned from his father.
Until materials became scarce and the industry came to a standstill.
Cornered by loss of purchasing power, they began to consider the idea of migrating to Spain, always dissuaded by the fear of what could go wrong, “mainly because of the children,” both parents repeat.
One day they put the house that Peña had built with his own hands up for sale.
“If we sell it, we'll leave,” they thought.
Months later, they received $7,000 for their life estate.
It was enough to buy the tickets to Spain and to save a thousand euros for the first days.
Little more.
I can't afford to get the passports – which in Venezuela are very expensive and difficult to process.
So Ferdinand crossed the border with his children to get the travel document in Colombia.
Finally, they left Barinas, a small town on the plains of the Santo Domingo River, where Ferdinand and Marisela had met almost 20 years earlier, while he patrolled the neighborhood where she lived.
The Peña Mora family has been trying to get an appointment to process asylum since November 2023.Juan José Martínez
The Spanish State processes 99% of asylum requests from Venezuelan citizens favorably, mainly for humanitarian reasons, through which 40,574 Venezuelans obtained State protection in 2023, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
Such a degree of acceptance is only comparable with countries like Ukraine, with 100% of applications approved, or with African countries in crisis, such as Mali and Sudan, with rates above 90%.
Ferdinand seems aware of this because he constantly repeats: “We just need an appointment to request asylum.”
The rest, they want to earn by working.
With the white card, granted to asylum seekers whose processing is in process, this family could aspire to a job in six months and, in the meantime, help from organizations such as the Red Cross to alleviate their housing situation.
But without that document, they can only appeal to the City Council's emergency services or NGO shelters, only available for days.
“This situation is horrible.
I worry about my children, seeing them from one place to another, stressed, crying.
The oldest told me that he had homework to do.
It is horrible to send them to school like this,” Mora laments.
Ferdinand has tried to get money in Plaza Elíptica—that cosmopolitan roundabout where dozens of immigrants wait every day for an unknown van to come with an ephemeral job offer.
“Sometimes he manages to be taken for hours to throw rubble or as a construction assistant,” Mora says.
They don't want to get rich.
In the words of Peña: “We want to achieve our things here, for the children to choose what they want to study and have a better future…”.
The father unfocuses his gaze on the horizon, as if delving into a distant past before finishing the sentence: “Having things here, normal, like we had in Venezuela the time we were so good.”
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