“I gave my children a small cup of rice. That was all we had. Then I left,” says Emily, sitting on a grassy mound near a river and a road that leads into the Colombian town of Pamplona. Like nearly six million other Venezuelans, she has left home for a neighbouring country.
Emily crossed the border into Colombia and walked uphill for two days to reach Pamplona, a journey born of desperation. As a hairdresser in Maracay, in the north-west of Venezuela, Emily didn’t earn enough to buy food for her three daughters. “Leaving my daughters was painful, but watching them go hungry was worse,” she says. “Leaving became not a choice, but a necessity.”
Venezuela, once the richest country in South America and with the largest oil reserves in the world, is now facing an acute economic and humanitarian crisis that has been decades in the making. Venezuela’s oil wealth was used by the government of Hugo Chavez, elected president on a socialist platform in 1998, to fund radical poverty reduction programmes known as the ‘Bolivarian missions’. Although these missions expanded social services and cut poverty by 20%, they were very expensive, and Chavez also pursued policies that precipitated a steady decline in Venezuela’s oil production, meaning a decline in available revenue. After Chavez’s death in 2013, president Nicolás Maduro continued with his predecessor’s policies and the combined effects of economic mismanagement and widespread corruption have left Venezuela in a dire situation.
