The children: Three of Fernández’s children in the bedroom they share in their grandparents’ house in Maracaibo, Venezuela

The Children Left Behind

Mothers and fathers are fleeing Venezuela in search of work, leaving hundreds of thousands of children to fend for themselves

September 21, 2020

By Patricia Smith

Holding back a surge of tears, Aura Fernández kissed her children and climbed aboard the bus, the first leg of her long journey to Colombia.

“I love you,” she said. “Study hard.”

With that, Fernández became part of the flood of Venezuelan parents who have left their country—and their children—in order to find work to support them.

Seven years into an economic collapse, Venezuela’s migrant crisis has grown into one of the largest in the world. Millions have already left. By the end of 2020, an estimated 6.5 million people will have fled, according to the United Nations refugee agency—a number rarely, if ever, seen outside of war.

But hidden inside that data is a startling phenomenon. Venezuela’s mothers and fathers, determined to find work, food, and medicine, are leaving hundreds of thousands of children in the care of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and even siblings who are sometimes children themselves. Many parents don’t want to put their children through the grueling and often very dangerous upheaval of displacement. Others simply can’t afford to take them along.

“This is a phenomenon that is going to change the face of our society,” says Abel Saraiba, a psychologist at an organization that provides counseling to Venezuelan children. These separations, he adds, have the potential to weaken the very generation that is supposed to one day rebuild a battered Venezuela.

Inside the Battle for Venezuela

Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó each try to control the narrative as they struggle for leadership of the country.

From Rich to Poor

Venezuela’s turmoil has been a long time in the making. With the world’s largest proven oil reserves, it was once one of Latin America’s richest nations. In 1998, the country elected socialist politician Hugo Chávez as president. He nationalized many parts of the economy and seized the assets of many foreign businesses.

When Chávez died in 2013, his vice president, Nicolás Maduro, took over, and the country’s many long-festering problems began to come to a head. For years, Venezuela’s economy had been kept afloat by oil exports. But the price of oil plummeted in 2014, leaving the government effectively broke.

Now hyperinflation has made the country’s currency, the bolivar, virtually worthless. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Venezuela’s annual inflation rate (the rate at which prices increase) is more than 1 million percent. That’s an almost unimaginably fast rate of price increase, and it means that no one’s salary has any value because the prices of basic goods—when they’re even available—rise so fast that people can’t afford them.

In 2019, a political crisis developed on top of the economic one: Opposition lawmaker Juan Guaidó challenged Maduro’s authoritarian rule by declaring himself to be the country’s rightful president. A number of foreign governments—including the United States (see “The U.S. & Venezuela,” below)—have backed Guaidó’s claim, and there have been violent clashes between opposition protesters and the military. But Maduro clings to power.

The deepening crisis is what has prompted growing numbers of parents to flee the country in search of work. The exodus is so large—one group estimated that 1 million children have been left behind—that it’s reshaping the concept of childhood in Venezuela, sending grade-schoolers into the streets to work and leaving them vulnerable to abuse.

The arrival of Covid-19 has isolated these children further. To combat the spread, Maduro has announced a countrywide lockdown, sending the military into the streets to enforce the measures. That’s cut many young people off from the teachers and neighbors who may be their only means of support. At the same time, borders are now closed, severing these children from the rest of the world and making it impossible for their parents to come and retrieve them.

Rolling Blackouts & Hunger

In the state of Zulia, where Fernández left her children in January, the economic collapse is particularly stark. It was once the Texas of Venezuela: rich in oil and cattle and home to a flourishing class of petroleum workers who bought nice cars and took expensive vacations. Today, it’s home to rolling blackouts and jobs with monthly wages that barely buy two days’ worth of rice.

When Fernández left, she carried a purse crocheted by her oldest daughter, packed with little more than her Bible, a toothbrush, and a bottle of perfume. She also carried an empty blue suitcase that she planned to pack with goods to bring home to her children. But Fernández had no phone, and it was unclear when she would see her children again.

“I did not abandon my children,” she said during a stop along her journey.
“I left them because the situation is very difficult in Venezuela.”

Fernández had once managed cleaning supplies at a food company in Venezuela but found that she couldn’t survive on the meager salary. She left for Colombia for the first time in late 2016, placing her children in the care of her parents. But both parents have health problems that make it difficult for them to get out of bed some days.

In Colombia, Fernández found a job as a housekeeper, and she began to send money home every two weeks, about $35 a month.

But when Fernández came back last December, for Christmas, it was clear that not much had changed. Her sister had joined her to work in Colombia, also leaving her children with their grandparents. That put the ailing grandparents in charge of 13 kids, with the occasional help of aunts and uncles.

Despite the money she’d been sending home, Fernández’s children were still eating only once a day. So she set off again.

‘Living in a Time of Crisis’

Many families in Zulia are barely getting by and making the same difficult decision. The Casa Hogar Carmela Valera is a boarding school for girls in need run by nuns in Zulia’s state capital, Maracaibo. In the past, students came here after parents died or began to use drugs. Today, at least half of its residents have a parent abroad.

The school has seen better times. It has running water for a short period about every two weeks, so the girls usually shower, cook, and flush the toilet using water they save in any containers they can find. They have no light bulbs for one of their two bathrooms, which means they brush their teeth on slippery floors in the dark.

Sister Wendy Khalil says the home is desperate for everything: antibiotics, shampoo, toilet paper, vegetables, and water tanks. But her biggest concern is providing a degree of normalcy for the girls, keeping them busy with homework and the occasional movie night.

One day this past February, the girls woke just after dawn and headed to the chapel, where a priest led them in prayer.

“Father,” they shouted together, “we pray for Venezuela!”

Fernández’s parents are looking after 13 grandchildren.

At 10 years old, Ana is one of the older students at the school, and she sometimes climbs into bed at night with the littler ones, comforting them as they cry.

“We are living in a time of crisis,” Ana says. No one explained the country’s collapse to her, she says. “I realized it on my own.”

Experts agree with Ana’s assessment.

“This is a country that is falling apart,” says Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The economic crisis can only be solved
by changing the government.”

With reporting by Julie Turkewitz of The New York Times.

The U.S. & Venezuela

These former allies are now adversaries

For most of the 20th century, the U.S. and Venezuela were allies. American oil companies began operating there in the early 1900s, helping to establish the industry that made Venezuela the richest country in South America in the 1970s.

“For many decades, Venezuela was the U.S.’s closest friend in the region,” says Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The tensions that now characterize the relationship began in 1999, when Hugo Chávez became president. Chávez was a populist who often portrayed the U.S. as a bully. His anti-American rhetoric became famous. The U.S. saw the Chávez regime as deeply corrupt and hostile to American companies operating there.

But a recent political standoff has taken relations to a new low. After Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, was re-elected president in 2018 in a vote widely condemned as rigged, opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president. The U.S. quickly recognized him as Venezuela’s rightful leader.

In March, the U.S. indicted Maduro on drug and corruption charges, hoping to encourage Maduro to step down.

“The regime is now under heavier pressure than it has ever been,” U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams told Reuters. “Maybe this pressure will lead to a serious discussion within the regime.”

Continue the Learning Journey

Read this Upfront story about Venezuela from 2019. Write a short response including some additional examples of the hardships Venezuelans face and how they might help explain the phenomenon of parents leaving their children to seek work abroad.

Read this New York Times story about the Venezuelan government’s response to the pandemic. Write a short response that incorporates what you learned in the Upfront story and this article.