Venezuelan migration picks up, reaches about 6.8M

LOS PATIOS, Colombia (AP) — Arbelys Briceño fixed her eyes on the chicken soup in the plastic container set before her, the first warm meal she'd had in days. She began eating slowly, almost hesitantly, but then picked up the pace — and snagged another serving when soup kitchen workers offered seconds.

It was her eighth day on a journey from her Venezuelan hometown to Peru, a country the 14-year-old couldn't place on a map but that her older brother had set as their destination. Mosquitoes had marked her legs. The sun had baked her face.

“It is as if it were a vacation but with lots of walking,” Arbelys said with an outlook far more upbeat than that of most Venezuelan migrants trying to escape poverty in their once-prosperous country.

About 6.8 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since an economic crisis took hold in earnest in 2014 for the country of some 28 million people. Most have gone to nearby nations in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 2.4 million are in Colombia, where Arbelys and her brother had paused on their trek.

That huge migration slowed as the pandemic cut economic opportunities and complicated travel across the region and as Venezuela's socialist government adopted reforms that slowed the country's economic free-fall and gave some appearance of revival.

About 150,000 Venezuelans returned to their homeland at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, according to United Nations' estimates, and some host countries reported a decline in the overall count of Venezuelan immigrants for the first time in years.

But the outward march is on the rise again.

At least 753,000 Venezuelans have left their country for another in Latin America or the Caribbean since November, according to data from receiving countries, even as the government of...