More vulnerable wave of migrants flees Venezuela amid sanctions, while Trump pledges U.S. support at U.N.

PAMPLONA, Colombia – Amid new sanctions imposed last month and promises of aid from the U.S., President Donald Trump took on the troubled regime in Venezuela during his remarks before the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday -- ahead of a meeting about the country he will reportedly lead during the gathering Wednesday.

“To the Venezuelans trapped in this nightmare, please know that all of America is behind you,” he said. “The United States has vast quantities of humanitarian aid ready and waiting to be delivered.”

But as Trump declared his solidarity with the people living through crisis in Venezuela, experts on the region and the humanitarian situation there caution that it’s the very people Trump says the U.S. is supporting, not the Maduro government, that his administration is strangling with the ever-tightening economic grip ofU.S. sanctions.

More than 4 million people have fled Venezuela to countries like Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, which have seen growingly vulnerable populations – families, pregnant women, the elderly, the sick, the wounded – arriving to their borders amid the sanctions and the country's economic collapse.

Trump and world leaders have promised aid to help the fleeing population, but it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the crisis: the Venezuelan exodus receives about 1.5% of the international aid dollars compared to other comparable mass migrations, according to one analysis.

'It's better to struggle as a foreigner'

And while world leaders make a push for yet another round of sanctions and Trump's sanctions could help his 2020 re-election effort, according to one observer, it’s migrants like 42-year-old Elnper Espinso who are being affected.

Espinso fled Venezuela in September, saying he never wanted to leave, but that the economic pressure had pushed him over the edge. Now, he had been walking fordays from the sun-burnt Colombia-Venezuela border and into the winding and freezing mountain roads. Without glasses, Espinso was practically blind and an infected wound he’d lived with for years because of lack of basic medical care in the country sent stabs of pain through his right leg. 

“I left because in Venezuela I would have lost my leg,” Espinso said, sitting on the side of the mountain road with only a small bag of clothes. “It's better to struggle as a foreigner than die in my country without fighting for anything.”

Without food or medical aid, he was set on a more than thousand-mile journey to Peru. And he wasn’t alone. An estimated 5,000 Venezuelans leave from the country every day, a growing number of those embarking on the exodus by foot, their fate in the hands of world leaders, diplomats and aid experts grappling with the increasingly dire situation.

Going ‘nuclear’

The United States sanctions date back more than a decade when the Obama administration began imposing contained individual sanctions as a way to push back on human rights abuses by Hugo Chávez’s and, later, Nicolás Maduro’s government.

But the U.S. government went “nuclear” at the beginning of 2019 when the Trump administration targeted the Venezuelan oil sector, the bread-and-butter of its economy, in an effort to pressure the Maduro government, said Geoff Ramsey, Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. Those, combined with even more sweeping sanctions in August, have only aggravated the already deepening crisis. 

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While Venezuela was already in a free fall, human rights leaders were quick to say that last month's move would be “likely to significantly exacerbate the crisis for millions of ordinary Venezuelans."

“The sanctions are extremely broad and fail to contain sufficient measures to mitigate their impact on the most vulnerable sectors of the population,” Michelle Bachelet, United Nations human rights chief, said in a statement in August. 

And those tactics are only likely continue as Colombian President Ivan Duque and other world leaders call for more sanctions, and Trump replaces ex-national security adviser John Bolton with the more moderate hostage negotiator Robert O'Brien. While Bolton “took great pleasure” pushing forth more aggressive tactics against Venezuela, Ramsey said, O'Brien’s pick may signal the beginning of a more passive approach: standing to the side as sanctions continue to strangle the country’s economy.

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“Long term, I don't see this administration doing much more than waiting around for the oil sanctions to cause some kind of fracture in the regime, and I think that's not a given,” he said. “The longer these sanctions are left in place, the more they will hurt the general population.”

‘I don't know how we've survived’

The new crush of migrants is stark on Venezuela’s border with Colombia, a country that has received some 1.3 million migrants according to the U.N. and has been overwhelmed by the mass migration. 

By one U.N. estimate, 5,000 people leave Venezuela every day, and tens of thousands more lean on places like the border city of Cúcuta, Colombia, for food and medical care. Hospitals and aid providers have seen an influx of pregnant women, young children, migrant cases of diseases like HIV and measles and deteriorated medical conditions generally. Few cross the border without stories of starvation and violence. 

Many of the migrants arrive without money for a bus ticket, so a growing number of people like Espinso embark on hundred-mile – and sometimes even thousand-mile – treks, across the region.

And despite the flight from the country set to reach 8 million people by the end of 2020, by one estimate, surpassing even Syria, Venezuelan migrants receive only cents on the dollar in aid that their Syrian counterparts do, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg News.

Matha Duque has felt the lack of aid. Duque runs an informal shelter out of her house in the chilly mountain town of Pamplona, Colombia, where walking Venezuelans pass by in streams. Families with coughing babies sit outside her home, wearing winter jackets, hats and mittens as they brace for the cold that grips the mountains by night. 

Duque, 55, began the largely self-funded shelter when the migration began in 2016. She saw small clusters of walking migrants and welcomed groups soaked from the rain into her home. That trickle, though, has since turned into a steady flow. Between 500 and 700 people pass through daily, though there have been days where she’s seen as many as 1,500 people. Every day, she said, they “arrive in worse conditions.”

“Women have arrived eight months into their pregnancy,” she said. “They get sick and have to go to the hospital and they lose their babies. There have been a lot of babies that have been lost because of the long walk.”

Shelters have been stretched to a breaking point as they lack sufficient resources to take on the growing population. Duque says she runs short on food nearly every day and will soon be out of money to pay for water and gas, which she depends on to cook for the Venezuelans. She said her name has appeared on a pamphlet circulated by illegal groups in the area, threatening the lives of people helping Venezuelans.

It’s taken over her life, but she continues because there are so few resources for the walkers.

“People think we receive a lot of money and resources,” she said. “But … we work in our own houses, no one pays me rent. I don't know how we've survived, but I'm still here.”

The Colombian government and other receiving countries have fallen into the same dilemma, repeatedly calling upon the international community to step up aid funding. And though the U.S. announced earlier this month that it would provide an additional $120 million in “humanitarian assistance,” and, more recently, $52 million in “development assistance” to aid Guaido inside the country, Ramsey called the funds just a "drop in the bucket" compared to what’s actually needed.

‘Standing back as Venezuela collapses into dust’

Now could mark a significant tipping point in what role the Trump administration will play in Venezuela.

In the previous months, the Bolton-era White House played a fairly aggressive role in the country, tethering itself to political efforts by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to force aid supplies across the border, ramping up sanctions and entering secret talks with powerful officials in the Maduro government possibly about ousting the embattled president.

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But O’Brien’s appointment may be an indicator that the administration is trying to not “rock the boat” as it enters an election year and instead tout the sanctions and previous saber-rattling as a political card to cater to conservative voters in key states like Florida, Ramsey said.

“He's perfectly fine standing back as Venezuela collapses into dust because it suits his needs electorally,” Ramsey said.

Though just last week, the president bragged that his opinions on Venezuela were far stronger than Bolton’s and that the ex-adviser “was holding me back.” And the U.S.’s leading role this week invoking a treaty to set a path for more pressure as the U.S., Canada and Latin American leaders promise to crack down on the Maduro government may indicate otherwise.

The uncertainty scared Maria Contreras a 45-year-old Venezuelan crossing the border with her son, who wore an American flag t-shirt. They, like many Venezuelans, said they were torn by the U.S. government’s hand in their country.

“What the United States is doing with the pressure, it's good,” she said. “But it's the people who are suffering. Maduro isn't feeling anything. He's not suffering anything because he leaves in his airplanes and arrives with his food.”

Meanwhile, the family living in the border town of San Antonio, Venezuela, has struggled to feed themselves, and crosses into Colombia every day to sell their possessions on the streets. They said they want to leave, but don’t have the documents to migrate legally. Instead, they watch as their family and friends clear out, as the situation worsens by the day, and wonder what their future holds.

“It's getting worse, it's lonelier,” Contreras said. “You feel the loneliness more the fewer people who stay there. Everyone is leaving and the people who stay are the elderly, and now they're leaving too.”

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