Venezuelan mothers in defense of a future for their children

Since the political crisis and economical gives Venezuela entered its worst phase, 170,000 people crossed the country’s border with Roraima. Fleeing from the shortage of food and medicine, Venezuelan mothers see the Amazon state, the poorest in Brazil, as an alternative for the future of their children

At the age of 22, four months pregnant, Venezuelan Romina Yaguaran walked for eight hours, under the blazing sun, along a clandestine route to cross the border between Venezuela and Brazil.

On ordinary days, the route between the border towns of Santa Elena de Uairén, on the Venezuelan side, and Pacaraima, in Roraima, can be done in a few minutes by car. However, on that day in April, it had been two months since the border had been closed by order of the president. Nicolas Maduro, in an attempt to block the entry of foreign trucks that offered symbolic support to the population. The border would only reopen in May.

In power since 2013, Maduro is facing a serious political crisis that has plunged the Venezuelan economy into chaos, with inflation that reached 1,370,000% last year, according to calculations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Added to this is the shortage of essential goods, such as food, soap and toothbrushes, medicines and hospital supplies.

To get an idea, the shortage caused the minimum wage to devalue to the equivalent of 8 reais a month, not enough money to buy 1 kilo of meat. Impoverished and with threatened rights, the population flees to neighboring countries, such as Colombia, Peru and Brazil, in search of survival.

Because of this wave of immigration, according to the Ministry of Justice, 80,000 asylum requests were issued in Brazil in 2018, 63% of which in Roraima alone. Three out of four were Venezuelans.

With no alternative, Romina, her husband and two other family members faced the shortcut between Venezuela and Roraima on foot. Along the way, without food or money, the four had to hand over the clothes they were carrying in exchange for permission to pass through an indigenous community.

“I came to have my daughter. In Venezuela, the situation was very bad, with everything too expensive”, she says, who currently sleeps in a tent provided by the Brazilian Army, installed in an improvised area near the International Bus Station in Boa Vista. She is one of thousands of Venezuelans who had their children in Roraima.

The state, which is part of the region known as the Legal Amazon, is the least populous in Brazil (it has 605,000 inhabitants, estimates the IBGE), but since 2016 it has received around 170,000 Venezuelans, according to the Federal Police. In addition, it is the poorest in the country, if considered its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and faces an escalation in violence. Last year, the rate of 67 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants was recorded, 415% more than in 2011, according to the Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security. It is in this context that children are born.

Since January 2016, when the immigration flow intensified, until May of this year, 3,600 Venezuelan women were delivered at the only public maternity hospital in the state, Hospital Materno-Infantil Nossa Senhora de Nazareth, in downtown Boa Vista. The volume represents about 10% of the institution’s total births in the period.

General director of the hospital, pediatrician Adriana Casselli de Abreu believes that the arrival of weakened Venezuelans has imposed new challenges on maternity teams, who are used to dealing with the maternal and child care needs of Brazilian women. “Suddenly, an exponential number of Venezuelan pregnant women appeared, most with complications. With that, we do a total of about a thousand births per month, many of them at high risk, ”she says.

One of the refugees assisted at the maternity hospital is Gleisbel Zuniga Rivas, 26 years old. She is the mother of Glenda, 10, Angel David, 3, and Diego Mateo, 10 months. As with Romina, the food shortage in her country was what motivated her to move with her husband and children two years ago. “I feel that everyone there is in a worse situation than the one I find here”, says Gleisbel.

Her life in Roraima, however, is far from ideal. The family lives in a tent at the Jardim Floresta shelter, one of 11 installed in Boa Vista by the Acolhida Operation, a task force of the federal government and non-governmental organizations that shelter 5,800 vulnerable Venezuelans in the state. They receive three meals a day and diapers for Diego Mateo, but they still depend on donations. The heat inside the tents without electricity causes several families to stay outside the shelter, under the shade of the trees.

Gleisbel was a gas station attendant in the country with the cheapest gasoline in the world. Now unemployed, she takes care of the children while her husband does weeding. “It is difficult to get work. Many deny him service because he is Venezuelan,” she reports on her partner’s situation, also experienced by other families arriving from the neighboring country.

In addition to the most obvious factor, prejudice, there is also the lack of access to teaching Portuguese and the barriers to having their diplomas validated, which means that many qualified immigrants cannot perform functions for which they would be qualified. Almost 80% of Venezuelan immigrants have completed at least high school and 30% have higher education, according to the 2017 report Sociodemographic and Labor Profile of Venezuelan Migration in Brazil.

“It is necessary to have public funding for Portuguese courses and a policy that simplifies the reuse of diplomas, which today is costly”, suggests Gustavo da Frota Simões, coordinator of the international relations course at the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) and one of the authors of the study. “To move forward, Brazil needs to treat the immigration flow as an opportunity, and not as a one-off emergency”, he says.

There are still obstacles to obtaining recognition of the situation of refugees. Gleisbel and her family are awaiting the evaluation of their application, which should take some time to come out – the National Committee for Refugees (Conare), linked to the Ministry of Justice, has a queue of 160,000 cases (of different nationalities, with Venezuelans in the lead) to to analyze. And that number should not stop increasing, since, according to the Organization of American States (OAS), 8 million Venezuelans should emigrate by the end of 2020.

Giving birth

Despite all the adversities during pregnancy, Romina and Gleisbel sought health support and strictly followed the prenatal care. According to the City Hall of Boa Vista, 3,500 prenatal care sessions were performed for Venezuelan pregnant women in the first half of this year, which represents an increase of 144.4% over the same period last year.

However, according to the director of the Boa Vista maternity hospital, Adriana de Abreu, the number of pregnant women who do not have any monitoring could be much higher. “They often come malnourished and depressed. Living on the street, they cannot maintain proper hygiene conditions and find it difficult to even meet simple needs, such as going to the bathroom,” she says.

She adds that Venezuelans who arrive pregnant in Brazil often do not have access to prenatal care in their country or use vitamin supplements capable of preventing malformations in the fetus. Every day, an average of 31 births are performed at the hospital – seven of them to Venezuelan mothers.

Cesarean sections correspond to 36%, a rate close to that recommended by the Ministry of Health (35%) in highly complex institutions. In order to lower this number, the Boa Vista maternity hospital is included in the federal program Rede Cegonha, which prioritizes the increase in normal deliveries in public facilities.

Despite the apprehension of giving birth in another country, eventually through a cesarean section, Kerly Siulenin Aray, 27, managed to have a normal delivery without any problems, with only one day of hospitalization.

“Since my first two births were surgical, I imagined it would be like that again. But I arrived at the maternity ward and, in less than an hour, Thiago was born”, she reports, relieved, with the small baby in her arms.

Kerly arrived in Brazil two years ago, accompanied by her parents and two children, now aged 5 and 3. She works as a cashier at a market in Boa Vista, where she lives in a rented house on the outskirts. “I intend to stay in Roraima and I want my children to learn both Portuguese and Spanish”, says she, who is one of the 980 Venezuelan beneficiaries of the municipal program Família Que Acolhe (out of a total of 5 thousand families assisted).

Through this project, she was guided on care during pregnancy, healthy eating and children’s rights. She also won a trousseau for her newborn son and, when he turns 1, he will receive milk and have a guaranteed place in a daycare center. Despite being positive, the program is insufficient to account for all Venezuelan mothers and other nationalities.

As Kerly’s youngest child, babies born on this side of the border immediately acquire Brazilian nationality. The same does not happen in countries like Colombia, the nation that has received the most Venezuelan immigrants – it is estimated that the number reaches more than 1 million.

Colombian legislation does not grant citizenship to the child of a foreigner simply because he was born in its territory, requiring at least one of the parents to have a permanent residence visa.

Because of this limitation, until August of this year, at least 24,000 children of Venezuelans in this situation were at risk of becoming stateless. That changed after President Iván Duque Márquez signed a decree giving them citizenship.

The measure, valid for the next two years, includes those born in the country since August 2015 who fall into this case. This insecurity is one more reason for women to choose Brazil.

Around here, the threats to mothers who decide to leave Venezuela are different. Seamstress Nancy Jael Martes Franceschi, 21, is the mother of Alejandra, 5, Ender, 3, and Nelson, 1.

She has lived in Boa Vista for a year. In that short period, she already ran the risk of losing custody of her children and was offered cash to sell Ender. Now, she sleeps with the children on cardboard spread out on a sidewalk a few meters from three shelters operated by the Acolhida Operation. “I don’t want my children to be discriminated against because we live on the street. We try to have a normal life, we just don’t have a place”, says Nancy.

Every day, she drops her eldest daughter off at the municipal school. Alejandra is one of the 4,800 Venezuelan children enrolled in the municipal school system, corresponding to 11% of students in the city.

“In our country, my friends’ children are not in school. I’m putting up with this very difficult situation because my children have to move on. I prefer that they study and have a good profession so that the sacrifice I’m making is worth it”, says Nancy, who is waiting for vacancies to be transferred to another state, which has already happened to around 20,000 people. She has a grandmother who went to Rio de Grande do Sul. So she waits for an opportunity to gather…