There are a couple of hours, almost three, in the morning, when the sun on the border is not even enough to give hope. Glenys Castro, her sister Marián, their five children, who range from six to 17 years old, and “grandfather”, Johnny Castillo, try to warm up by inertia. They survive. Winter is harsh in Ciudad Juárez, in northern Mexico, especially for a family of Venezuelans from Maracay, whose thermometer is in the Caribbean Sea. “I was shocked last night,” says Glenys, 34. “Hands, feet!” Ice creams.
These days are cold news for the family. The worst of all, the one they feel when they are kicked out of the hostel, at six in the morning. Half asleep, the women lift the boys from the local bathrooms, the family bedroom. They don’t even have to shelter them: they sleep with everything on. Outside it is still night. They go out into the street and see—feel—the hostility of the place. It’s not just the cold, it’s the border geography, inhospitable, made of abandonment, cars at full speed, fences and wire, an enclosed river. Of rejection.
The Castro family, who arrived in Juárez this week, is part of the growing flow of Venezuelan migrants trying to reach the United States by land. In the first 11 months of fiscal year 2022, which ended in September, the immigration authorities of that country registered the arrival of 154,000 Venezuelans at the southern border, 216% more than in the same period of the previous year, a record number. Until October, citizens of the Caribbean country could come to the US and request asylum, a situation that allowed them to enter, given the impossibility of the authorities to return them or send them to Mexico, as they did with Central Americans.
But everything changed then. In October, in the middle of the Castro family’s trip, Mexico agreed with its northern neighbor that it would also receive Venezuelans, rejected, like Central Americans, by virtue of Title 42, an old directive from the United States, revived during the Government of Donald Trump. This measure, still in force, makes it possible to reject foreign citizens, including asylum seekers, alleging health reasons, in this case the coronavirus pandemic. Although the repeal of the directive seems imminent, the bureaucracy will keep it in place, at least until after Christmas.
The final months of the year have been difficult at the border. In November, Venezuelan migrants who were beginning to become stranded in Ciudad Juárez set up a makeshift camp on the banks of the Rio Grande. They were around 700. In the United States, expressions such as border crisis or invasion began to be used, capitalizable at a political level, which had little to do with the desires of travelers. At the end of the month, they were “evicted”, one of many euphemisms in the migratory universe. Since then, some have taken advantage of clandestine crossings to cross to the other side, but the majority, those who were there and those who arrived, remain in the river, in shelters, or on the street, especially after the deployment of the National Guard, which has installed barbed wire fences in the area.
dead water
For Venezuelans, everything is new. Among those who these days gather in Juárez and El Paso, on the other side of the Rio Grande, and those who have passed through here in recent months, create a history of migration that did not exist before, because before those who migrated left by plane, swearing at the government of Nicolás Maduro, and now those who leave are protesting an uninhabitable life, in which a kilo of flour costs ten dollars. That, many at the border explain these days, is equivalent to a weekly salary, sometimes biweekly. Sometimes even monthly.
Those who arrive narrate trips of three and four months, via Colombia, Central America and Mexico, full of danger and misery. They are stories that cross Caracas, Valencia, Maracay, Guárico, in the form of WhatsApp messages and Tiktok videos and that build the idea of migrating, making it more welcoming and possible. Its protagonists emulate what Cuban or Haitian migrants did before, long continental journeys to finally reach the north: the United States. The same thing that Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Hondurans have been doing for decades. Also the Mexicans.
In their stories, Venezuelans proudly speak of their journey on the roofs and wagons of the freight train that crosses Mexico from south to north, La Bestia. It is a factory for cripples, an all-you-can-eat buffet for the mafias, who see walking dollars in stowaways. They recount, outraged, the robberies they suffer in the country, at the hands of police and criminals. They say, shameful, that they have had to ask for money. In the streets, in the squares, everywhere.
They also talk about the Darién, that deadly trap disguised as a jungle that separates Colombia from Panama, turned into an amusement park for speculators and thugs. They all mention the fallen in the Darién, and use adjectives such as “horrible” and “inhumane.” The grandfather, Johnny Castillo, a 52-year-old miner and trucker, exclaims, epic: “Marico, we drank dead water there!” Literal: the Castro family drank from a river in the jungle, in which they later discovered several bodies, upstream.
Batman in El Paso
The Rio Grande separates countries and cities. Distinguish hopes. On the Mexican side, Venezuelan migrants are waiting for the US government, chaired by Joe Biden, to repeal title 42 and thus return to what was before: surrender to the Border Patrol, request asylum and live their process already at their destination. . On the Texan side, the hope of those who have already crossed—most of them irregularly—is to get some money and get out of El Paso.
At the bus station in the Texan city, a small crowd, many Venezuelans, but also Colombians, Salvadorans and even Mexicans, plead for some kind of help. In an alley that stinks of urine, a child who is less than two years old plays with a Batman doll. In Juárez and El Paso, some residents have approached shelters and areas where migrants wait, to bring them blankets, food and even toys.
The game of the boy, who is called Milan, is quite simple. He grabs the doll and throws it as far as he can. From the outside, Batman’s flight can be interpreted as a kind of rejection of his situation, a symbol of exhaustion, but his mother, Milianny, who is 19 years old, says that the poor man is tired. And against exhaustion, Milan throws away the Batman, then his tennis and everything that he actually reaches with his little hands, dry from the cold.
“We got here on Monday,” he says, like many others. Monday was the last time that groups of migrants crossed the Rio Grande, before the deployment of the National Guard in the channel. “The three of us came; my husband, Milan and me. We lasted three months on the trip. If you only knew!… It’s that in Venezuela the situation is very strong, it’s not enough, ”he explains. His intention is to go to Denver, which embodies for Venezuelans the great hub of United States communications. From there they want to continue to Chicago.
For now, the most important thing is to seek refuge. This weekend, El Paso was expecting sub-zero temperatures due to a cold wave coming from the north that has them expecting. There is no fear on the woman’s face, just a curiosity tinged with wariness. She already knows the cold, but she doesn’t understand what it is below zero: she has never experienced it. “We were in a shelter, but they told us that we had to leave, because a lot of people came from here and they fight and it was unsafe for the child.” Concerned for the minor’s well-being, the shelter managers put them on the street.
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