Vienna (AFP) - The EU announced a 35 million euro ($41mn) aid package on Friday to counter the effect of Venezuela's economic crisis, which has sparked one of the biggest exoduses in Latin American history.

"I can announce today that the European Union just adopted a package of humanitarian aid of 35 million euros to support Venezuelans both inside Venezuela but also in the neighbouring countries and the host communities," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said after a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Vienna.

Mogherini said the money would go to activities "focusing in particular on nutrition, water, health and the support to the most vulnerable people".

Venezuela's economy has collapsed into chaos under President Nicolas Maduro since 2013, with falling oil prices leading to chronic shortages of food and medicine and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country.

"We're extremely worried for the humanitarian situation in the country but also the effect on the neighbouring countries that are receiving massive waves of Venezuelans in their territory," Mogherini said.

Some 1.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015 as four years of recession and hyperinflation the International Monetary Fund predicts will reach one million percent this year have left large swathes of the population in poverty.

Maduro has systematically sidelined the opposition as he tightens his grip over Venezuela, with the political turmoil worsening the country's ability to deal with its economic collapse.

"We decided to step up our diplomatic engagement together with the countries in the region" to encourage fresh dialogue, Mogherini added on Friday.

Earlier this year the EU condemned "irregularities" in Maduro's re-election, citing "major obstacles" to the participation of the opposition.

In June Venezuela's vice-president and 10 other officials were hit by EU sanctions over the conduct of the election as well as other human rights abuses, prompting Venezuela to accuse the EU of "aggression and meddling".</s>LIMA, (Reuters) – Colombia, Peru and Ecuador want more international aid to help manage a surge in Venezuelan migration that is overwhelming public services in those countries, a Peruvian official said on Thursday.

“Support has been given and we value it, but it has to increase in line with increasing migration,” said Cesar Bustamante, an official at Peru’s foreign ministry who met with representatives of Colombia and Ecuador on Wednesday in Lima.

“More demand for public services means more resources. There’s no way around it. We have to provide those services, with our own resources or with international help,” he said in a telephone interview.

Bustamante said developed countries should do more to support United Nations programs that are assisting migrants in South America and should offer funds to countries hosting them.

Colombia, Peru and Ecuador have accepted hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing an economic meltdown, growing poverty and food and medical shortages at home.

The United Nations has said that more than 1.6 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015 in one of the largest mass migrations in Latin American history.

In Peru, Venezuelans receive attention at state-funded health clinics and attend public schools, and the government’s immigration agency is processing residency requests around the clock.

Last week, United Nations’ agencies dealing with migration and refugees called for more help for host countries to handle a crisis it said was approaching a level comparable to the influx of refugees in the Mediterranean.

On Thursday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is on a four-nation Latin American tour, said in Bogota that the European Union would give Latin America 35 million euros to help with the migrant crisis.

The United States has given nearly $31 million in aid for Venezuelans since fiscal year 2017, as well as $18.5 million for Colombia, home to more Venezuelan migrants than any other country, the U.S. State Department has said.

However, the United States has not eased its immigration policy to accommodate more Venezuelans, underscoring new challenges in the developing world as U.S. President Donald Trump shifts the burden of hosting desperate migrants and refugees to places with less capacity to absorb them.

Last week, Peru’s foreign minister said that he had spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about funding needs.

Colombia, Peru, Ecuador discussed Venezuelan immigration in Lima on Wednesday at a gathering of the Andean Community, one of a number of regional meetings aimed at tackling migration issues.

In a joint statement, the three countries called on Caracas to facilitate passports for Venezuelan citizens to strengthen regional security. Bolivia, an ally of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, attended Wednesday’s meeting as the fourth member of the Andean Community, but it did not sign the joint statement.

Peru started requiring passports instead of national ID cards from Venezuelans on Saturday, following a similar decision by Ecuador.

Some 1,200 Venezuelans per day entered Peru after the new rule was implemented, down from 5,100 earlier this month, according to Peru’s immigration agency. The figure included migrants as well as aspiring refugees, who do not require passports for entry under international law.</s>Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez confirmed Thursday that the European Union approved 35 million euros (about $41 million) in humanitarian aid to help Latin America deal with the wave of Venezuelan refugees fleeing the crisis in their country.

"The Spanish government also has used its good offices within the framework of the European Union, and today ... in Brussels approval was given for 35 million euros that the (EU) will place at the disposal of the Latin American region to deal with this immigration crisis," said Sanchez in Bogota after meeting with Colombian President Ivan Duque.</s>Brazil Sends Military To Border To Cope With Flood Of Fleeing Venezuelans

Brazilian President Michel Temer signed a decree Tuesday to send troops to the country's northern state of Roraima, where Venezuelans fleeing food shortages have streamed across the border.

The armed forces will have police powers on the borders and highways in Roraima, the Brazilian government said.

Temer said the armed forces are being sent to "guarantee law and order" as Venezuela's migrant crisis was "threatening the harmony of the whole continent." He said the move was for the safety of both Brazilian citizens and Venezuelan migrants.

The decree is in effect until Sept. 12.

Temer said on Twitter that Brazil was working to minimize "the impacts of the humanitarian disaster caused by the government of Venezuela." He said Tuesday that Venezuelans have been subjected to "terrible living conditions."

Earlier this month, Brazilian residents at Roraima's border town of Pacaraima attacked migrant camps of Venezuelans, according to The New York Times.

In Venezuela, inflation rates recently topped 60,000 percent amid widespread reports of food and medicine shortages.

More than 1.6 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015, the United Nations said, with 90 percent of them moving to other South American countries — especially Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. A total of between 2,700 to 4,000 migrants arrive in those four countries each day, the U.N. says.

In Brazil alone, more than 800 Venezuelans have arrived each day as of April, the U.N. said, with a total of more than 52,000 since the start of 2017.

Brazil's announcement comes after a meeting this week of officials from Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Brazil in the Colombian capital Bogota over the handling of what a U.N. refugee official has characterized as "one of Latin America's largest mass-population movements in history."

Colombia is now home to about 1 million Venezuelans while more than 400,000 are living in Peru, Reuters reported.

Colombia and Peru announced that they would begin sharing information on Venezuelan migrants in an effort to track movements and distribute aid, according to the wire service.

Ecuador has declared a state of emergency in some of its northern provinces in response to the influx, while Reuters reports that Peru declared a 60-day health emergency Tuesday in two of its northern border provinces.

Peru reported a decrease in the number of Venezuelan migrants entering the country after it imposed new requirements that went into effect Saturday — Venezuelan citizens must carry a passport to enter. Peru and Ecuador both made the change this month, requiring passports instead of national ID cards.</s>Settlers from across Brazil built this 20th-century city, creating an orderly urban space dotted with palm-fringed lawns and manicured parks. Its residents lived in relative isolation, with the most common outsiders being the anteaters wandering in from the Amazon jungle.

Then came the Venezuelans, streaming out of their country in Latin America’s largest migrant crisis in decades.

A group of Venezuelan immigrants rests near the bus terminal in Boa Vista, Brazil.

Waves of newcomers are overwhelming Boa Vista, inundating hospitals and sparking a 1,000-percent increase in emergency calls to police. Schools are scrambling to put up bilingual signs for Spanish-speaking students reaching Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Thousands of migrants are living on the streets, willing to work for a third of the wages of Brazilians. Refugee camps have sprung up in the urban core, giving rise to fears of long-term ghettos.

Boa Vista residents “are losing their city to people of a new culture, people they don’t know,” said the mayor, Teresa Surita. “If this continues, we will lose total control of this city.”

As their numbers skyrocket, Venezuelans fleeing hunger and repression in their collapsing socialist state are reshaping cities and towns across the Western Hemisphere. The sound of Caracas slang is now ubiquitous in some Miami neighborhoods. Thousands of miles to the south, the scent of Caribbean cooking wafts through streets in Santiago, Chile. In English-speaking Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelans make up a new working class.

Aid groups estimate that between 1.6 million and 2 million Venezuelans will leave their nation this year, escaping hyperinflation and desperate shortages of food and medicine. Those numbers are on top of the 1.5 million Venezuelans who left between 2014 and 2017. Roughly 1 in 10 Venezuelans will have left their country in a four-year span.

Compared with the European nations receiving Syrian refugees in recent years, Latin American countries have few resources to cope with the deluge of migrants. In recent weeks, Peru and Ecuador started insisting that arriving Venezuelans have passports, not just national ID cards, effectively closing their borders to many.

Brazil has kept its doors open. But this week, President Michel Temer signed an emergency decree sending additional troops to the northern border to reinforce a military contingent there. The sudden migrant influx is raising concerns about crime and lawlessness, as well as deeper questions about identity in a country that was long culturally walled off by its distinctive language and habits.

As that change accelerates, initial sympathy for the migrants is turning to shock, and shock is turning to rage — bringing the global debate over immigration to perhaps its most remote outpost: the Amazon region.

“Trump should be our president,” said Marcos Pereira da Silva, 43, a house painter who joined an anti-migrant protest in Boa Vista one Saturday in mid-August. That day, hundreds of angry Brazilians in the border town of Paracaima went on a rampage, bulldozing a makeshift migrant shelter and burning its occupants’ belongings after the stabbing of a local merchant.

TOP: Venezuelans at the Rondon refugee center in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state, Brazil. LEFT: Migrants cook at the Pintolandia camp for Venezuelan migrants in Boa Vista. RIGHT: A laptop captures the attention of Venezuelan migrants at the Pintolandia camp.

Boa Vista’s newest and fastest-growing migrant enclave is Rondon No. 1, a sprawling settlement of rows of durable plastic shelters that is home to more than 600 people. It is one of six emergency housing centers that have gone up here since March. Built by the army and operated with the aid of the United Nations refugee agency, the centers are bringing to Brazil an alien concept: refugee camps.

For those fleeing Venezuela, Boa Vista is the first big city south of the border, and the capital of Roraima state. Venezuelans began trickling in three years ago as their country’s petroleum-based economy slid into crisis because of plunging world oil prices and government mismanagement. By now, 800 Venezuelans a day are crossing into the state. Officials estimate 30,000 Venezuelans are living in Boa Vista, or 10 percent of the city’s population. By year’s end, they say, 1 in 5 residents could be Venezuelan.

On a recent afternoon, the city’s newest residents grilled arepas — Venezuelan corn cakes — on portable stoves. Salsa music, foreign in this country-music-loving city, blared on radios as residents chatted in Spanish.

It feels almost like a Venezuelan neighborhood, said Marisol Martinez, 38, who arrived here alone seven months ago. She has put on some weight after losing 20 pounds at home because of a lack of food and has picked up some Portuguese at a local church. “Falo bem, não, é?” — I speak well, no? — she joked, testing out the language.

She sends most of the money she earns cleaning houses home to her children. But she wants to launch an arepa business and earn enough to bring her children to Brazil.

This kind of regional migration was once exceedingly rare. No more.

“My children are not eating, they’re going to bed hungry, because that’s Venezuela,” she said. “Brazil is giving us a chance.”

The shelters are meant to be temporary, but many people in Boa Vista are dubious.

“This is the ghettoization of Boa Vista,” said Maria Suely Silva Campos, governor of Roraima state, of which Boa Vista is the capital.

She has gone as far as asking the Brazilian Supreme Court to close the border. Thus far, it has ruled against her, but she said she is determined to stop the influx.

LEFT: A Venezuelan student, Katherim Lopez, offers to answer a question during a class at Nova Canaã school in Boa Vista. RIGHT: A Venezuelan student passes a Portuguese- and Spanish-language welcome display at Nova Canaã school.

Inside the gates of Nova Canaã Elementary School, the daily lunch menu is listed in Portuguese and Spanish. The bathrooms also have bilingual signs. A wall banner offers a “Welcome” in both languages.

Some U.S. cities coping with large numbers of immigrants took years to face the kind of challenges now confronting Boa Vista at lightning speed. In 2015, there were 53 Venezuelan students in Boa Vista’s school system. This year, the number is 2,261. And most Venezuelan children here are not enrolled in school.

To cope, the city is ordering 50 shipping containers to use as overflow classrooms.

“Most of our teachers don’t speak Spanish, so we don’t have a curriculum for the Venezuelan kids,” said schools superintendent Hefrayn Lopes. “At the same time, we think they need to adapt to our culture. We shouldn’t adapt to theirs.”

Boa Vista — the poorest state capital in Brazil — has not received enough aid from the federal government to handle a refu­gee crisis, local officials say. The majority of Venezuelans arriving, they say, are malnourished. With medicines scarce and conditions deteriorating in Venezuela, many are also ill — arriving with measles, malaria, HIV infection and tuberculosis.

At the 300-bed Roraima General Hospital, the largest in Boa Vista, Venezuelans now make up more than 50 percent of patients. With the hospital well over capacity, the sick lie languidly on beds in the corridors. On a recent day, one Venezuelan with complications of diabetes moaned as he lay on his side, waiting for doctors to amputate one of his legs.

“We’ve had to delay all nonemergency operations for Brazilians, some by months,” said hospital director Marcilene Moura. She added that the Venezuelan patients are arriving with startling illnesses.

“Today, we no longer see patients with just a fever,” she said. “They come with cerebral malaria, gunshot wounds and meningitis.”

Despite sharing borders with seven Spanish-speaking countries, Brazil stands apart in Latin America. The country looks toward the United States, Europe and China as economic and cultural touchstones. Brazilian students are more likely to study English than Spanish as a second language. Fashion, cinema and culinary trends tend to come from Hollywood and Paris, not Buenos Aires or Mexico City.

LEFT: Venezuelan migrant Robert Jimenez sells produce at the edge of the public market in Boa Vista. His prices undercut those of the Brazilian vendors, but he says Brazilian shoppers avoid him nonetheless. RIGHT: Albert Aquino, a migrant working as a street musician, serenades fellow Venezuelans Olivia Nagas and Erick Alves. Some of the migrants have irritated locals by singing and dancing in public.

On a recent afternoon at a town market, a Venezuelan musician picked up his guitar and began singing a Venezuelan folk song outside a restaurant. Venezuelan customers tapped their feet and sang along.

But the festive atmosphere soured a few stalls down.

“It’s like they have no limits,” complained Nelle de Maciel, 63, a Brazilian seamstress who has worked in the market for five years. “Their life is a party. Our market used to be calm, but now they get together to sing and dance. Sometimes they even clap their hands. We aren’t used to it. When you go to someone else’s house, you need to adapt to their way of life.”

Many in the city also fear the desperate Venezuelans will undercut them in the local job market.

Paulo Sergio Rodrigues, 58, a contractor in Boa Vista, lost half his income after Venezuelan day laborers came to town charging a third of his rate. But he said he will not lower his prices. “It would devalue my work,” he said. He has traded his car for a motorcycle to cut costs.

Others, like fruit vendor Valmor Saldenia, 49, blame Venezuelans for a crime wave that is spooking customers. Petty thefts — particularly shoplifting at grocery stores — have increased sharply, police statistics show.

“People are leaving the market. They are scared their bikes and food will be stolen,” Saldenia said.

Saldenia, who sells corn for the equivalent of 30 cents an ear, says his business has fallen by 50 percent since the Venezuelans began arriving in large numbers.

Just yards away at the entrance of the market, Robert Jimenez, 37, was selling corn for about 16 cents an ear. He earns only a few cents of profit per ear and measures success by survival. On a good day, he’ll eat. On a bad day, he won’t.

A former factory worker from the northern Venezuelan city of Maturin, he came to Brazil two months ago, almost starving. He rented a room with his brother, then they were evicted. The brothers had paid their rent, he said. “But I don’t think they liked Venezuelans.”

Now he’s sleeping on the street.

Despite his low prices, it’s hard to lure Brazilian customers. Many walk away, he said, when they hear his accent. One anti-migrant local threatened his brother with a gun.

At the end of a recent 17-hour workday, he had not sold a single cob or eaten a meal.

Asked how he was doing, he said: “Excellent. I’m still alive.”</s>MIAMI >> One was a Venezuelan army officer who deserted and joined the opposition. The other, a political activist who says he had to flee after pro-government forces attacked his home. They ended up in the U.S., among thousands of their countrymen seeking asylum in what seemed like an obvious place to do so.

But both men have been turned away, learning a hard lesson about the limits of asylum in the U.S. even for people from a collapsing country whose government the Trump administration has condemned.

Helegner Tijera Moreno, the former army officer, is being held at an immigration detention facility in New Mexico pending a final removal order or a last-minute reprieve after a judge rejected his asylum claim. The other man, Marcos Guada, was repatriated to Venezuela in July but quickly fled to the Dominican Republic.

They are still surprised — and somewhat bitter — that the U.S. rejected their asylum bids.

“I came here because I thought the United States was the principal opponent of the Venezuelan government and because I thought we had a good chance of help,” Tijera, 39, said by phone from the detention center. “Sadly, I was wrong.”

Venezuelans, whose country has grown increasingly authoritarian and lawless amid an economic collapse, now make up the largest group by nationality of people seeking asylum in the United States. But they are increasingly being denied and must either return to their country or join the more than 2 million who have become refugees in other countries.

“I was looking to save my life,” Guada recalls of his decision to leave. “My life was in danger.”

Nearly 28,000 Venezuelan asylum petitions, some for more than one individual, were submitted in 2017 by people making “affirmative” claims that they assert upon or after their arrival in the U.S. It was 50 percent more than a year earlier and five times as many as in 2015. Thousands more have made “defensive” claims to stave off deportation after visas expired or after their initial petitions were rejected.

Asylum claims typically take up to four years, though the Trump administration has been accelerating the process as part of a broader policy of increased immigration enforcement.

Last year, at least 250 Venezuelans were deported, up 36 percent from a year earlier. At least 258 were deported in the first half of this year. Another 265 are detained like Tijera, awaiting deportation. Officials won’t say how many had their asylum claims denied but lawyers and other experts say that it’s the majority.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization at Syracuse University, found that nearly half the Venezuelan asylum applications that have come before immigration judges in the last five years have been denied. In comparison, nearly 90 percent of claims from Haiti and Mexico are denied while less than 20 percent of claims from Syria and about 10 percent from Belarus are denied.

To qualify for asylum, migrants must prove they face an imminent threat upon their return of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

“The general violence, the chaos, the economy aren’t enough,” said Juan Carlos Gomez, an immigration lawyer who runs a legal clinic at Florida International University in Miami. “Many Venezuelans apply for political asylum thinking they are coming out of hell and someone is going to protect them but, sadly, that’s not the law.”

Many Venezuelans believe they will be allowed to claim asylum because the U.S. has been such a staunch critic of the government of President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez.

“The American government is two-faced,” Guada said. “They say one thing and do another.”

Advocates for immigrants say asylum seekers misunderstand the system for a reason. “It is a contradiction in the U.S. immigration policy that we often condemn conditions in a foreign country and then deport people to those conditions,” said Royce Murray, policy director at the American Immigration Council.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services won’t comment on individual cases but says it is upholding asylum laws that have been abused.

“The truth is that claims have skyrocketed across the board in recent years because migrants know they can exploit a broken system to enter the U.S., avoid removal, and remain in the country,” said Michael Bars, a spokesman for the agency.

Tijera would seem to have a strong case since he was a lieutenant in the army, and the support of the military is widely seen as key to Maduro being able to stay in power. Two members of the military were arrested this month for their alleged participation in an attempt to assassinate him by drone and Tijera believes he would be imprisoned and tortured if he returns.

He fled the Venezuela in January 2015, crossing the border into Colombia. He sought asylum in Italy but was turned down so he went to Mexico and sought asylum in the U.S. at a border checkpoint in Texas.

“If I were to go back they would put any kind of charge on me. They know I’m a traitor to the country,” he said.

Guada was a businessman back in Venezuela who was active in opposition campaigns in the northern state of Carabobo. He fled Venezuela in 2010, after government supporters attacked his home with rocks and broke down the door, eventually making his way to Laredo, Texas. There he was detained for nearly three months, then released on a $13,000 bond.

His wife had legal residency and his two sons have U.S. citizenship by birth but he still could not convince immigration authorities that he faced imminent danger back home. Eventually he exhausted his appeals and was deported in July.

“I am frustrated,” he said. “I don’t deserve this.”

Tijera was also unable to convince the judge that he faced arrest if he returns home. He was moved recently in the detention center and could be deported at any moment and fears the worst back in Venezuela.

Back in Venezuela this summer, Guada, now 50, wasn’t going to take any chances with an immigration judge back in the U.S. In three days, he boarded a plane and flew to the Dominican Republic, where he is living with his son.

“I was terrified because anyone who speaks against the regime can be silenced,” he said.</s>Colombia and Peru have agreed to build a joint database to share information and better address the flood of Venezuelan immigrants fleeing violence and a crumbling economy.

The countries, along with Brazil and Ecuador, met in the Colombian capital Bogota this week to discuss the issues each country faced with the wave of refugees that is only likely to increase in the coming months.

“We are sure that the solution is to not close the borders, since that in encouraging the irregularities,” said Christian Kruger, Colombia’s immigration director.

The proposed would better track crisis that has been felt throughout South America and better document details about the refugees’ locations, health, education and what services they have accessed, according to press release by Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Relations.

By doing so, the statement said, it will allow the countries to better construct polices regarding the immigration, work, safety, health and education of those migrants.

More than 1.6 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and thousands more pour over the border each day.

In Colombia, the government has reported around 1 million Venezuelans who have settled across the nation. Peruvian officials say there are more than 400,000 living in the nation.

As the two countries continue talks of the database, they have extended an invitation to other governments in the regions to join them in their effort.

“We must, from the sovereignty of each country, search for strategies that allow us to provide attention and identify these migratory flows and most importantly, to make them an active part of society,” Kruger said.

Colombia and Peru to build joint database on fleeing Venezuelans was last modified: by
The European Union announces an aid package of €35 million ($40.6 million) for Venezuelans, both inside the country and for those displaced in neighbouring countries.