FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

We followed Venezuelans fleeing their country’s dire economic crisis

These two young women said goodbye to their families and began their journey to Peru.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro may have won a second six-year term in office last week, but the low voter turnout — as low as 32 percent — tells the bigger story.

Many Venezuelans didn't bother voting because they're fed up with Maduro's increasingly autocratic actions, as well as the food shortages, exorbitant prices, crumbling hospitals, and violent protests that have come with the nation's worst economic crisis ever. But it’s not just anger and indifference that kept Venezuelans from the polls. About 5,000 of them have been fleeing the country every day for the past few months. Around 1.5 million people have moved abroad since 2014, when oil prices started to plunge and rampant inflation took hold. Arantxa Acosta, 25, is a bioanalyst who used to work at a lab but quit because she wasn’t making enough money to live on. “The most an international company pays is 20 million [Venezuelan bolivares] per month, and here cooking oil costs 2 million,” Acosta told VICE News.

Others are packing their bags and leaving because they can't get proper medical care for their families. Eliana Escobar decided to leave her family behind after she experienced firsthand the medicine shortages. “One day I went with my niece [to the hospital]. She had gastritis,” Escobar said. “It was a private hospital. And even with that, there was no medicine for her.” If the migration rate remains steady, 1.8 million Venezuelans could leave the country by the end of 2018.

VICE News followed Acosta and Escobar as they said goodbye to their families and began their journey to Peru.

This segment originally aired May 21, 2018, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.