Thrown into the street in the midst of a pandemic: this is the life of thousands of Venezuelans in Peru
With a population close to 32 million inhabitants, Peru is the second South American country with the most positive cases of COVID-19, the third in the American continent and the sixth in the world
During the economic and political crisis created in Venezuela by the imposition of the total blockade of the United States, the European Union and allied governments, many Venezuelans have decided to emigrate to other countries in search of tranquility and better living conditions. But not everyone has the same luck, and what started as a dream ended up becoming a nightmare, and many are totally exposed and living on the street.
The bubble in which thousands of Venezuelan migrants lived exploded with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which generated strict confinement measures that left these people in total vulnerability. Without any income, because many of them work informally and without sufficient savings, they have not been able to continue paying the rents of the pensions, rooms or houses that they had rented.
The portal Venezuela Migrante, created to promote Venezuelan migration as the only way out of the crisis that the South American country is facing and which has an editorial orientation that supports the idea of a parallel pseudo ‘government’, published an article regarding the situation that those Venezuelans who fled their nation are living abroad.
The article entitled “Evictions in Peru: Venezuelans at risk due to lack of resources for rent” and written by Ayatola Núñez, tells the story of one of these evicted families, victims of psychological abuse, threats of physical violence, and who ended up thrown out onto the street to live their fate.
«On March 15, when the quarantine began in Peru, some tenants of rooms, houses and apartments did not ‘ease’ their agreements with their tenants. Thus, foreigners — including Venezuelans — and Peruvians who were left without resources to pay, saw the eviction as an immediate event. Other tenants were given a new term for payment. There were also lessors who were willing to wait until the end of mandatory confinement to receive payments.
But rents are not always made under strict legal guidelines. It can happen, as is the history of the Uzcátegui Contreras family, who instead of a contract, had reached a verbal agreement”, the article describes.
Life on the street
The Uzcátegui Contreras informed that the eviction occurred between verbal violence and threats to physical integrity against family members. “We stayed on the street in the middle of Easter, on April 9, the second extension of the quarantine was just beginning”, says Leo, the father of the family.
«By that date, Leo Uzcátegui, 31, and father of two minors, had already been without work for almost 15 days. He was in charge of delivery services for a restaurant near his home, in the San Juan de Lurigancho district”, the note added.
He explains that it all started with harassing phone calls and visits to remind them that they had to leave.
«Until one day the landlord arrived and with enormous rage began to kick the door. One of my sons opened and the screaming started. He threatened us and told us that we had until eleven in the morning to get out of there. He told us that he had 100 soles available to pay two thugs, who also lived in the pension, to get us out”.
The family decided to remove their belongings from the home and spent the night on the street. “Neither the police came to see what was happening or warn us that we should protect ourselves by the curfew”, says the father of the family.
The Uzcátegui decided to stay in Lima, unlike other evicted families who chose to return to Venezuela, whose testimonies integrate the history of the walkers who have taken trails and green paths to return to their homeland.
More than 55,000 families are at risk on the street
According to the publication, approximately 55,000 families are in the same situation of ending up on the street. Many are family groups made up of single mothers, couples with young children, someone with reduced mobility or people with disabilities.
Regarding this situation, the Peruvian Ombudsman Office warned and recalled that evictions, when they occur in a state of Emergency, are illegal, and much more if there is no final judicial sentence.
“Faced with this type of situation, those affected can request the intervention of the National Police and the Public Ministry, who must attend to cases urgently”, the institution said in a statement.
“The authorities should not ask tenants for written contracts to protect them from physical or verbal attacks”, he added.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit numerous countries hard, especially those whose governments were not able to apply preventive and sanitary control measures in time. In South America, the tendency is that the coronavirus has affected the States with right-wing leaders in the most severe way, including: Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia and Bolivia.
With a population close to 32 million inhabitants, Peru is the second South American country with the most positive cases of COVID-19, after Brazil, the third in the American continent and the sixth worldwide, with more than 283 thousand infected and many deceased, according to data from the University Johns Hopkins in his interactive map on the behavior of the coronavirus, until this June 30, 2020.
Highlighted social inequality
The situation in Peru is striking because in the list it is one of the countries with the least number of inhabitants and at the same time with a high level of contagion in its population.
Peru is only surpassed by giant nations such as the United States, which has almost 330 million inhabitants and is the current global epicenter with almost 2.6 million cases and more than 126 thousand deaths. Then there is Brazil, which, with 209 million inhabitants, has more than 1.3 million infected people and almost 60,000 deaths.
In global figures, the pandemic has already surpassed the figure of 10.2 million confirmed infections with more than 505 thousand fatalities.
Another of the edges that makes Peru more vulnerable is the informal economy, one of the main forms of income for most Peruvians, especially those who leave their provinces, to look for a way to improve their quality of life and financial contributions for their families, in the capital, Lima.
Peru has a population similar to that of Venezuela, which presents figures totally opposite to that of the country that has been under so many attacks by the Lima Group lobby, a seditious platform created with the auspices of the United States to pressure and try to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, with a total iron blockade, which has made its citizens suffer.
To date, Venezuela has only 5,500 positive cases, but about 70% of the total are from Venezuelans who decided to return to their country due to the precarious and vulnerable conditions lived abroad, mainly from Colombia (almost 100,000 cases and more than 3,200 deaths), Brazil, Peru, Ecuador (more than 55 thousand cases and more than 4,500 fatalities) and Chile (seventh in the world with more than 276 thousand cases and almost 6,000 deaths).
Meanwhile, Venezuela has one of the lowest death toll from COVID-19, with just 48 deaths.
The pandemic has served not only to throw thousands of evicted Venezuelans onto the streets, but also to show the seams of all these countries to which they decided to emigrate, especially those that in recent years have had governments dedicated to disproportionately attack Venezuela and promote migration as if it were an ‘American dream’.
