Venezuelan exodus nearing crisis point

The exodus of migrants from Venezuela is building toward a "crisis moment" comparable to events involving refugees in the Mediterranean, the UN migration agency said on Friday.

Growing numbers are fleeing economic meltdown and political turmoil in Venezuela, where people scrounge for food and other necessities of daily life, threatening to overwhelm neighboring countries. Officials from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru will meet in Bogota next week to seek a way forward.

A pregnant Venezuelan woman offers to wash car windows at traffic lights in Boa Vista, Roraima state, Brazil. Photos were taken on Friday. Photo: Reuters

In Brazil, rioters this month drove hundreds back over the border. Peru this month tightened entry rules for Venezuelans, requiring them to carry passports instead of just national ID cards, though a judge in Ecuador on Friday rolled back a similar rule enacted there.

Describing those events as early warning signs, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Joel Millman, said funding and means of managing the outflow must be mobilized.

"This is building to a crisis moment that we've seen in other parts of the world, particularly in the Mediterranean," he told a news briefing.

On Thursday, the IOM and UN refugee agency called on Latin American countries to ease entry for Venezuelans, more than 1.6 million of whom have left since 2015.

Venezuela's information minister, Jorge Rodriguez, said on Friday that a new package of economic measures meant to address hyperinflation would win over Venezuelans who had left the country.

Venezuela on Monday cut five zeros from prices and pegged the country's currency to an obscure state-backed cryptocurrency. Critics slammed the plan as inadequate in the face of inflation that topped 82,000 percent in July and is expected to reach 1 million percent this year.