Enmanuel

When this project started I didn’t expect it to grow into what it is now. In late 2017 I heard about the growing Venezuelan refugee crisis through spotty news coverage and later through a friend covering Venezuela and Colombia for the Guardian (UK). After doing some initial research and talking to folks on the ground I traveled to La Guajira on the Colombian Venezuelan border just before Venezuela’s fraudulent May 2018 presidential election.

La Guajira is the second most impacted region in Colombia. I embedded there for over a month nearly a year before any international attention was focused on the region and was welcomed into the lives of the most affected; from those sleeping rough on the beach to Wayuu indigenous communities supporting their Venezuelan Wayuu cousins in remote rancherias. During that time I gained an intense understanding of the crisis from an emotional and psychological perspective which cemented my adherence to only focusing on the humanitarian crisis faced rather than the political.

Over 5 million people have fled Venezuela. Geography is crucial, If this were on the shores of Europe or the southern U.S. border it would have never gone underreported for this long. Compared with the Syrian refugee crisis, in which the global community has contributed an average of $1500 (USD) per person, the Venezuelan refugee crisis has only received an average of $125 (USD) per person. In La Guajira where each micro-crisis of this calamity are compounded, I realized the only way people would pay attention was if they can draw parallels to the lives of those affected. Initially I planned to build this project as a narrative photographic essay but it didn’t take long to understand that the intensity of this crisis needs a larger platform than still photography and a more intimate perspective.

After I returned to Canada in July, I spent the remaining months of 2018 analyzing the stories of those who I had met and photographed, trying to better understand from where and with whom to build this intimate perspective. I had met former teachers, nurses, accountants, and tradespeople who had their lives in Venezuela reduced to nothing by kleptocracy. Families torn apart, children as young as 10 sent across the border to fend for themselves, women forced through poverty into survival sex work. So many harrowing stories extending far outside of the lived experiences of our possible audience that rather than invoking empathy, we might cause the reverse effect and incite voyeuristic pity. Finally I decided that the best way to develop this narrative was to find a family who are attempting to build something up for themselves past the rubble of what they left behind, past the categorizations they didn’t choose, to build a narrative of hope through sacrifice.

In March 2019 I returned to Colombia, traveling from Bogota, to the border city of Cúcuta in the east and to the Darien Gap in the north. Then in June 2019, through an educational foundation operating in Unir 2, an informal neighbourhood near Bogotá’s airport, I met the Arias-Moreno family.