- Since 2014, the humanitarian and social crisis in Venezuela has forced more than 6,000 Indigenous people to leave their ancestral lands and find refuge in Brazil.
- In Manaus, the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon, the Warao people from the Orinoco Delta are forced to beg on the streets to survive.
- Despite government measures to promote the integration of Indigenous communities in Brazil, the Waraos still struggle to find jobs, education and medical assistance.
Dinora Moraleda, 33, breastfeeds her 4-month-old daughter, sitting on the floor of a 10-square-meter (107-square-foot) room with eight family members. Her cough is dry, a sign of the pneumonia she caught in the insalubrious run-down building she lives in, located in Cidade de Deus, a poor district in the north of Manaus, in the state of Amazonas. A year earlier, she was breastfeeding her son Jordi in the same building, but he died of pneumonia at the age of 18 months because she could not afford to take him to the hospital.
Moraleda is from the Warao people, Venezuela’s second-largest Indigenous community, with 30,000 members, who once lived according to a more traditional way of life in one of the country’s most remote northern regions.
The name Warao means “the boat people.” They consider the Earth, called Hobahi in their language, to be a disk floating in the middle of a body of water and believe that everything in nature has a spirit. Far from the lush forests where they once grew up, they now survive on only one meal a day. Often, it’s a meager portion of fish and rice. Moraleda left the country in 2016, fleeing the humanitarian and economic crisis there; 26 family members joined her later in Brazil.
Amazonas state is dotted with Warao communities. Now, around 800 of them live in Manaus, mostly in the Cidade de Deus slum. Moraleda had no idea what life had in store for her. Forced to beg in Brazil, even when suffering from pneumonia, she would stand with her sick son Jordi in her arms in front of traffic lights: “I would beg even when we were both sick, because to get to the hospital you have to take three buses, and I couldn’t afford to get there without begging.”
Like Moraleda, 12 families of Warao origin live in 5-m2 (54-ft2) rooms in the makeshift shelters in Cidade de Deus. Their life in the lush forest seems a long time ago. They originally came from the Orinoco Delta, a labyrinth of rivers stretching more than 25,000 square kilometers (9,650 square miles) and comprising more than 300 canals.
On the banks of one of these canals, Moraleda’s family lived in a stilt house in the Yorinanoko community, a small remote village. Moraleda’s mother, Amelia Cardona, remembers those days with nostalgia. “We had two small canoes, my husband fished, we planted yucca, bananas, sugar cane and lived quietly,” she recounts.
Like many Warao refugees in Brazil, the Moraleda family had already migrated within Venezuela to Caracas in 2008 when the father of the family suffered a stroke. “He could no longer fish or work, and the medicine that kept him alive was increasingly difficult to obtain,” Cardona explains. Her husband struggles to speak but pulls out his 120 mg box of phenobarbital from his pocket, the medicine that stops him from shaking uncontrollably.
The largest exodus in Latin America in a century
The Waraos’ history is littered with experiences of forced migration. The Indigenous groups were first displaced in the 1960s to make way for hydrological projects that diverted their water supply. Epidemics such as cholera, malaria and measles appeared at the same time, forcing some Warao to leave their villages.
But it is the current economic crisis, which has seen the Venezuelan economy collapse due to an 800% inflation rate, which has driven the latest wave of Warao to emigrate in search of economic opportunities, medicine, fuel and basic food.
Daisy Pérez, 42, who was a teacher back home in Venezuela, is one of those who fled. In 2017, she traveled hundreds of kilometers by boat, bus and on foot to reach Pacaraima in Brazil, in the northern state of Roraima, and Manaus a few months later.
She lost her salary and instead had to survive by selling handicrafts on the road to Brazil with her four children and husband. Two of her sisters and her parents joined her. “Any place seemed better at the time than Venezuela. It was leave, or stay and see our children starve to death,” she says.
Since 2014, Venezuela’s humanitarian and social crisis, which has seen record inflation, has compelled thousands of residents to flee for neighboring countries. Brazil has welcomed more than 400,000 Venezuelans. More than 3 million people have fled the country, the largest exodus in Latin America in a century, representing around 10% of the Venezuelan population. Around 6,000 Indigenous Venezuelans, including the Warao, have entered Brazil since 2014.
When the Venezuelan migration began, the Brazilian government had shelters built for the refugees. It also adopted certain legislative measures to promote the integration of Indigenous communities in Brazil, including the extension of Indigenous rights. This means that the constitutional protections reserved for Brazilian natives now also apply to natives of all countries. The Waraos are therefore legal refugees in Brazil.
But the majority of Waraos have found no permanent employment in Brazil; the men typically unload fishing boats and receive a few fish in exchange for their labor. Most speak their mother tongue and know only a few words of Portuguese, and virtually none of them have any formal education. To pay the rent, they are reduced to begging.
Tuberculosis and parasites
Former teacher Daisy can’t get used to seeing her community living in such miserable conditions, and as one of the few to have completed higher education, she has become the de facto representative of her community. She knocks on all doors to ask for help. “At the beginning, we received food baskets; there were all the associations like ACNUR [UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency] that helped us, but as our situation ceased to be considered an emergency, now we have nothing.”
She has arranged with doctors in the village for all the Waraos in Cidade de Deus to get one free medical checkup, and she takes stock of the patients: Around 20 people have contracted tuberculosis, while many children are heavily affected by parasites.
Magaly Pérez, 36, Daisy’s sister, explains: “To fool the children’s stomachs, we give them water and sugar when we’ve got nothing left, even though we know it’s not good for them, but it’s better than nothing. I don’t have any money to buy them milk,” she says in despair. The mother of three tells us that her 13-year-old daughter passes in the street smelling the scent of freshly roasted meat. “She asks me why we can’t eat it; I wouldn’t wish it on any mother, not being able to feed your children properly.”
The Waraos have free access to the public hospital. But there, they are discriminated against by nurses and doctors. Many avoid seeking care for that reason.
One of the local doctors explains: “The situation is catastrophic. Some of them arrive at the public hospital where I work, and say it’s been a week since they’ve eaten to be able to feed their children first. I have colleagues who get rid of them because they don’t understand their language,” the doctor says. “There should be translators and a real care system.”
Isolated, the Waraos have little faith in their future. Daisy Pérez explains: “Our only hope is to have land and be able to live as we did before the crisis and our successive displacements. The women would be able to make handicrafts again, and the men would be able to work in the fields.”
No more trees of life
Departing from their ancestral lands has been traumatic for the Warao, who lost a fundamental part of their culture and traditional way of life.
Paulito García shows his phone with a picture of his previous home in his village of Mariusa, located in the Orinoco Delta: a house made of moriche palm (Mauritia flexuosa), the tree of life for the Waraos. “We used the moriche tree from head to foot: the fruit for food, the palm for building, the fiber for handicrafts,” he recalls.
García and his six children now live in the center of Manaus in a downtown building they call “Hotel 583,” in a neighborhood that has the reputation to be dangerous, with 20 other Warao families. On the sidewalk, a 15-year-old girl smokes crack as the wails of police sirens can be heard a bit farther away. García, who was a cacique, a village chief, worries about the fate of his children, who don’t go to school in Brazil.
“Without land, without education, what are they going to do when they grow up? I’m afraid their lives will be reduced to these four walls”, he confides. Daisy Pérez, the Warao’s representative in Cidade de Deus, has managed to get the community’s first children into primary school, a source of hope for her: “If they learn the language, if they learn a trade, they have the same ability as others to integrate and earn a life.”
On the second floor of Hotel 583, the teenagers sit idle. They haven’t found a boat to unload this morning, and they are now missing out on the few fish they would get for their labor. Some have eyes reddened by drugs, others by despair.
Banner image: A Warao woman wearing a traditional robe in her shelters in Cidade de Deus slum, in Manaus, Brazil. Image by Nicola Zolin.
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