Migrants returning to Venezuela face debt and harsh living conditions

MARACAIBO, Venezuela — The hands of Yosbelin Pérez have made tens of thousands of the aluminum round gridles that Venezuelan families heat every day to cook arepas.

MARACAIBO, Venezuela — The hands of Yosbelin Pérez have made tens of thousands of the aluminum round gridles that Venezuelan families heat every day to cook arepas. She takes deep pride in making the revered “budare,” the common denominator among rural tin-roofed homes and city apartments, but she owns nothing to her name despite the years selling cookware.

Pérez, in fact, owes about $5,000 because she and her family never made it to the United States, where they had hoped to escape Venezuela’s entrenched political, social and economic crisis. Now, like thousands of Venezuelans who have voluntarily or otherwise returned to their country this year, they are starting over as the crisis worsens.

“When I decided to leave in August, I sold everything: house, belongings, car, everything from my factory — molds, sand. I was left with nothing,” Pérez, 30, said at her in-laws’ home in western Venezuela. “We arrived in Mexico, stayed there for seven months, and when President (Donald Trump) came to power in January, I said, ‘Let’s go!’”