This report focuses on the youngest victims of Venezuela’s worsening crisis: children fleeing the country, often with their families and sometimes alone, in search of food, medicine, schooling and safety. It follows journeys across borders into neighbouring countries, where families arrived exhausted and with few belongings, hoping for help that was not always available. The film shows how a crisis measured in economic statistics becomes, for a child, a disrupted education, a missed meal and a home left behind.
The programme explores why so many families decided to leave, from shortages and failing hospitals and schools to the fear that conditions would only get worse. It also looks at the risks children faced on the road and after arrival, including exploitation, separation from parents, and the difficulty of enrolling in new schools or receiving medical care without documents or money. Aid workers, teachers and parents describe the strain on host communities as well as on the families themselves.
For readers interested in socialism’s history and present, this story is a powerful test of any political project: its effects on children, who bear no responsibility for the policies that shaped their lives. Venezuela’s mass emigration, one of the largest in the region’s modern history, cannot be understood without listening to the young people at its centre. The video below presents the full report.