The Children Left Behind: Mothers and fathers are fleeing Venezuela in search of work, leaving hundreds of thousands of children to fend for themselves.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Holding back a surge of tears, Aura Fernandez kissed her children and climbed aboard the bus, the first leg of her long journey to Colombia.

"I love you," she said. "Study hard."

With that, Fernandez became part of the flood of Venezuelan parents who have left their country--and their children--in order to find work to support them.

Seven years into an economic collapse, Venezuela's migrant crisis has grown into one of the largest in the world. Millions have already left. By the end of 2020, an estimated 6.5 million people will have fled, according to the United Nations refugee agency--a number rarely, if ever, seen outside of war.

But hidden inside that data is a startling phenomenon. Venezuela's mothers and fathers, determined to find work, food, and medicine, are leaving hundreds of thousands of children in the care of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and even siblings who are sometimes children themselves. Many parents don't want to put their children through the grueling and often very dangerous upheaval of displacement. Others simply can't afford to take them along.

"This is a phenomenon that is going to change the face of our society," says Abel Saraiba, a psychologist at an organization that provides counseling to Venezuelan children. These separations, he adds, have the potential to weaken the very generation that is supposed to one day rebuild a battered Venezuela. In 1998, the country elected socialist politician Hugo Chavez as president. He nationalized many parts of the economy and seized the assets of many foreign businesses.

When Chavez died in 2013, his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, took over, and the country's many long-festering problems began to come to a head. For years, Venezuela's economy had been kept afloat by oil exports. But the price of oil plummeted in 2014, leaving the government effectively broke.

Now hyperinflation has made the country's currency, the bolivar, virtually worthless. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Venezuela's annual inflation rate (the rate at which prices increase) is more than 1 million percent. That's an almost unimaginably fast rate of price increase, and it means that no one's salary has any value because the prices of basic goods--when they're even available--rise so fast that people can't afford them.

In 2019, a political crisis developed on top of the economic one: Opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido challenged Madura's authoritarian rule by declaring himself to be the country's...