“You very rarely saw a depressed woman in the neighborhoods. Men, yes, but not women. And this year we have already had three cases of female suicides. The backbone of the barrios is breaking,” Alfredo Infante, who as Jesuit parish priest of La Vega attends to half of the 120,000 inhabitants of that part of southwestern Caracas, told correspondents.

Petare, one of the largest and most dangerous slums of Caracas.

In Venezuela’s urban slums, “women are the decisive figure and are key to understanding the degradation of the neighborhood. Until now, more men migrated, but I think we are going to see more female migration,” he said.

In the area of Las Torres de La Vega, a neighborhood near the Pan-American highway that was once a receiver of immigrants, “first the Ecuadorians left, then the children of Colombians, then their parents, then the Andean people (from western Venezuela)… I used to pass through there and people in the afternoons were on the sidewalks, talking, interacting. Now you pass by and the streets are deserted, it looks like a ghost town,” said the priest.

According to Infante it is an “unstoppable” phenomenon. “With the economic deterioration and the loss of quality of life we are experiencing a radicalization of social depression, which will translate into increased migration.

And the neighboring countries can forget about the border (with Colombia) being closed: it is too long (2,219 km) and porous, and closing it would only help the mafias who live off those who migrate, and the situation is similar in the case of the border with Brazil,” he said.

Infante, who is also an expert on migration issues, said he hopes that the Latin American countries worried about the Venezuelan wave of migration “will do as Mexico did and put into practice the Cartagena Declaration of Refugees (signed by Latin American countries in 1984), which characterizes as refugees people in a situation of forced migration, in this case, due to a deterioration of their living conditions.”