Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I want to thank you, Carolina, because I think you included all the problems and the numbers of Venezuela. I want to highlight the humanitarian crisis that we are living in, in Venezuela, and with the Venezuelan migrants in Latin America. In Venezuela the overall poverty rate i

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No. As Carolina said, the circumstances have worsened. The problem is that if you are a refugee or—

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Okay. The problem is that when people come back, they find that Venezuela has worsened in the numbers in terms of lack of medicine, food and everything. If you are in a country where you don't have legal status, you don't have enough. You have an informal job or you don't have a

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  What is going on is there is no hope for Venezuelans inside Venezuela. A lot of people, young people, don't see any future for themselves or their children, so they try to leave. From 2017, the flow of migrants has increased, and they are leaving by the thousands. They get to dif

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, remittances, but that's finished with the COVID because the people don't have jobs. The people in Venezuela do not work because there are no formal jobs, or very few of them. They stay home all day long. The children have no connectivity. They don't have classes and they don

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. The problem is that we don't have enough testing in Venezuela, so the people are dying. The last resort, as you said, is that they die from COVID, so there are a lot of people dying. We don't have the statistics, the numbers, because we don't have the tests. The government s

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's in Venezuela. This is inside Venezuela, yes.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Canada has been very helpful with respect to immigrants in all of the countries around, but I am always asking for help for the people who stay in Venezuela. We need to work maybe with NGOs, as we have a lot of NGOs working inside Venezuela, to try to keep the children and the pe

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm sorry, but I'll speak in English.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The problem is, for example, that in Colombia or on the border with Brazil, prostitution and sexual abuse and everything are sometimes the easier ways to get some money. I have even heard that some professionals who can't get jobs in their profession end up doing pornographic pho

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  There is no social distancing in the camps. The dining areas they had at the borders, for two or three years, have been closed. They don't have access to free food to support their families. They are on their own. They just closed the borders. It's dangerous in every country, but

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In Canada you have 45,000 Syrian refugees, and you are very proud of that. You have in Canada 1,500 Venezuelan refugees. We're asking Canada to open up a bit with the programs, with something that can help the Venezuelans to come to Canada with all the restrictions you want. We f

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  This is very important, because our NGO has an alliance with a Canadian NGO, and we sent in almost 8,000 meals to Venezuela in 2020. If we at least can guarantee the children food and education.... Maybe we can do some online education. Maybe in some programs we can give them som

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  COVID is like a weapon for the government. They use the COVID situation to repress and control the population. They even control the food and the gas. Everything is about the sanctions from the United States. We may have a lot of gas for a few months, but there are long lines of

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's not only women and girls, as Carolina said. There is always human trafficking of organs. Children are very affected by this.