Migrant trajectories: Venezuelan youth in Peru. Executive summary

Abstract

Since 2015, the political and economic situation in Venezuela has generated a deep crisis that has occasioned a massive migration of people to different countries in Latin America and the world. More than one million Venezuelans have arrived in Peru in the last five years. Our country has also become the nation with the largest number of asylum seekers of Venezuelan nationality in the world. This massive migration is a new phenomenon for Peru, which has traditionally been a place of origin or transit of migrants rather than a destination.

Venezuelan migration is due to various factors such as degradation of living conditions in all socioeconomic strata, food and medicine shortage, hyperinflation, and the decline of purchasing power of salaries, increased insecurity and violence, and heightened threat to fundamental rights and freedoms because of the political crisis. Venezuelan migration, and particularly its situation in Peru, has been the subject of interest from international organizations and civil society, as well as from different scholarly disciplines. However, the trajectories of Venezuelan migrants have not been studied from any perspective until now. Exploration of this specific subject is the main contribution of the book summarized in this executive summary.