Meeting with Alba Pereira, Colombo-Venezuelan, Director of the “Entre 2 Tierras” Foundation, Bucaramanga, Santander

I arrived on February 14th 2004 (Valentine’s Day), fleeing persecution for openly expressing my opposition to the Chavez’s regime while he was still President.

After a few years at Bucaramanga, in August 2013, together with my partner, we decided to open a restaurant serving typical Venezuelan food. I am a chef and she is an economist, so we didn’t have much knowledge about immigration issues. Therefore, we started to look for answers to the questions we were asked and we managed to come up with effecient answers.

The foundation “Between two lands” has been serving and supporting the migrant and repatriated population of Venezuela for the past 8 years.

Among the services provided are humanitarian food aid, focus on the routes of the Caminantes, legal and immigration advice and guidance on the rights and duties that Venezuelans must respect.

We have thus been able to see that needs change according to the type of migration, i.e. in 2014, for example, migrants were entrepreneurs, managers or small investors whose needs were essentially of legal matter. On the other hand, the migration at the end of 2017, showed different needs, more oriented towards migration regularisation, access to health, employability, housing and education.