Venezuelans angry with their government, a deteriorating economy, and a seemingly intractable political impasse marked 100 days of protest on Sunday — demonstrations that have often turned violent and in which more than 90 people have been killed.
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Venezuela is at risk of losing an entire generation
"The country has broken down because of what we have lost ... That has an impact on the social reality."
Security forces take position in front of a demonstrator during rallies against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas.
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The protest movement that emerged at the end of April is not the first to appear. Venezuelans took to the streets for several weeks in spring 2014 in protests that left more than 40 people dead.
Protracted discontent in Venezuelan has also spurred another kind of movement: the migration of Venezuelans to other countries in search food, medicine, work, and security.
Emigration has moved in waves over the past 20 years. Many elites left in the early 2000s, dismayed at political changes made during the early days of Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution. Educated people and skilled workers left during the latter half of the 2000s. Since 2010, the country's youth and middle classes have departed.
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A 2015 survey found 10% of Venezuelans were working on paperwork to leave. A September 2016 poll showed that 57% of registered voters — some 12 million Venezuelans — wanted to leave. That sentiment has only intensified.
Polling done over the last half of 2016 and the first half of 2017 found that 35.3% of respondents wanted to leave Venezuela to live and work elsewhere in the next three years — nearly triple the 12% who said the same in 2014.
However, among Venezuelans 18 to 29 years old, the desire to leave was even stronger — 53% said they wanted to leave the country to live or work in the next three years. Among 30- to 39-year-olds, nearly 40% said they wanted to leave, while just under 31% of Venezuelans between 40 and 49 years old said the same.
"The country has broken down because of what we have lost," Emilio Osorio Alvarez, a professor and president of the Venezuelan Population Studies Association, said in an interview earlier this year. Many Venezuelans in their prime working years have left or want to leave, "leaving a population of older adults," he said. "That has an impact on the social reality."
have already leftAnd the growing number looking to leave means that the outflux now draws from a broader segment of Venezuelan society.
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"Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela," told Business Insider.
Venezuela's neighbors have received more and more people who are in increasingly desperate situations.
Colombia has taken in more Venezuelans than any other country, thought to be more than a million over the last 20 years.
So many wealthy Venezuelans arrived in Colombia during the initial years of Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution that they drove up property values and packed elite private schools. Now Venezuelans often arrive with little more than their clothes — many using unpaved roads to cross the two countries' largely porous border.
Jungmann said the Brazilian government was developing plans to deal with a possible wave of Venezuelan migrants. "Our biggest concern is the humanitarian situation," he said. "We need to have a contingency plan in place to handle this if things get worse."
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Peru has become a magnet for Venezuelans since offering temporary visas allowing them to work and study there earlier this year.
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