Starving Venezuelan women sell their hair to feed their children. NYT (photos)

In Colombia Border Town, Desperate Venezuelans Sell Hair to Survive
By JOE PARKIN DANIELSFEB. 17, 2018

CÚCUTA, Colombia — For the past three weeks, Wilya Hernández, her husband and their daughter, 2, have been sleeping on the garbage-strewn streets of Cúcuta, a sprawling and chaotic city on Colombia’s side of the border with Venezuela.

Though Antonela, the toddler, often misses meals, Ms. Hernández has no desire to return home to Venezuela.

“I need an angel,” Ms. Hernández said, holding back tears at 1 a.m. on a humid recent night. “We can’t go back, and we can’t stay here.”

It is a view shared by thousands of her compatriots who have fled to Cúcuta, where the struggles of adapting to life in a new country can seem more attractive than the hunger and upheaval they endured back home.



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Ms. Domínguez, from Margarita Island on Venezuela’s northern Caribbean coast, was able to save enough to pay for her passport and bus tickets, though many Venezuelans are not so lucky.

Without passports or the right to work, thousands of Venezuelans in Cúcuta who held down decent jobs back home are now begging for food and change. When work is available, often in construction or reselling contraband candy at traffic signals, pay is low.

A good day brings in 15,000 Colombian pesos, or about $5, which goes to food, water and paying to use bathrooms in cafes. There is seldom anything left over.

“I sold my hair to feed my girl,” Ms. Hernández said, pulling back her locks to reveal a shaved head underneath, adding that wigmakers now walk the plazas of Cúcuta where many Venezuelans congregate, wearing signs advertising that they give cash for hair.

The going rate in the border town for women’s hair is 30,000 pesos, or about $10, less than a third of the price in Bogotá, the capital.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/world/americas/venezuela-crisis-colombia-migration.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Remember now... the NY Times is the mouthpiece for the oligarchy and right-wing fascists... these stories are propaganda and the pictures are all staged in order to make Bolivarian Socialism look bad!