Venezuelans Are Trapped by a Chronic Passport Shortage
- Hundreds queue for documents government can’t deliver
- Estimates that of 1.8 million requested, 300,000 were supplied
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Joel Bustamante was fed up with the soaring cost of living and the shootouts and petty crime in his working-class Caracas neighborhood. He was ready, he decided, to do as so many of his fellow Venezuelans have done and flee the crisis-torn country. He lined up a factory job in Chile, bought a one-way plane ticket and packed his bags.
All he needed was a new passport. He ordered it six months before his scheduled flight. Plenty of time, he was told. But days of waiting turned into weeks, then months. To this day, eleven months after that flight left for Chile without him, Bustamante, a 24-year-old cab driver, continues to wait.