Caracas (Venezuela), 11/27/2024, Sr. Nícida Díaz Leal.- The Clamor Network Venezuela gathered from November 4 to 7, 2024, to elect the coordination team for the 2025-2027 term, share experiences, evaluate, and organize to continue our commitment to pastoral care for human mobility, alongside migrants, refugees, displaced persons, and victims of human trafficking.
During this national meeting, we had the opportunity to hear the cries of our migrant brothers and sisters:
- “Make our situation visible: our dignity, the causes that forced us to leave, the difficulties along the way, the challenges of staying and integrating, and the contributions we make.”
- “Act against the growing dead ends we are facing: help us to enter, to pass through, and to stay.”
- “Pay special attention to those we leave behind, to the children and adolescents traveling with us, to missing migrants, to those stranded or uprooted, to our psychological and emotional health, to new climate migrations, to Haiti’s migration crisis, and to the most dangerous routes we are forced to cross, such as the Darién Gap.”
- “Focus on victims of human trafficking, denouncing this crime in all its complexity, preventing it in every aspect, and advocating for public policies to enforce existing regulations.”
- “Coordinate, work together, be increasingly prophetic, address the root causes of forced migration, and collaborate with others to ease the burden on those who welcome, protect, receive, defend, or fund these services to make them possible.”
These cries are prayers that reach the heart of God, urging us not to remain idle but to commit ourselves anew and walk with our people in the way of Jesus, helping others feel more human and more like brothers and sisters. To be a cloud that shelters, embraces, integrates, and protects, and a pillar of fire that sustains and illuminates the path, strengthening the hope for a more dignified future where people can thrive wherever they arrive.
We know this commitment is not easy, but we trust God will give us the strength to move forward, keeping our eyes on Jesus, who personally experienced what it means to be a migrant, displaced, and refugee, exposed to dehumanizing conditions. His Word will guide us on how to welcome, protect, integrate, and promote those forced to leave their countries due to humanitarian crises, wars, persecution, hunger, and more.
To see, listen, judge, and act are the dynamics that guide us in the Clamor Network, helping us respond to this increasingly difficult reality as best we can. Amid migration, people in irregular mobility face protection risks such as extortion and fraud, labor and sexual exploitation, physical harm, violence from irregular armed groups, document retention, deprivation of liberty, theft, and more.
We are deeply concerned about the consequences of migration in our country: the loss of professionals due to brain drain, fragmented families, those left behind (children and the elderly), vulnerable individuals, and suicide attempts.
We also examined the challenges our migrants face in host countries, including human trafficking, labor and sexual exploitation, forced begging, psychological and emotional impacts of change, xenophobia, and more.
We took time to reflect: “What have we accomplished together in 2024?” Our answer is a grateful memory in our hearts. We thank the host countries for their support of our migrant brothers and sisters, the diocesan and parish Caritas organizations, and religious institutions that provide shelters, hydration points, food, hygiene kits, medical care, psychosocial assistance, and legal aid. We are also grateful for the humanitarian aid from NGOs and United Nations agencies, as well as those supporting those left behind with psychological counseling for migration grief, the prevention of illegal migration and trafficking, and job training for youth and returnees.
Thank you, because every humanitarian action becomes a work of charity, accompanied by pastoral care, as Pope Francis reminds us in his message for the 110th World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2024: “Many migrants experience God as a traveling companion, a guide, and an anchor of salvation. They entrust themselves to Him before departing and turn to Him in times of need. They seek comfort in despair, and thanks to Him, Good Samaritans appear along the way. To Him, they entrust their hopes in prayer.”
With grateful hearts, we presented this reality during the Eucharist and entrusted it to the heart of Our Lady of Guadalupe. With her maternal presence, she shows us the path of synodality, reminding us that God walks with His people in this migration reality, giving us the fraternal strength to welcome and accompany those who come to us, asking not to be abandoned.
Our prayer will be the strength that fosters solidarity, represented in so many welcoming faces, outstretched hands, and fraternal hearts.