Autonomy and Struggle in Times of Viral Borders: Venezuelans Across the South American Andes During Covid-19

ABSTRACT

This article takes a close look at Venezuelan migrants' experiences throughout the Andean corridor of cross-border mobility during the COVID-19 emergency. It focuses on the differentiated characteristics of their fragmented journeys to trace the potential of struggles in reclaiming autonomy in contemporary migration. Conceptually, it expands on Nicholas De Genova’s ‘viral borders’ to explore the ways migrants rechannelled, reimagined, and remade their trajectories amid the recent wave of violent, nationalist border controls, expanded in the name of public health. The article argues that, to cope with the consequences of COVID-19 management, Venezuelan migrants made mobility choices related to their differentiated access to social and material resources, enmeshed in prevailing racialised, classed, and gendered social structures. Meanwhile, migrant struggles enabled autonomy amid fragmented journeys opposite Covid-19-related attempts of nationalist (re)bordering. It is suggested that, as legacies of viral borders become more evident, autonomy and struggle remain key in shaping mobility amid the exclusionary post-pandemical border regime.

Introduction: And People Kept On Moving

The violent exercise of sovereign authority at borders was intensively reinforced during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in much of the world. Generalised coercion over people crossing national boundaries was often justified by invoking the need to safeguard ‘public health’ (Casaglia 2021; Heller 2021; Stierl and Dadusc 2022; Tazzioli 2020b; Tazzioli and Stierl 2021). Throughout this ‘pandemic of viral borders’ (De Genova 2020, 2021a, 2021b 2022), the COVID-19 sanitary crisis was used by states worldwide ‘as a pretext and as an opportunity for implementing or intensifying draconian controls at their borders, resorting to a simple-minded logic of “national” quarantine to justify violent border closures, and often vicious tactics of migrant and refugee immobilisation’ (De Genova 2022, 142).

In South America viral borders spread quickly, severely impacting the Andean corridor of cross-border mobility, shared by Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, among other countries. The initial COVID-19 outbreak was followed by stringent migrant (im)mobilisation tactics, related vilification discourses, and a diverse set of legal/political hindrances, directed by a plurality of authorities. Migrants and refugees of diverse origins and nationalities were radically affected. As part of their diverse and fragmented journeys throughout the Americas, thousands of them had moved across the region on a regular basis for decades, mostly overland (Álvarez Velasco 2022).

Notably, viral borders impacted people going to and coming from Venezuela under precarious conditions. In public discourse, ‘Venezuelan migrants’ became the objects of intensified suspicion, exclusion, and rejection in the name of public health (Acosta and Brumat 2020; Freier and Castillo Jara 2021; Freier and Vera Espinoza 2021). Paradoxically, they substantially contributed to the ‘essential labour’ that kept the region’s lockdown-impacted economies moving (Ivancheva and Pla 2022). Meanwhile, many defied immobility, reorganised their migration journeys amid renewed calls for (national) social cohesion, and enacted diverse forms of solidarity in face of border violence. Other (re)initiated their own journeys as they dealt with the economic consequences of Covid-19.

In rechannelling, reimagining, and remaking their cross-border trajectories, Venezuelan migrants momentarily escaped, and at times subverted, the stringent conditions imposed through the border regime in place, exerting greater or lesser degrees of autonomy (Domenech and Boito 2019; De Genova and Garelli 2018; Varela Huerta 2020a; Mezzadra 2011; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013; Scheel 2020; Squire 2017). Such experiences were shaped through a broad set of migrant struggles ‘in which migrants openly challenge[d], defeat[ed], escape[d] or trouble[d] the dominant politics of mobility’ (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015, 80). Indeed, Venezuelan migrants struggled to continue their journeys during the pandemic in diverse manners (Bolívar and Rodríguez 2021; Brumat and Finn 2021; Eguiguren et al. 2021). Still, the particularities, productive effects, and legacies of those struggles have not been fully addressed to date.

Building on this initial concern, in this article I expand on De Genova’s viral borders to make two contributions. On the one hand, I focus on the characteristics of migrants’ autonomy in front of viral borders. I follow De Genova in acknowledging that people moving across borders during the pandemic ‘remain[ed] subjects who ma[d]e more or less calculated strategic and tactical choices about how to reconfigure their lives and advance their life projects despite the dispossession and dislocation of their […] condition’ (De Genova 2022, 141). In so doing, I argue that Venezuelan migrants made such choices in relation to their differentiated access to social and material resources to cope with the consequences of COVID-19 management. Broadly, such differences were enmeshed in struggles over racialised, classed, and gendered social structures, previously shaping migration trajectories across the region.

On the other hand, I scrutinise the conjunction of migrant struggles amid viral borders and the ways in which migrants’ autonomy is exerted. Through a digitally conducted empirical observation of experiences of Venezuelans, I outline some of the ways in which the ‘constitutive power’ (Aradau et al. 2022; Mezzadra 2020; Squire 2021) derived from migrant struggles is a decisive element in ‘appropriat[ing] mobility and realis[ing] migratory projects’ (De Genova 2022, 141). I thus argue that autonomy is boosted through struggle, leading to prolongating migrants’ moments of excess in front of attempts of sovereign (re)bordering, also amid differentiated access to social and material resources in times of Covid-19, renewed, nationalist politics.

To develop this argument, first, I locate viral borders, as both a product of a renewed form of sanitary nationalism and as a conceptual heuristic to approach migrants’ struggles during Covid-19. This serves as a necessary step in understanding the intimate relation between viral borders and the (re)configuration of mechanisms of sovereign rule during the pandemic. Second, I build on the notion of ‘fragmented journeys’ to explore the Andean corridor of mobility that is conceptualised in this study. Besides, I comment on the methodology used. Third, I examine the spread of viral borders across this corridor. In so doing, I focus on six thematically defined moments to showcase the complex relation between viral borders, migrant struggles, and autonomy. Finally, I sum up the main findings of the research while pointing out the importance of observing struggles and autonomy in post pandemic times, overwhelmingly shaped by renewed calls for nationalist bordering politics.

Viral Borders, Migrant Struggles, and Autonomy

Viral borders and nationalism are intimately related. In an early assessment, De Genova argued that such ‘purportedly protective measures envisioned to exclusively safeguard nation-state’s citizens’ in face of COVID-19 were enmeshed in ‘enactments of bombastic nationalism, which in their most “populist” forms, are turned into opportunities to re-border the “people”’ (De Genova 2020, 49 my translation). Starting from this observation, I suggest that viral borders played an important role in the (re)affirmation of sovereign authority amidst the unease and uncertainty that emerged during the pandemic. Viral borders served to recreate and sustain alleged differences between the ‘national’ –as a purportedly compact collective in which pandemic-related risks are under control– and the ‘other(s)’ –risky, threatening, and contagious–, in both material and discursive ways.

Yet, appealing to nationalism was not an inherently effective tactic in this context. Framing the viral spread as a threat to the ‘national community’ did not guarantee that related governmental actions would automatically be deemed legitimate. Pandemic-related uncertainty and unease generated distrust, disorientation, and scepticism among the citizenry (Bigo, Guild, and Kuskonmaz 2021; Ratcliffe 2021). As a result, extoling protection during COVID-19 was accompanied by different strategies for social cohesion building which brought ‘forward national identity as both a personal and a collectively experienced feeling […] but [also as] a manipulative tool, a mobilisation instrument, a populist ground, as well as a deception, a masking, repressing or overshadowing real social processes’ (Klivis 2021, 170).

Viral borders contributed to the enactment of a ‘national identity’ by rendering visible differences and affirming national markers under a sense of emergency and exceptionality. Borders and bordering in the pandemic were expected to contribute to the production of social cohesion and reshape ‘the nation’ opposite an ‘external’, collective, imminent threat (Nyers 2018; De Genova 2013; van Houtum 2010). The production of foreignised ‘others’ and their (im)mobilisation and control was thus based on the presumption that their (unauthorised) movement and foreign origin made them threatening vectors of contagion (Casaglia 2021; Ozguc 2021). Importantly, this framing was structurally enmeshed in the racialised and uneven dynamics of global cross-border control (van Houtum 2010). Not all people on the move were portrayed as posing an equivalent risk to ‘public health’. Racialised and precaritised groups of people, often seen as unruly migrants navigating the contemporary dynamics of exclusionary border control, were deemed riskier than more privileged groups crossing borders, to the point of often depicting those non-national lives as disposable (Otieno Sumba 2021; Tazzioli 2020a).

Indeed, once the first lockdowns were lifted in 2020, cross-border mobility was first eased for returning nationals, foreign businesspersons, tourists, and (non-national) family members. In the case of the latter three, their admittance at the border was often subjected to their financial capabilities, their ‘national origin’, and the accomplishment of sanitary protocols. Authorities often deemed the contributions of these persons to the national post-lockdowns ‘economic reactivation’ necessary –and desirable (Heller 2020). Meanwhile, precaritised groups of people crossing borders –including persons in need of international protection– were discursively framed as increasingly threatening, through being portrayed as ‘unruly’ (Tazzioli 2020c, 5), ‘risky’ (Garrapa and Camargo Martínez 2021, 5) and ‘contagious’ (De Genova 2020, 49). Their mobility remained the object of active scrutiny, while juridical/political tactics of ‘exceptional’ border enforcement mushroomed.

Some of the most visible examples of such measures were the ‘containment’ of people at and beyond the border (Casaglia 2021; Heller 2021; Stierl and Dadusc 2022) and the multiplication of different mobility control practices such as incarceration (Tazzioli 2020b; Tazzioli and Stierl 2021), exhaustion (Ansems de Vries and Welander 2021), abandonment (Heller 2020), and deportation (Mena Iturralde and Cruz Piñeiro 2021). Simultaneously, existing tactics of migrant irregularisation (Vera Espinoza et al. 2021; Jauhiainen 2020) and externalisation of border control (González Arias and Aikin Araluce 2021; Garrett 2020) were expanded and adapted to the underlying sanitary rationale. Many of such measures were framed under legal instruments which have used public health as a pretext to protract organised border violence deceitfully, such as in the case of the infamous Title 42 in the United States (US) (Fabi, Rivas, and Griffin 2022).

Nationalist-imbued viral borders made border violence both a normal and a presumptive legitimate happening in the pandemic. They have been a powerful instrument for ‘rendering punitive actions and expanding surveillance technologies legitimate’ (Domenech 2020, 19 my translation) ever since the initial outbreak. The ‘Covid-19 excuse’ has facilitated the normalisation and legitimation of various forms of biopolitical and necropolitical violence against people crossing borders (Stierl and Dadusc 2022, 1469). Meanwhile, the ideological affirmation of a stringent regime arresting cross-border movement of classed, racialised, and gendered groups has advanced (Garrapa and Camargo Martínez 2021). This transition has been hidden behind an ‘infrastructure of mobility control [which is] not primarily about migration [but] about protecting public health, [as an] objective shared by a suite of domestic measures, including quarantine, lockdown, social distancing rules, internal travel restrictions, mobile app contact tracing, and so on’ (Triandafyllidou 2022, 26).

To focus on the prevalence of migrants’ diverse mobility projects in this context, I follow De Genova (2022, 2021a) in observing viral borders as reactions to cross-border mobility, the latter being a total social fact before the pandemic. Defiance of viral borders reveals anew that cross-border movement precedes the structuration of national-state projects (Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias 2020; De Genova and Garelli 2018; Mezzadra 2011). Moreover, it highlights the existence of moments of migrant autonomy and excess shaping the (dis)continuity of their own mobility projects (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; De Genova 2013; Stierl 2018). Cross-border mobility during COVID-19 remained ‘a social and political practice, embodied in migrants and refugees, unequally and differently enacted at national and transnational scales’ (Álvarez Velasco 2020, 11 my translation) even in front of renewed derisive and violent excesses of sovereign power.

As in other contexts, mobility in face of viral borders has been reclaimed through migration struggles, as subjective ‘practices and vindications of freedom and equality which are not necessarily defined across formal definitions of citizenship’ (Domenech and Boito 2019, 163 my translation) and related practices of ‘insubordination’ (Cordero, Mezzadra, and Varela 2019, 11 my translation). Importantly, these struggles are imbued with a certain ‘constitutive power’ (Squire 2021, 18), essential in tracing the (dis)continuity and (re)channelling of mobility projects. Moreover, I side with the view that struggles in front of viral borders are essential to trace migrants’ experiences as ‘person[s] who in order to move to or stay in a desired place, ha[ve] to struggle against bordering practices and processes of boundary-making that are implicated by the national order of things’ (Scheel and Tazzioli 2022, 3 my emphasis).

Hence, I contend that struggles in front of viral borders remained an essential part of migration journeys because they allowed for the (dis)continuity of mobility under such a derisive environment, and because they were substantial for migrants in the process of being political subjects amid purportedly legitimate nationalist exclusion. Importantly, people mobilised differentially in relation to their own situatedness and possibilities. Autonomy in front of viral borders was informed by the contrasted impacts of racialised, classed, and gendered social structures that pervasively attempt to govern migrants’ mobility, and their own possibilities to access diverse social and material resources to cope with the consequences of COVID-19 (Garcés-Mascareñas and López-Sala 2021; Scheel 2020; Sharma 2020; Álvarez Velasco, Lourdes Pedone, and Miranda 2021; Álvarez Velasco 2021; Álvarez Velasco and Varela Huerta 2022). Yet, struggle often became a vehicle to boost their autonomic potential, despite such disbalances. In the remainder of the article, I develop this idea through an empirical observation of Venezuelan migrants’ struggles in front of viral borders along the Andean corridor. I start by setting out the conceptual and methodological standpoints of my reflection in the next section.

Following Migrants’ Fragmented Journeys Across the Andes

Venezuelan migration is one of the largest cross-border mobility processes in the world (Seele and Bolter 2022; Freier and Vera Espinoza 2021; Betts 2021). Most scholarship signals the country’s social, political, and economic turmoil as the main driver of migration (Freier and Doña-Reveco 2022; Freitez, Lauriño, and Delgado 2020; Legler 2020). In early 2022, six out of a total population of 32 million Venezuelans lived abroad (R4V 2022), representing an eight-fold increase from the 725.000 persons who lived outside their country one decade before (Osorio Álvarez and Phélan Casanova 2019, 255). Some 4.1 million Venezuelans lived in four contiguous Andean countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile (R4V 2022). Literature describes how the trajectories of Venezuelan migrants across these and other countries in the Andean region –such as Bolivia, Paraguay or Argentina– have transformed these societies while overland, unauthorised, and fragmented mobility has become a lasting feature in the region (Bolívar and Rodríguez 2021, 1–2).

Many Venezuelans have been persecuted in their country according to the criteria of the Geneva Convention and the Regional Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, or due to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity (Vera Espinoza et al. 2021). Yet, there has been an intense debate regarding the ‘politics of labelling’ (Sajjad 2018) over Venezuelan migrants’ status as subjects of international protection. States have responded unevenly in this regard (Vera Espinoza et al. 2021). This has led to irregularisation, limitations in access to rights, and precariousness (Amaya Castro, Moreno, and Pelacani 2019).

Analysing such complex migrants’ experiences across Andean countries requires stepping back from ‘traditional understandings of migration and migrants […] focused on predominantly dichotomous categorisations based on time/space, location/direction and causes’ (Collyer and de Haas 2010, 469). I suggest to move away from applying state-proffered categories to this extensive process, as they blur the linkages between the region’s physical and social geography, related institutional transitions, and migrants’ subjectivities, both allowing and inhibiting their mobility (Garcés-Mascareñas and López-Sala 2021). I employ the notion of ‘fragmented journey’ (Brigden and Mainwaring 2016; Collyer 2010; 2007; Collyer and de Haas 2010) to delve into the ‘separate stages, involving varied motivations, legal statuses and living and employment conditions’ (Collyer 2010, 275) in migrant experiences, while drawing attention to the fact that trajectories may be ‘planned in advance, but one stage may arise from the failure of a previous stage, limiting future options and draining resources’ (Collyer 2010, 275). I thus take distance from the view that cross-border mobility is the sheer result of objectively defined or structurally delimited causes and the epistemic products derived thereof.

The analysis of Venezuelans’ fragmented journeys over the Andean corridor of mobility is thus based on several empirical observations. At first sight, overland journeys departing from Venezuela seem to be constrained by physical geography, namely, the sparsely populated and densely forested Amazon basin, extending across the country’s borders with Brazil and Guyana. Even if both countries are contiguous to Venezuela’s easternmost regions and host a significant number of migrants and refugees in their territories, Andean neighbours to the west host at least ten times more (R4V 2022).

Many Venezuelans have undertaken their overland journeys by heading to the westernmost sections of the country, where the Andean space emerges. Infrastructure, more limited in the east and the south of Venezuela, thus plays a role in shaping mobility dynamics. The scale of cross-border movement is significantly larger towards and across Andean countries, as evidenced by dense mobility networks, active social and political collectives, and a substantially politicised discussion around the subject of mobility. Social geography also impacts the picture, as is evident in how cultural and linguistic differences, resulting from contrasting colonial and republican histories and differing institutional developments, influence migration projects (Freitez 2019, 46–47). Venezuela shares a far-reaching postcolonial legacy with other Andean countries, apparent in the use of Spanish, the reliance on seemingly similar political institutions, and other sets of historical, cultural, and social commonalities.

The corridor extends over the countries crossed by one of the most untamed and tallest mountain ranges in the world, but also by nearby valleys, wetlands, cold deserts, a vast hydrological system, and extensive tropical forests. The space is linked by official and unofficial physical infrastructures in either a permanent or intermittent manner, depending on the season of the year and local politics. Thousands of roads, pathways, bridges, and passages constitute a network of physical and social interconnection between Venezuela and different locations and cities along the Andes, constituting a suitable setting for analysing an evolving ‘viapolitics’ in the region (Walters 2015; Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2021). Many migrants use buses and related means of public, often informal, transportation, and many others rely on hitch-hiking or walking, or on a combination of both. In time, a dense complex of social networks has emerged across the corridor, making this one of the most vivid, extensive, and complex –and yet still widely underexplored– geographical spaces of contemporary global migration.

Before the pandemic, most journeys departed from Venezuela and finished in different places throughout the Andes after having traversed potentially thousands of kilometres overland (Roth 2021). Migrants, however, often returned temporarily or permanently to Venezuela using the corridor (Freitez 2019), which shall not be seen as an unchanging or fixed space. From the Andes, other corridors branch off across Argentina into Uruguay and the south of Brazil, where migrants and refugees have also established residence (Facal Santiago and Casal Gil 2021). Furthermore, Venezuelans are not the only nationally framed group on the move. They are accompanied by migrants from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, mostly en route to Central America, Mexico, and the US (Méndez Barquero 2021; Álvarez Velasco 2022), as well as by other South Americans, such as Colombians who were previously settled in Venezuela and started anew with their own mobility projects (Riaño 2022).

Conceptually speaking, the Andean corridor constitutes a space for geographically framing and researching migrant journeys and their specific trajectories (Brigden and Mainwaring 2016; Iranzo 2021), for locating the analysis of power relations along distinct territorialities (Agnew 2009), and for exploring the impact of infrastructures (or the lack thereof) and transportation means on the politics of cross-border mobility (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2021). Yet, due to its extent and complexity, researching this space implies important methodological challenges. With the start of the pandemic and the implementation of mobility restrictions all over the corridor, research limitations increased. I thus conducted an exploratory digital ethnography, resulting from adapting Marcus’s multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) to approach autonomy, struggle, and viral borders over the Andean corridor.

More specifically, I chose to follow virtual interactions of Venezuelans moving and living across Venezuela and Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, the Andean countries hosting most migrants, statistically (R4V 2022). I thus assumed the perspective that digital spaces are constitutive of the social world and not exclusive repositories of information for the research endeavour (Caliandro 2016). I then centred on developing a sense of ‘virtual’ transactions, not only as a representation of the ‘physical’ world, but also as inherently constitutive of reality (Airoldi 2018).

I continued by adapting traditional ethnographic endeavours, such as observation, interviewing, and in field self-reflection, to a group of equivalent digital research activities, whose potential has been explored increasingly in migration research, as virtuality has become an integral part of migrant experiences and journeys across the Andes and abroad (Frouws et al. 2016; Zijlstra and Van Liempt 2017). In the words of a Human Rights activist in Peru, ‘a major part of Venezuelan migrants, even those in the most precarious conditions, are internet and social networks users’ as these constitute ‘their only tool for communicating with their families and relatives [and] informing them about the reception communities’ (Online interview, June 29, 2021).

Hence, I designed three sets of activities in my digital ethnographic endeavour covering March 2020 (start of COVID-19 related lockdowns) to January 2022, focusing on the analysis of fragmented journeys, migration experiences, and the intertwined official positions. First, after observing public interactions across the region on four popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, I consolidated a data matrix. Digital snowballing, based on following available hypertexts, allowed me to then prioritise around 250 digital entries, defined as significant according to their popularity, as measured either by number of retweets, times shared, or times viewed, depending on their format (text, audio, video, or a combination of these). Second, from these initial procedures, I identified a pool of prospective interviewees. 29 persons, among them Venezuelan migrants, activists, and officers, speaking from 17 locations across the region, accepted my invitation to an online semi-structured interview. Third, I analysed over 150 pieces (text, audio, and video) of media items which contain verbatim declarations and testimonies of migrants, officials, and researchers. I examined over 80 hours of audio and video and ran additional documentary research. Once the collection activities were structured, I conducted a thematic analysis of the data, aimed at defining, first, the main strategies of viral bordering in the region, second, the specificities crossing autonomy and border struggles alongside and, third, the legacies of viral borders in the incipient post pandemic. I comment on these findings in the remainder of the text.

Struggle and Autonomy Across the Andes in Times of Viral Borders

The Pre-Pandemic Picture

Visible bordering and nationalist-inflected (im)mobilisation strategies directed at people leaving Venezuela were already common across the Andes before the initial COVID-19 outbreak. In the mid-2010s, during the early days of what has commonly been labelled as a ‘humanitarian and migratory crisis’ (Domenech and Dias 2020, 50 my translation), most South American governments announced their openness towards Venezuelan migrants. Officials appealed to solidarity, generosity, and justice in light of a seemingly unprecedented situation in the region (Acosta, Blouin, and Freier 2019). However, these responses were for the most part embedded in a complex political setting. Migration was seen as a consequence of increasing authoritarianism and the related economic upheaval in Venezuela. Governments vilified the incumbent regime, seeking to boost their domestic and international prestige (Zenteno Torres and Salazar 2021). Quickly, the idea of a ‘Venezuelan exodus’ (Freier and Parent 2019) popularised. In ‘receiving’ countries, migrants were often reduced to humanitarian subjects in need of state protection and control (Fassin 2010).

Originally, many Venezuelans relied on the previously existing South American mobility regime, which had been negotiated at multilateral instances such as UNASUR and MERCOSUR and allowed for visa-free travel (Brumat 2020; Ramírez et al. 2017). Initially, thousands reached their destinations through air transport, an option which became dramatically limited as several international airlines cancelled their operations and many local carriers disappeared, once economic turmoil exacerbated (Deutsche Welle 2020). Reliance on cheaper and less bureaucratised means of overland mobility intensified, as more precarious groups of migrants set out to travel (Doña-Reveco and Gouveia 2021).

In time, tensions began to emerge, and a common semantic of nativism, criminalisation, and racialisation of Venezuelan migrants gained momentum (Freier and Pérez 2021). Nationally defined restrictions thus mushroomed. By late 2019, costly tourism visas and bureaucratised humanitarian permits had been implemented across the region (Blouin 2021, 149), including Chile’s ‘Democratic Responsibility’ visa, which served to deter Venezuelans’ asylum applications (Dufraix Tapia, Ramos Rodríguez, and Quintero Rojas 2020). Moreover, diverse ‘regularisation’ schemes developed across most Andean countries with mixed effects. Conditional access to rights, production of liminal citizenship, and impediments to obtain refugee status have been common elements of these policies, usually presented as part of a humanitarian/protective ethos (Del Real 2022; Oyarzún Serrano, Aranda, and Gissi 2021; Aron Said and Castillo Jara 2020). Across the region, class, racial, and gender-based differences among ‘earlier’ and more ‘recent’ migrants have also been integral to shape ‘integration’ policies. Meanwhile, tactics of exhaustion and waiting have been employed to make access to asylum and regularisation programmes more difficult (Tijoux 2019).

As cross-border policing increased, fragmentation in migrants’ journeys became more visible. People stranded at national border crossings and camping in public spaces became common (France 24 en Español 2019; Deutsche Welle 2018). Migrants and activists mobilised, in order to call for solidarity and fairer regulations (Ramsey and Sánchez-Garzoli 2018). Meanwhile, hostility at border-crossing points grew. As controls in Chile impeded ‘regular’ border-crossings from Peru, the Peruvian government restrained migrants from crossing over the border from Ecuador, where, at the same time, entries from Colombia were inhibited by newly designed measures. Long-standing political animosity between the Colombian government and its Venezuelan counterpart had already led to the intermittent operation of authorised border-crossing points, while mobility across the shared borderland continued (Ramos Pismataro and Rodríguez 2019, 549). Irregularity of border communities has thus been actively produced for several years now (Palma-Gutiérrez 2021a).

Broadly, unauthorised border crossings, related smuggling and trafficking, increased precariousness, and the production of migrants as risky subjects were prominent features of migrant journeys across the Andes before the initial COVID-19 outbreak (Acosta and Brumat 2020; Bolívar and Rodríguez 2021; Mazza 2020). It was ‘often not the case that entire journeys [were] planned in advance [,] but [that] one stage [arose] from the failure of a previous stage, limiting future options and draining resources’ (Collyer 2010, 275).

Two variants of viral borders

With the virus outbreak in early 2020, fragmentation of Venezuelan migrant trajectories increased as viral borders spread quickly. New and intensified bordering mechanisms based on sanitary nationalism were rendered legitimate as authorities averred that public health was at stake (Gandini, Prieto Rosas, and Lozano-Ascencio 2020; Riggirozzi, Grugel, and Cintra 2020; Castro Neira 2020) Aside from legal/juridical hindrances, these measures involved a complex set of symbolic and discursive moves with diverse biopolitical and necropolitical features. Based on my empirical observation, two broad sets of such practices can be analysed in this context. Using a biological analogy, I called them variants.

A first variant of viral borders focused on categorising migrants returning to and departing from Venezuela as both sanitarily risky (potential vectors of disease transmission) and unruly (undisciplined bodies resisting official immobilisation measures such as confinement and travelling bans in place). Such process has been conducted through techniques of day-to-day labelling, intensified through sanitary-related discourses, and quotidian practices of healthcare (Aradau 2004). Meanwhile, media played an essential role, as it was entwined in the production of a rhetoric of national cohesion and framing of difference. This form of viral borders spread progressively, as the effects of the pandemic turned mobility into ‘an object of government and, at once, a technique for governing migrants’ (Tazzioli 2020c, 3). Labelling and framing people in official and private stances, as well as (re)producing discourses linking migrants to the spread of Covid-19, were common happenings attached to this variant.

A second variant involved the enactment of spectacularised forms of border control, aimed at rendering sovereign power visible and traceable (De Genova 2013). These, often graphically violent, and structurally undemocratic practices, were performed at territorial borders and directed at migrants’ very own bodies (Stierl 2018). In such mises-en-scène, a specific performative element was essential to catalyse cohesion in nationalist emotion (Klivis 2021), through a set of visually and easily communicable moves, tailored for media and aiming at making the exclusion of ‘sanitarily risky’ migrants visible (De Genova 2013).

During the pandemic, both variants overlapped. They worked as a joint set of actions aimed at (re)bordering the ‘people’ and the ‘nation’ with varying degrees of intensity and duration. Their effects on migrants have been multiple and unequal depending on experience, situatedness, and history. Yet, both are crossed by migrant struggles. Observing these struggles presents an opportunity to disentangle the complexity shaping migrant autonomy in face of viral borders.

Coping with Deceleration

From the initial COVID-19 outbreak on, people struggled with viral borders. Indeed, mobility decelerated almost instantaneously (De Genova 2022). Officials in the region promptly announced the need for confinements and other exceptional (im)mobility-related measures such as ‘mandatory social distancing, [as] the only way to stop the virus propagation’ (Vizcarra 2020). The economic contraction was sensed quickly (ECLAC 2022). The incomes of Venezuelan migrants engaged in informal or precarious economic activities were impacted immediately. Many were evicted by landlords, as they were not able to pay their bills (Acosta and Brumat 2020, 3). Amid plummeting work opportunities, virtually inexistent savings, and restricted access to public economic support programmes, many envisaged returning to Venezuela, despite the prevailing pre-pandemic political and economic turmoil. In words of a woman stranded near Bogotá (Colombia):

Many of us were working […]. But with the pandemic, we lost our jobs. Those who were not able to pay […] were evicted … Now, we do not want to stay here any longer. (Caracol Radio 2020).

Meanwhile, official international border crossings, including those along land, air, and maritime corridors, had already been interrupted for ‘the wellbeing and healthcare of all the citizens of the region’ (Duque 2020). Some humanitarian return flights were agreed upon with the Venezuelan government. Yet, few persons benefited, as they were part of a complex bilateral political negotiation (González 2020). Many prospective travellers feared that contacting Venezuelan authorities from abroad would risk them being considered ‘traitors’, as they had left the country time ago (Redacción El Pitazo 2020). Hundreds of Venezuelans took to the streets of several cities in the region. They camped in front of embassies and consulates, calling for ways to ease their return to the country (Soto 2020). Other persons defied the immobilisation scheme. As a man who had recently started to walk from Ecuador to Venezuela argued:

[I] left [Venezuela] because of the crisis, but now, it is more practical to go and stay there with my family, than staying here during the pandemic, where I do not get any [economic] help. (Impacto Mundo 2020)

Viral borders had a deceleration effect on Venezuelans’ journeys. Many were indeed temporarily immobilised. However ‘their mobilities remain[ed] an intractable and always potentially disruptive constitutive power’ (De Genova 2022, 139). Different groups of people, with diverse resources and myriads of life experiences at their disposal, were able to exert certain degrees of autonomy to reconstitute their journeys allowing them to transform ‘waiting from “dead time” into more or less productive time’ (De Genova 2022, 139). Such autonomy was reclaimed to a greater or lesser extent in relation to available (material, social, and symbolic) resources and the (non)prevalence of specific characteristics derived from dominant classed, gendered, and racialised social structures.

The ways in which individuals and families crossed national borders throughout the Andes in an unauthorised manner until they reached Venezuela exemplify this. Access to different forms of capital seemed to be an important element in enacting mobility at this point. Some migrants were able to pay fees to locals administering the crossing. Other bribed officials at closed crossings or relied on ‘traffickers’ (Grattan, Faiola, and Herrero 2020). Yet, material resources were only a part of the story. The differentiated capacity to deal with violence and criminality – constant features of these journeys – was another element that enabled mobility to a greater or lesser extent. Journeys of women were oftentimes shaped by specific forms of gender-based violence, which lead to acuerpamiento¹ becoming an essential strategy to enact their mobility (Varela Huerta 2020b).

The first variant of viral borders spread rapidly in this context. People’s unauthorised movement accentuated a sense of fear and uncertainty among ‘national’ communities towards the possibility of migrants’ bodies as COVID-19 transmission vectors (Segnana 2020). Official messaging on media and social networks aimed at deterring the mobility of Venezuelan ‘returnees’, and was expanded in name of national health (Palma-Gutiérrez 2021b). The health protection rationale nurtured diverse calls for self-discipline and immobilisation as a responsibility (UE en Perú 2020).

However, different expressions of ‘autonomous solidarities’ (Dadusc and Mudu 2022) appeared alongside. According to information compiled in nine interviews across the region, dozens of informal local, regional, and nation-wide networks of volunteers formed rapidly, via WhatsApp and social media, in support of people getting back to Venezuela and of those who had been immobilised forcefully. These exercises of transnational solidarity across cities and roads, and around spontaneous temporary outdoor settlements included the provision of humanitarian aid, the organisation of digital activism, and health campaigns. Importantly, the popularisation of WhatsApp, other messaging services, and social media more generally, also served authorities to trace migrants’ trajectories in this context (IMMAP 2021). Such experiences coexisted with governments denying the opening of official land-border crossings, even if air travelling restrictions had been eased for more privileged travellers from June 2020 on (América Economía 2020).

Andean borderlands and their dwellers were impacted substantially by viral borders. In the Colombian-Venezuelan borderland, for instance, an official ‘humanitarian corridor’ was implemented during the first months of the pandemic (Migración Colombia 2020). However, only a few hundred Venezuelans a day were authorised to cross, even if, at times, thousands were stranded waiting. Both governments used the situation to fuel their long-standing animosity, mutually accusing each other of incompetence (Espinosa Palacios 2020). Venezuelans stranded at the Colombian side of the border were commonly portrayed as potential COVID-19 spreaders. Meanwhile, prices, precarity, and violence rose in the so-called trochas, unofficial border-crossing points often dominated by a myriad of economic actors and, increasingly during the pandemic, criminal dynamics (Fundaredes 2022). With people continuing to move, the human consequences became visible immediately. A woman shared her testimony:

When I crossed through the trocha, I was robbed. They took it all … My clothes, my food, my ID … Guardias [Venezuelan border officers] took my phone … (Acosta 2020)

Besides that, the foreignisation² of Venezuelan nationals getting back to their country became commonplace. High-ranking officials accused returning migrants of being ‘bioterrorists’ (Bolívar and Rodríguez 2021, 10), who had been ‘deliberately infected with the coronavirus’ (Mazza 2020, 3) by foreign, rival governments. As a result, sections of the general Venezuelan public further spread these fears by tagging returning migrants as ‘risks’ of foreign origin (Venezuelan activist in Colombia, online interview, July 6, 2021). Authorities labelled them trocheros (or persons using a trocha). The label was embedded in a national-sanitary logic, as revealed in an official tweet: ‘An infected trochero is a [foreign] bioterrorist in your zone, who can end your life and your family’s. Report them!’ (Gobierno de Amazonas 2020). Almost automatically, vigilantism along the border intensified (Venezuelan activist in Colombia, online interview, July 6, 2021).

The fate of those crossing the border into Venezuela through authorised channels was also shaped by the derisive national-sanitary governmentality. From April 2020 on, Venezuelan authorities opened several reception centres for returnees who entered via authorised ports. There, according to quarantine rules, they had to stay for 14 days from their entry to the country on (Redacción Maduradas 2020). A woman remembered her stay at one of these facilities:

We slept on the floor, without mattresses … The bathrooms were out of service, the sanitary batteries were blocked […] The women had to clean […] It was a humiliation. They were punishing us for leaving the country before […] I instantly regretted coming back [to Venezuela]. (Mercado 2020)

Activists reported that ‘some migrants who complained or led resistance groups in these centres were [forcibly] disappeared by officers’ (Venezuelan activist in Colombia, online interview, July 6, 2021). Meanwhile, solidarity networks activated spaces to ‘inform the migratory experiences of those who decided to get back to Venezuela’ (Interview with activist in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, May 24 2021). According to official numbers, 140,000 persons returned to Venezuela overland in 2020 from the Colombian side of the border (Redacción El Tiempo 2021). The fragmented nature of these journeys unveils a broader picture of mobility in this context. A migrant activist in Peru contended that:

I know people that went back to Venezuela in 2020 and stayed there for four months, but they came back [to Peru]. They could not stand life there anymore … In Venezuela, even if you pay your bills, you do not get basic stuff regularly … (Online interview, June 22, 2021)

A man in San Cristóbal (Venezuela) argued that:

[There] it is not possible to make a living or to have some stability. We resisted for a while, waiting for a solution … But that never comes, so we escape … Those who are still coming back [should know] crisis here is harder everyday … (Itríago and Ríos 2020)

By late 2020, once the initial lockdowns and confinements had been eased and the first signs of economic recovery emerged, thousands of Venezuelan migrants, with some forming overland caravans, mobilised towards and across Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, mostly through unauthorised border-crossing (Bolívar and Rodríguez 2021). It has been reported that some of these were controlled by criminal bands, corrupt authorities, and a diffuse set of economic actors (Interview with NGO officer in Tulcán, Ecuador, June 24, 2021). Other crossing points were operated by locals who had encountered an economic opportunity to add to their income during the economic crisis experienced throughout the region at the time (Interview with activist in Tulcán, Ecuador October 10, 2021).

By the end of 2020, the deceleration of mobility was defied strongly across the Andean corridor. In northern Chile’s cold desert, close to the triple border shared with Peru and Bolivia, news of groups of persons trying to enter the country through non-authorised points mushroomed, while members of local communities expressed their concerns related to COVID-19 and health (La Prensa del Táchira 2020). Meanwhile, migrant deaths due to exhaustion were reported in the area (Meganoticias 2020). Moreover, thousands of families were stranded at the Colombian-Ecuadorian and the Ecuadorian-Peruvian borders, causing anxiety about the purported intensification of the current health emergency (Diario Correo 2020; Nariño Hoy 2020). Yet, journeys continued. Two young siblings from Caracas (Venezuela) walking through the Pan-American highway south of Lima (Peru) talked about the struggles along their journeys:

We have been walking and hitchhiking […] It has been harsh. Slowly, slowly, people help you … There have been good and bad moments. […] But in the end, this is all an adventure and a sacrifice (La Verdad Vargas 2020).

Confronting Border Spectacles

Performances of sovereign authority constituted a central element in the affirmation of viral borders. Indeed, tailored media enactments, portrayed as exercises of power (re)affirmation, were central in building national cohesion (Klivis 2021; Rai et al. 2021). Their most evident forms acquired a broadly spectacularised manner. Along with the campaign of foreignisation described before, the Venezuelan military began patrolling the country’s borders in search of ‘returnees’ (Manetto 2020). Officials and public alike helped in popularising video and audio material depicting the military manoeuvres. Under nationalistically framed paraphernalia, images focused on citizens’ positive reception of troops. The bodies of hyper-masculinised officials in uniforms were a common feature of these widely distributed representations of national protection.

Similar enactments took place in Colombia, where a joint military-police operation was launched in October 2020 ‘to control unofficial border crossings’ starting in Venezuela (Redacción Vanguardia 2020). The procedure, unequivocally named Operación Muralla (Operation Wall), was graphically publicised by sharing contingents of fully equipped ‘bio-secure’ troops patrolling the borderland. One of the commanders argued that these measures were ‘deemed to oust generators of violence and bring calm back to local dwellers’ (ACVA 2020). Traditional media and people on social networks shared images, videos, and audios, documenting how unauthorised border crossings continued in the desert, through the river, or across improvised pathways, when authorities were not present.

Elsewhere along the Andean corridor, this picture recurred. In late January 2021, the Peruvian army mobilised some 1,200 soldiers and 50 armoured tanks at the border with Ecuador ‘to combat irregular border crossings’ (AFP en Español 2021). For a few days, social and traditional media were flooded with the images of a couple hundred soldiers equipped with automatic weapons and armoured vehicles performing state authority near the border. Meanwhile, authorities insisted on these military procedures being part of the safety measures in place ‘to curtail COVID-19 contagions’ (Redacción El Comercio 2021). An amateur video taken at the border went viral. Two Peruvian soldiers were shooting into the air with automatic rifles, trying to deter a group of Venezuelan migrants, including children, from crossing from Ecuador (Camargo 2021). On Facebook, some locals reacted:

From now on, you won’t get in! Don’t come to Peru! (Venezolanos en Lima 2021)

Nevertheless, the deterring effect of this spectacularised military deployment was limited. Many Peruvians called for a more humanitarian approach by their government (Perú 21 2021). Meanwhile, ‘even if border-crossings slowed down for a while, some weeks later they continued as usual’ (NGO officer in Ecuador, online interview, April 30, 2021). Some authorities perceived this continuity as part of a wider mobility ‘crisis’, notably at the northern Chilean border with Bolivia (Interview with activist in Santiago, Chile, November 11, 2021). A plan (Plan Colchane) to ‘safeguard borders’ and to ‘tidy up the house’ was promptly put into effect. Chilean security forces mobilised under the justification of keeping the virus at bay and reinforcing the fight against ‘migrant and drug smugglers’ (Reyes 2021a).

Concurrently, an infamous set of televised live border spectacles was launched. In February 2021, 86 persons, mostly Venezuelans, but also some Colombians, were deported from Chile by plane from Iquique’s International Airport, while over 50 more persons were returned to Peru and Bolivia overland (24 Horas 2021b). This constituted the first of a continued and contested series of group deportations, set in motion by Chilean authorities, employing an airport as a regulated space for biopolitical border control (Walters 2018). The alleged reasons were people’s unauthorised entry to the country or their alleged engagement in drug trafficking or migrant smuggling.

In accordance with domestic law, authorities avoided the word ‘deportation’. Instead, they offered two types of rationales for the expulsiones (expulsions): ‘administrative’ and ‘judicial’ (ImmiChile 2021a). In any case, the deportation procedure was enacted through a thoroughly calculated mise-en-scène in front of the TV-cameras. Migrants were forced to wear white, ‘bio-secure’ full-body overalls, that contrasted and stood out from the desert landscape. Journalists broadcasted live as a strict queue was formed by people, guarded by visibly armed soldiers, while waiting to get on the plane. The Chilean Minister of the Interior addressed the press:

Our message is clear. We are organising the migratory flow across our border, and those who want to come, must do it through legal paths, […] without threatening those who live in Chile or themselves. (24 Horas 2021b)

He implied that a national-sanitary rationale was behind the expulsion. Some months later, during another group deportation, he defended the governmental scheme:

Our procedures respect migrants’ dignity and follow [anti-Covid-19] protocols … Some want us to grant them permission to stay … I believe they will be better off in their country … (24 Horas 2021a)

The minister was referring to an influential group of activists, lawyers, and migrants working from Chile and other places in the region to stop these procedures. Several related strategies were coordinated under conditions that, due to intermittent lockdowns and other related regulations, were restrained. For example, ‘a network of volunteer lawyers was successful, by making a full case leading to the national constitutional tribunal to declare as unlawful some of the expulsions’ (Interview with activist in Santiago, Chile, November 24, 2021). Also, different online apps administered by Chilean and Venezuelan specialists in migration law and free of charge, ‘were activated, to inform people who are either willing to cross to Chile or fear being deported’ (Interview with NGO officer in Santiago, Chile, December 9, 2021).

The border spectacles served authorities to stage deportees in the media and to produce images that generated contradictory emotions such as fear, pity, and rage, among others, in national audiences (Gray and Franck 2019; Holzberg, Kolbe, and Zaborowski 2018). Not all migrants escaped the scheme. However, others persisted. While waiting for her deportation in Iquique, a Venezuelan woman mentioned that:

I feel so disappointed […] But, I’ll get on my way out of Venezuela again. I’m not coming back to Chile … but [I’m going] to another country … through the trocha … I’ll get out again. I’m absolutely not staying in Venezuela. (24 Horas 2021c)

Her message was shared online by other migrants watching the deportations. Some argued that the images were part of ‘fake news’, ‘lies’, or ‘smoke curtains’ and that those getting to Chile ‘should not worry’ (Brito 2021). Yet, other persons were more cautious. Some conversations on social networks warned of cancelled or delayed journeys. Meanwhile, viral borders economies continued to adjust. Transportation means adapted to increasing fragmentation, as an ad, posted on and later erased from Facebook, illustrated: ‘Time to travel with professionals. Buses departing from Venezuela. Destinations: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile. Departure, March 15th [2021] Bio-safety equipment and border-crossings included’ (Unknown author 2021, my emphasis). The latter term was used as a euphemism, meaning that potential fees for persons managing crossing points, possible bribes, and other related expenses were included in just one price, convened by the trip’s organisers.

In other locations across the Andes, deportations of Venezuelans in the name of national security – now convoluted with public health – were also normalised throughout the period. In 2020, for instance, some 1,200 Venezuelans were ‘discretionally expelled’ from Colombia, according to a legal disposition that justifies migration authorities to ‘expel those foreigners that in their judgement act or constitute a risk to national security, public order, public health or social stability’ (Ramírez Bolívar 2021). Images, audio, and video references accompanied the procedures constantly (DeJusticia 2021). In Peru, after a failed collective ‘expulsion’ of more than 40 Venezuelans organised in front of the cameras at the Lima airport in late 2021, it was announced that a fully funded ‘expulsion plan’ of Venezuelan citizens would be enforced (Redacción InfoBae 2021). Yet, migrants kept navigating these developments. After threats of new deportations in Peru, a Venezuelan woman commented that:

Many [Venezuelans] moved to Chile and elsewhere. It did not matter, that borders were still closed or that the pandemic was still there […] Those who could, moved. (Interview with Venezuelan migrant, December 8, 2021).

Viral Policy/Viral Politics

Viral borders impacted the formulation of policies that exceed the sheer management of migration. They have also informed the setting of electoral politics in the region, as has been the case more generally with Covid-19. A first approximation to how viral borders were embedded in these political landscapes can be traced to the start of anti-Covid-19 vaccination schemes. In early 2021, as vaccine rollout began across the region, Colombian authorities declared that they would not vaccinate undocumented Venezuelans ‘because this could provoke a stampede of people across the [Colombian-Venezuelan] border’ (Sedano 2020, 2). In time, the posture was abandoned in a politicised manner, instrumental in boosting the implementation of a general regularisation programme or ‘Temporary Protection Statute for Venezuelan Migrants’ (Estatuto de Protección Temporal para Migrantes Venezolanos), which aimed at documenting the residence of at least 1.8 million persons (Presidencia de la República de Colombia 2021). The Colombian president argued that, once they registered, ‘migrants covered by the statute would get their jabs in an orderly manner’ (Castro 2021).

In a renewed nationalist fashion, vaccines in Chile were also used for bordering purposes. In February 2021, the health minister announced the government’s will to combat ‘vaccination tourism’, which in practice impeded undocumented migrants to access vaccines (Ministerio de Salud 2021). Days later, the government changed its position and started to provide jabs for irregularised groups (Chávez and Cifuentes 2021). This occurred alongside the series of collective deportations described before, the expansion of the idea of a ‘crisis’ in the northern regions of the country, and the enactment of a ‘controversial general immigration law’ (Reyes 2021b), focused on ‘the Chilean state’s purported capacity for controlling, selecting, and restricting mobility of people residing in the country’ (Thayer 2021).³

In April 2021, the Chilean president introduced the new law under an explicitly nationalist umbrella, as a tool to ‘tidy up the house’ (again), ‘combat illegal immigration’, ‘ease the administrative expulsions of those who enter Chile illegally’ and ‘defend the interest of those who enter the country in an organised, safe, and responsible manner’ (ImmiChile 2021b). Arguably, he took advantage of the national emotion, recently strengthened during the pandemic. Moreover, the occasion was used to appeal to discipline among those willing to ‘risk their lives when trying to clandestinely enter’ while the pandemic continued (CNN Chile 2021). Yet, people adapted their journeys. According to the UNHCR in December 2021, ‘between 400 and 500 Venezuelan migrants and refugees cross[ed] the Bolivian-Chilean border daily’ (UNHCR 2021). In this context, nativism, xenophobia, racism, and other forms of related violence intensified. In the northern city of Iquique, anti-migrant manifestations turned into mobs raiding informal Venezuelan settlements on different occasions, until as recent as January 2022 at the time of writing (Deutsche Welle 2022a). A human rights activist described one of these developments on the city’s Plaza Brasil in October 2021:

People feared the arrival of migrants amid the pandemic, in the context of economic crisis … Violence was real. Animosity was nurtured by official discourse towards migrants … (Interview with activist in Santiago, Chile, November 11, 2021).

These remarks were given in the context of a presidential campaign in which migration, economic recovery, and post-pandemic transitions were substantial. Besides Chile, presidential elections were held in Ecuador and Peru throughout 2021. In all cases, mobility control embedded in post-covid 19 recovery was a defining element of the proposals of the candidates. The winner in Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, announced his intention to implement a ‘regularisation’ process similar to the one in Colombia, as a way of granting ‘Venezuelan and Colombian refugees the protection they need’ (Vicepresidencia Ecuador 2021). He also mentioned that, after their regularisation, migrants would be provided with vaccines, hereby conditioning the right to health with following governmental instruction.

In neighbouring Peru, the outgoing government released an executive order in late July 2021, enacting a new temporary permit for Venezuelans, as part of a regularisation process suspended due to COVID-19 (República del Perú 2021). This happened just days before the new president, Pedro Castillo, announced that ‘all foreign criminals must leave the country in 72 hours’ during his inaugural speech (ATV 2021), keeping a promise made during his campaign. In Chile, Gabriel Boric was elected president in November 2021, after winning against a candidate who defended ‘digging a trench’ along the northern Chilean border ‘to contain people’ from crossing through unofficial border points (24 Horas 2021d). In contrast, the winner’s ‘mobility management’ proposal included ‘reforming the Migration Law, under a Human Rights focus and towards the recognition of equal treatment of migrants’ (Ex-Ante 2021).

Migrants’ views were impacted by these political developments, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways. A woman who had lived in Santiago (Chile) since 2018 reflected on the election of the new socialist president:

I don’t want to stay here. The country wants a socialist government, and we don’t know where to go now. We don’t want that for us […] There are many Venezuelans who are now planning to get on the road again (Interview with Venezuelan migrant, December 8, 2021)

The memories and imaginaries attached to Hugo Chávez’s and protégé Nicolás Maduro’s rule in Venezuela continued to shape Venezuelan migrants’ journeys. Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government had progressively used mobility as an instrument for international and electoral politics, adapting it to the national-sanitary rhetoric that was advanced during the pandemic. In 2018, the government launched a plan called ‘Vuelta a la Patria’ (Return to the Homeland), to organise return flights for Venezuelans living abroad under precarious conditions (Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela 2020). Since the outbreak, the programme has been a tool for confrontational and nationalist politics across the Andes, at moments in which nativism, xenophobia, and racism have multiplied. In face of COVID-19 developments related to migration, the government accused the Colombian president of being ‘a racist and a bigot’ (France 24 en Español 2020) and the Chilean government of ‘xenophobia against Venezuelans’ (Rodriguez 2021) while announcing that flights were being organised ‘for those fearing necessity’ (Brik 2021) abroad.

Moreover, the Venezuelan president stated that in 2022 “the number of [flights’] recipients will increase threefold” (Redacción Rostros 2022), as purported evidence of his humanitarian commitment to migrants. The announcement came at the start of a new round of internationally supported negotiations with the Venezuelan domestic opposition. Having been considered an illiberal regime for years, Maduro’s administration recognised this as an opportunity to present a humanitarian face internationally. According to official numbers, at least 27,000 persons had returned to Venezuela through this programme until November 2021 (Swissinfo 2021). These numbers have often been presented to show the government’s efforts ‘to unite Venezuelan families […] and fill Venezuelan homes with love and happiness’ (Plasencia 2021).

Violence and Death: The New Normal?

As societies around the world have transitioned to assessing COVID-19 as an endemic virus, the idea of an emerging ‘new normal’ has popularised as a catchphrase to refer to the routinisation of specific protective sanitary measures. Behind the term, the normalisation of a code of discipline has been evolving progressively, to organise post-pandemic social life. Norms and attitudes learned and popularised during the pandemic, such as wearing facemasks, maintaining a routine of test and trace to avoid further viral spread, or staying at home in case of displaying any virus-related symptoms, remain active. These measures, originally perceived as exceptional and temporary, are now more or less part of routinary public behaviour. Viral borders legacies can be assessed in parallel with the disciplinary move behind the ‘new normal’. Increased levels of border violence and exclusion attached to the pandemic seem to remain acceptable after the most difficult moments and are even deemed ‘normal’, in the eyes of many in the general public across the Andes.

Hence, unprecedented violence has normalised across now amplified trajectories of Venezuelan migrants. During the pandemic, new oceanic and fluvial corridors to cross South American borders opened under increased precariousness (Castedo 2020). Other previously existing passageways from the region to Caribbean Islands, like Trinidad, have become more deadly and precarious as severe ‘sanitary’ border enforcement proliferated, making wrecks and ocean deaths common (Rodríguez and Collins 2021). Moreover, thousands of fragmented journeys of Venezuelan migrants starting in the Andes have reached other locations across the Americas. Crossing the Colombian-Panama borderland, where the untamed Darién Gap between South and Central America emerges, became common for Venezuelans, en route to Honduras, Guatemala, Chiapas, and the Sonoran Desert crossed by the Mexican-US border (González 2021). The place constitutes a longstanding space of necropolitical border control, where, due to domestic and international constraints, state authorities have been both unwilling and unable to provide a political solution to the situation (Palma-Gutiérrez 2016). Thousands of more migrants, with dozens of different nationalities from the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia travel –and die– side by side (Voz de América 2022). While deaths have normalised, governments, media and citizens in the region tend to make an example of those who ‘irresponsibly put the lives of their children at risk’ (Telemundo Utah 2022) when trying to cross. A message on social networks from a Venezuelan migrant who had crossed the gap and had settled abroad was revealing: ‘it is impossible to forget all those who died midway … there’s nothing harder than watching a human being dying’ (Unknown author, n.d.).

Recent political moves have also revealed the extent to which sanitary nationalism is imbricated in the new normal of the exclusionary border architecture. In a US newspaper, a report in late January 2022 stated that:

The [US] Department of Homeland Security said […] it will begin returning Venezuelans to Colombia if they had previously resettled in that country, expelling them from the United States under the pandemic-era health authority known as Title 42 (Miroff 2022).

The externalisation of the US border control, in the making for decades across the Americas, has violently expanded under the infamous Title 42. Based on the idea of national protection, it has allowed for a broad set of bleak strategies of (im)mobilisation of migrants and refugees to solidify, politically and juridically (FitzGerald 2021; Blue et al. 2021; Vilches Hinojosa, Rivas Castillo, and Vidal de Haymes 2021). In this case, the Title 42 is useful to further deter Venezuelans’ mobility towards the US in agreement with an Andean government through openly exclusionary means. Before the pandemic, the US had already been the main funder of Andean countries’ ‘response to Venezuelan migration’ (R4V 2022). This was an externalising move on its own. Yet, the novelty is the extensive degree of normalised border violence embedded in more recent politics.

The Mexican government has also contributed to building this exclusionary architecture. Since early 2022, Venezuelan nationals require a visa to enter the country, a means related to control Venezuelans’ border crossings to the US (Human Rights Watch 2022). By July 2022, 350 deportations of undocumented Venezuelans had already taken place under the new regulations (Deutsche Welle 2022b). Countries in Central America, such as Honduras and Guatemala, also took part. These have already imposed a tourism visa for Venezuelans since 2017, at the moment in which the US government externalised its border towards Central America during the Trump era (Faret, Téllez, and Rodríguez-Tapia 2021).

The example of Venezuelan migrants illustrates the pattern of increasing severity in mobility control based on reinforced nationalist-normalised emotions in the emerging post-pandemic. Yet, migration journeys continue, in fragments, but also shaped by solidarity, which is enacted within moments of autonomy. A migration activist speaking from Santiago reflected on the constitutive power of struggles in the post-pandemic’s ‘new normal’:

And those expulsions? What for? So that they get their show? For criminalising migrants? That doesn’t work […] Hundreds of people move and will keep on the move everyday … Each one at their time … (Interview with activist in Santiago, Chile, November 24, 2021)

Conclusion: Exclusion and Autonomy After Covid-19

In the name of public health and imbued with a sense of reinforced national authority, border violence and exclusion of migrants have been enforced anew as acceptable mechanisms in front of audiences worldwide throughout the (post)pandemic. In the case of the Andean corridor of mobility and the experiences of Venezuelan migrants, this has resulted in a political transformation. The line of what is acceptable in terms of mobility control and nationally-based exclusion shifted, while the consequences of COVID-19 drove millions of persons in the region into poverty and precariousness (ECLAC 2022). Death of and violence over migrants have been rendered more tolerable in name of safeguarding ‘the nation’ from the ‘viral spread’ under generalised political anxiety. Paradoxically, the combination of exclusion and economic mismanagement enmeshed in this formulation keeps driving many of the continuous migrants’ fragmented journeys in the region. Yet, when taking a close look at migrants’ trajectories, it is revealed that the scheme of border violence reinforced through viral borders is oftentimes exceeded. Autonomy remains central in such developments.

The characteristics of autonomy are substantial in tracing the ways in which this exclusionary architecture is both contested and reimagined. Focusing on the productive power of migrant struggles offers an initial standpoint when interpreting how different experiences, situatedness, and life-trajectories – subjectivities at large – remain central in understanding how migrants deal with viral borders-related happenings and their legacies. This does not mean that viral borders are innocuous. Deceleration, border spectacles, pandemic-related bordering policies, and the production of necropolitical spaces of (im)mobility are only some examples of the many shades in which a reinforced sense of nationalism informs the post-pandemical exclusionary mobility regime. As elsewhere, sovereign control and mobility in the Andes are reframed and – apparently – strengthened through the lens of nationalist governmentality.

Yet, the example of Venezuelans along the Andean corridor of mobility reveals that subversion, contestation, dissent, and solidarity are constantly recalibrated in relation to migrants’ differentiated access to social and material resources to cope with the consequences of derisive (re)bordering mechanisms. Moreover, autonomy and struggle remain key in these processes as conceptual standpoints to observe how migrants’ political potential was reclaimed before, and now, in the incipient post-pandemic. The emerging question is not if post-Covid-19 sanitary nationalism and its derived viral bordering mechanisms are preceded by mobility. As political subjects, people will likely keep crossing borders even if post-pandemic nationalist-based violence is deployed to optimise control and exclusion. The question is how this evolving exclusionary architecture will be contested. A focus on the differentiated access to conditions enabling migrants’ autonomy can open up an opportunity for further research in this regard.

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Vicki Squire, Tom Long, Cristóbal Bywaters, Charlie Price, and Nick Kotucha at the University of Warwick; to Arlene B. Tickner, Federmán Rodríguez, Jesús Agreda Rudenko, and Ralf Leiteritz at the Universidad del Rosario; to Claudia Voigt for her patient editing assistance; and to the anonymous reviewers and Geopolitics editors for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Literally ‘embodiment’, this term is advanced by Varela Huerta (2020b, 213 my translation) as a ‘concrete form of migrant struggle, a form of radical self-care’ based on migrant women ‘staying together, walking together, taking care of themselves by being together’.

2. I thank the suggestion of this term to one of the article’s reviewers.

3. The law was first introduced as a project in the National Assembly in 2013 and had been extensively discussed before and during the pandemic. It needed an extraordinary constitutional review by the highest courts to pass (Oyarzún Serrano, Aranda, and Gissi 2021).