Hunger Highway: desperate Venezuelans take hard road to Brazil

Daniel Guerra hit the Hunger Highway at dawn hoping to steal a march on the punishing heat of Brazil’s northern savannah and consign 21st-century socialism to his past. “Necessity forced me to come,” explained the 24-year-old Venezuelan as he trudged along the BR-174, a 215km (134-mile) ribbon of asphalt that cuts south across the Brazilian Amazon and is the main entry point for tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants fleeing economic meltdown back home. A month earlier, Guerra had watched with joy as his first child, a baby girl called Carmeyn, was born, nearly 1,000km north in the Venezuelan city of Maturín.  Already, though, he had been forced to abandon her, propelled over the border into Brazil in search of food, work and, perhaps eventually, a fresh start for his family. More…