When speaking of Europe's migrant crisis, images of refugees clinging to tiny, overcrowded boats or attempting to scale the fences topped with razor wire in Ceuta and Melilla come immediately to mind. But migrants from the southern border only make a small number of the total number of refugees arriving in Barcelona.
In the final piece of this trilogy on how Barcelona takes in and integrates refugees, we hear the inspiring story of a Venezuelan asylum seeker who made a new life in the city, alongside the Barcelona based therapeutic center that helped him get where he is today.
Pedro Pimentel misses his home, Venezuela. He misses his country’s once happy culture, its once good humor and, most of all, his daughter, who remains there. “I have been in Barcelona for one year, four months and two days. And the hours?” He laughs, when I spoke to him at our offices in 2019. “I am very grateful to this country, and to the people of this country: they have made me grow a lot as a person. But I am still young and I have lots to do and to give, for me and for Venezuela. One day I hope to return to my country.”
Spain's "Other" Refugees
In Europe, the word refugee has become synonymous with migrants crossing the Mediterranean, arriving on boats on crowded shores and being held in squalid camps at border points across the continent. It is the product of a humanitarian crisis which came to shape and dominate much of the decade just passed, however, to characterize the refugee experience within these narrow confines is actually to misrepresent it. Not all refugees arrive in Europe by sea. In Barcelona, for example, the new frontier for migrants takes an altogether different form. Asylum seekers arrive here predominantly by air, and often from Latin America rather than Africa and the Middle East. These “other” refugees, the ones less discussed, removed from the prevailing European-wide narrative, make up the majority of those arriving in the city.
Unlike other parts of Europe, asylum seekers arrive in Barcelona predominantly by air, and often from Latin America.
Pedro Pimentel, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who came to Barcelona in 2018 and now lives and works in the city, is one such example. His story is a tale of profound resilience and the success that can manifest when refugees are given the tools to make a new life alongside adequate, appropriate help by the state.
“I am from Venezuela—a small but very pretty city in the Portuguese state,” Pimentel tells me, a wistful tone in his softly-spoken voice. “I left my country because of the political situation that I lived through there. When I left Venezuela, I went to Colombia, and from Colombia it was a direct flight to Barcelona, because my sister was here.”
The two neighboring states that Pimentel mentions—Colombia and Venezuela—have been involved in a curious twist of fate over the past few decades: wounds have been carefully healed in the former, while long festering gashes have been wrenched open in the latter. When Colombia was embroiled in conflict throughout the second half of the 20th century, vast numbers of its citizens were welcomed into the open arms of Chavez’s Venezuela, as indeed were refugees from across the South-American continent. Now that Maduro—Chavez’s hand-picked successor to the Venezuelan dictatorial throne—has overseen the country’s descent into tumult and turmoil, the roles are switched. Venezuelans are leaving the country in droves, some four million in the last few years alone.
Protest in Caracas, Venezuela, Feb 14, 2014. Venezuela has been rife with conflict and violence since the controversial 2013 presidential election. Photo by Andres Azp (CC BY ND 2.0).
A Country Embroiled in Turmoil
“I was motivated to leave Venezuela because I belonged to a political party that thinks differently from the government,” Pimentel tells me. “Now I am here, I can do so much more; being here and being alive, rather than being there with the possibility of being imprisoned or dead. It is the reality of Venezuela. The way I feel is a crime there now, and that is what led me and so many others to leave our homes.”
Spain’s Venezuelan diaspora is growing, the largest increase (42,803 in 2018, the most recent statistics) of any nationality. The same is true of Barcelona, where they now make up the 5th largest nationality from all of the Americas in the city. Pimentel says that seeing a community of his fellow countrymen already established here made the move a little less daunting. “If we Latinos come somewhere, we are like magnets! I talked to Venezuelans that had come to a place and made a thousand friends after they arrived here alone. So it's not like we’re starting from scratch, but we do have to start a new life, and when you are thirty-three years of age you are not immediately prepared for it.”
Could you ever effectively prepare for such a drastic change to your life? The motivations for Pimentel’s migration to Europe, and indeed the inherent nature of being an asylum seeker, means the answer is probably no. “When I arrived here,” Pimentel continues, “I requested international protection, because in my country I belonged to an opposition political party, but I did not meet the requirements to enter Spain. At the airport they saw that I didn't come with my papers, so they told me that I would have to return to Colombia, the last country where I presented my evidence after I left Venezuela.”
March to the Palace of Justice in Maracaibo, Venezuela, February 18, 2014. In 2014 alone, Venezuela saw over 9,000 protests to the Maduro regime. A 2019 UN report found that political refugees from Venezuela make up 20% of asylum claims in the world. Photo by María Alejandra Mora (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Pimentel was not sent back to Colombia. After five days waiting in the airport, he was allowed to leave—documentation still unresolved, as it remains to this day—and was put into the hands of Cruz Roja, the Red Cross here in Barcelona, who took him to a center where they look after people in the initial stages of the political asylum process. After 20 days there and a short stint living in Teruel, Pimentel was able to find work and a room in a shared flat in Barcelona. “From there I was given help to become more independent,” Pimentel says, talking about his first experience of life in the city. “CEAR gave me help when I came to Barcelona. My job paid me very little and I didn't have enough money to live, so they gave me help to pay for a room and to cover basic needs.”
“These people often feel guilty because of what they have suffered, and we have to try to make them understand who is the victim and who is guilty. And then, after feeling the victim, they can accept that they are survivors, people who are very brave." —Patricia Jirón
Once the endless litany of forms is completed in the long initial weeks and months of seeking asylum, a process of societal integration can begin. Pimentel tells me that this was perhaps the most difficult part for him, especially given he was without his daughter. “It was a bit complicated at first to integrate,” he says. “For the first few days I really didn’t want to leave my room. I was there almost every day locked up, thinking more than anything about my daughter in Venezuela. It is very difficult to bring her here too, since all the ministries and all the agencies in Venezuela are in the hands of a single government. It is easier to get a kidney than a passport in Venezuela right now, so I have not been able to get my daughter's passport. That led me to complain a lot, to be locked up, not wanting to go out or eat.”
A sense of loneliness that comes along with living in a new city is common among migrants of all backgrounds, but it is undoubtedly exacerbated when the emigration is self-imposed, when exile is the term more apt. The psychological strain of such vast, immediate changes to life are immense, and so many asylum seekers turn to professional psychiatric help. “That's why I decided to seek help with Centro EXIL. Patricia helped me a lot in terms of integration, to get out of the confinement I was in when I arrived in Barcelona. They helped me a lot to integrate into society, to the culture, to make friends and to get on in the workplace.”
Centro EXIL is part of the network of NGOs in Barcelona that aids in the integration of refugees in the city. Centro EXIL specializes in medical, psychological and social therapeutic courses. Photo courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona.
Helping Asylum Seekers Adapt, Integrate
Centro EXIL is an NGO focused on therapeutic care and dedicated to helping asylum seekers and people who have suffered human rights violations to move beyond their trauma. “It started in Brussels in the early 1970s, then in the year 2000 they created a branch here in Barcelona,” Patricia Jirón, a psychiatrist at Centro EXIL, tells me in a quiet room at their offices near Lesseps. It is part of the network of NGOs in Barcelona that all aid in the integration of refugees in the city, specializing in medical, psychological and social therapeutic courses. “We were actually the first center in Spain to give support to victims of torture. We take an integral approach to treating these people who have suffered torture or violation of human rights, meaning that we give medical, psychological and social support.”
Centro EXIL offers a wide range of care, so the profiles it deals with are equally varied, both in terms of nationalities and backgrounds. While Pimentel was given invaluable help to integrate into Spanish society (something, Jirón says, that is made all the more difficult by the psychological strain of the bureaucracy of Spain’s asylum process), the center deals with more severe, macabre cases too. “We have the support of the United Nations program for the victims of torture. We have another program for immigrant women, victims of machista violence. We have a program to support children who have suffered sexual abuse or maltreatment too.”
“All the types of psychological support we give are to elaborate on past trauma,” Jirón says, explaining the different methods they use in order to allow victims to address and come to terms with what has happened to them in their recent past. “A focus of our therapy is to reinforce in these people their resilience, or their capacity of resilience. That even though you may have had a terrible childhood, you can still have a good life when you are an adult if you find people that can believe in you, that can support you and give you good treatment to form trusting relationships. With this you can have more love around you.”
Patricia Jirón, a psychiatrist at Centro EXIL, was herself once a political refugee. When she was 18, her whole family fled the Pinochet regime in Chile and sought asylum in Venezuela. Photo courtesy of the Ajuntament de Barcelona.
Talking about trauma, then, is a key part of Jirón’s work, but she explains that in some situations non-verbal care can be equally effective. Art, music and the body are also used to elaborate on people’s past, conceptual methods which are especially useful when working with people who speak different languages. Jirón explains that gaining the trust of patients, being able to relate to their culture, is absolutely vital to her work. To do this, Centro EXIL enforces an idea that patients are survivors who have already been through the worst, moving beyond even the more passive idea of victimhood and towards a state of realization that something has been positively surpassed.
“In our sessions it's important to help these people to understand the process that they have been living in,” Jirón adds. “These people often feel guilty because of what they have suffered, and we have to try to make them understand who is the victim and who is guilty. And then, after feeling the victim, they can accept that they are survivors, people who are very brave. In the moment they feel [they are] survivors, they have the capability to help themselves to have a better life.”
And after a survivor? “Viviante," Jirón responds. “Somebody that lives. Somebody that can say 'Gracias a la vida,' thanks to life, even after all the terrible things they have lived through.”
Centro EXIL is the first center in Spain to give support to victims of torture. A focus of the center's therapy is to reinforce in these people their capacity for resilience, that even though they may have had a terrible childhood, they can still have a good life as an adult. Photo by Pere Virgili, courtesy of Centro EXIL.
Upon arriving at Centro EXIL, Pimentel sought out Jirón as the pair share a connection with Venezuela. “The first day I went to Centro EXIL I met Patricia, and she told me that she is Chilean and took refuge in Venezuela when the Pinochet era arrived. At that point I was not feeling well, and I wanted to talk specifically with her since there was a connection there, an expectation of trust. She had lived in Venezuela so I thought she will understand me more or less, because she knows a little about our culture.”
That cruel twist we touched on earlier—which sees Venezuelans leaving their country when before they welcomed others suffering the same plight—is the thing which brought Pimentel and Jirón together, but a sense of solidarity runs through everyone who works at the center. “Centro EXIL,” Jirón says, “was founded by health professionals who were survivors or escaped from the South American dictatorships. I am a psychologist, but when I was younger I was in exile with my family—my father was a victim of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile as well. He was the Health Minister of Allende, so after the military coup he was in a concentration camp in Dawson Island for almost one year. He survived, and we had to move to Venezuela, exiled with all our family. They gave us a lot of support, with open minds and a lot of love. They opened up the country to receive us, to let us work and study. For me, it was like a model of how a country receives refugees.”
More than Just Surviving
Once the initial process of overcoming trauma has been reached, getting back to a state of normality in daily life is vitally important for asylum seekers. However, as Pimentel explains, this stage can often be just as difficult to get through: “Patricia helped me a lot in terms of integration, to get out of that confinement I was in when I arrived in Barcelona. In Venezuela I worked 12 years in the health area—I worked in a hospital for 12 years and I was always the person who my daughter depended on. And when I got here and received all this help, I felt very useless.”
Once the initial process of overcoming trauma has been reached, getting back to a state of normality in daily life is vitally important for asylum seekers. However, for many, this stage can often be just as difficult to get through.
Pimentel’s difficulty in finding a job which matched up to his credentials in Venezuela is a common issue with all immigrants moving from the third to the first world. It’s something that Ignasi Calbó addressed in the previous piece, and Jirón did too when I spoke to her: “There's a security that they can feel here in Europe—maybe they can start to sleep better, to eat better. But the most difficult part is to get to another level, for instance to get permission to work, or possibilities to work. This is a very hard part, because maybe these people can support themselves psychologically and become more medically stable, more tranquilo, but then in the next step if they cannot find a job they feel very bad, because they always feel like they are depending on social services, and they don't feel that they can be dignified in life. Sometimes there is a limit to the help that the system gives to them, so it's quite hard.”
Living with Hope
Difficult it may be, but there are many success stories from Centro EXIL, and Jirón says that Pimentel is definitely one of them. He tells me he is enjoying his work at an elderly people’s home—a caregiving role close to his work in hospital administration in Venezuela—and that he feels he has made connections with his new home and the people living here. “I feel more integrated now that I am no longer locked up at home. I really enjoy the work I do, and feeling useful again has helped me a lot. Patricia also recommended that I go out and play sports. In Venezuela, baseball is practiced much more than soccer, so I found a baseball school in Hospitalet where the majority of the board of directors and the players are Venezuelans.”
Centro EXIL enforces an idea that patients are survivors who have already been through the worst, moving beyond even the more passive idea of victimhood and towards a state of realization that something has been positively surpassed.
Seemingly small things like playing sports and meeting people who have shared lived experiences are vital to integration in a new society, and Pimentel asserts that it was his work with Jirón that helped him realize this. She understood his culture, knew the gravity of his situation and was able to show him how to maintain resilience, learning in the process that asking for help was not an admission of weakness. “Of course, there are times that give you low spirits, but I know how to deal with them now,” he adds. “This situation of migrating changes your perspective on life. Being here, I have met people from all these new cultures, and I see there are other countries that have a hard time too.”
At the end of our conversation, I ask Pimentel if he thinks he will ever return to Venezuela. He responds with a knowing chuckle, as if he has been expecting this question the entire time. “There is a song from Venezuela that says, “the day I die I want to be buried near the sea in Venezuela.” Here in Spain I have plans, but in Venezuela I have dreams. I want to fulfill them both: my plans here, but also my dreams for me in Venezuela, and for Venezuela itself.”
Harry Stott.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.