Introduction

Since the late 1990s, many countries have become more invested in securitising their borders, keeping unwanted migration out, and finding, detaining and returning undocumented migrants to their home countries. This amalgamation of criminal law and immigration policy and its police-like enforcement encapsulates the concept of crimmigration (Stumpf 2006). Despite the burgeoning popularity of this paradigm among policymakers, studies have shown that criminalising migration, instead of curtailing it, may contribute to migrant smuggling as migrants who are not able to comply with the requirements to enter legally, instead of being dissuaded, find riskier ways to migrate (Sanchez 2014, 2017b; Brachet 2018; Zhang et al. 2018).

However, the adverse outcomes of irregular migration are often “attributed to the actions of migrant smugglers, who are almost monolithically depicted as men from the Global South organized in webs of organized criminals whose transnational reach allows them to prey on migrants and asylum seekers’ vulnerabilities” (Sanchez 2017b, p. 9). This narrative also portrays migrants as gullible victims who are passively transported from one country to another (Ibid). Thus, it is unsurprising that most strategies to tackle irregular migration are concentrated on criminalising and persecuting the people who facilitate crossings through unauthorised points. Yet, research has shown that the relationships between smugglers and migrants are more complex and that migrants have varying degrees of agency when negotiating different aspects of their journey (Spener 2009; Sanchez 2014, 2017b; Achilli 2018; Deshingkar 2019). Not only is most policy centred around punishing smugglers, but most of the literature on migrant smuggling has also favoured studying these individuals, the networks they use to move people and the profits that this business produces. On the other hand, how migrants themselves exercise agency in procuring their passage and negotiating with smugglers is an understudied area (Zhang et al. 2018; Chemlali 2023).

Similar to the literature on migrant smuggling, research on women and smuggling has concentrated chiefly on female smugglers and how, through participating in organised criminal activity, women have challenged traditional gender roles but also have reinforced them (Zhang et al. 2007; Deshingkar 2021; Schuster 2021). However, there is a gap of knowledge in the intersection between migrant smuggling and gender and, more specifically, how “female immigrants’ experiences with crimmigration are uniquely impacted by their gender and familial status” (Hartry 2012, p.7). Along this line, Bürkner (2012) posits that class affiliation and age are also under-researched categories when studying the experiences of female migrants. In this sense, an intersectional approach that considers different markers beyond gender such as family composition, social class and age can be useful to explore the ways in which migration policies affect women differentially (Bhatia 2023; Bürkner 2012).

To fill these gaps, this article will use empirical data collected by interviewing nine female Venezuelan migrants, out of which six entered Colombia from unauthorised points. The paper will first present the theoretical framework that will be used, followed by the exposition of Venezuelan migration into Colombia as a case study. The next section will briefly discuss the methods deployed to conduct this study. This will lead to three findings sections. The first section will explore the narratives of the participants who circumvented legal borders, and the second will detail the accounts of those who travelled through the unauthorised routes. The last findings section will discuss the participants’ experiences with those who facilitated their crossings.

Understanding Female Irregular Migration as a Form of Resistance

Feminist migration scholars have adopted the term “feminisation of migration” in relation to the trend of more women travelling as primary migrants instead of as associational migrants, dependants of their partners or for other forms of family reunification (Morokvasic 1984; Fleury 2016). Yet, there are still laws aimed at curtailing women’s mobility. A study by the World Bank (2015) revealed that married women in thirty-two countries were not allowed to obtain a passport without their husbands’ authorisation, and in six countries, they were not allowed to travel outside the country without their husbands. Also, heteronormative and patriarchal imaginaries of nuclear families may shape immigration laws and prevent women from gaining legal status, obtaining employment or travelling with their children without the support of their spouses (Martin 2004). Even when there is no specific legislation against female migration, there may be laws that restrict visas for certain occupations which are commonly gendered, such as domestic workers or healthcare practitioners, as well as types of migration, such as family reunification, which may disproportionately affect women (Pfeiffer and Taylor 2007). However, “by giving these women less opportunity to participate in officially sanctioned migration programmes (by denying visas to single women, for instance, or relegating them to a non-working and dependent position in family reunification programmes), states have made them turn more and more frequently to dubious support networks to aid their migration projects” (Lima de Pérez 2016, p.29). This creates a vicious circle whereby the lack of opportunities for some women to migrate safely prompts them to find riskier avenues to migrate, reinforcing the idea that all female migration is inherently dangerous and thus prompting states to devise more restrictions to prevent the migration of this group, making it even more dangerous for them to migrate, and so on (Ibid).

The way in which the challenges faced during the migration journey are perceived can also be gendered. While the risks and dangers associated with migration are understood as character-building and a symbol of bravery for men, these risks for women make them more vulnerable and subject to the protection and surveillance of men and the state (Huijsmans 2014; Deshingkar 2021). For example, mothers who choose to travel with their children through illegal channels are judged as irresponsible or irrational, while fathers who do this are portrayed as heroic (Chemlali 2023). Furthermore, Chemlali found that “migrant mothers constantly face and navigate risk, with smuggling becoming a harm reduction strategy in a way that challenges romanticized notions of motherhood” (2023, p.43). The study concluded that children posed a challenge to mothers’ mobility but that mothers navigate these restrictions by having to cross through riskier routes to travel with their children. In this sense, many female migrants use irregular migration to actively resist travel restrictions imposed on them.

Spener coined the term resistencia hormiga, as the “specific forms that everyday resistance takes with respect to clandestine border-crossing by autonomous migrants” (2009, p.23). Spener also proposes that knowledge of the territory and social capital derived from family and friends’ networks allow migrants to resist by navigating borders and circumventing policies aimed at preventing them from entering and working in destination countries where they can improve their quality of life. Another important form of resistencia hormiga occurs when migrants form “strategic alliances” with those who facilitate their border crossings. “This alliance is an uneasy and frequently conflictive one that is entered into for practical reasons rather than moral, affective, or political ones” (Spener 2009, p.231). The resistencia hormiga theory provides a useful framework to contextualise the narratives of women who choose to travel through unauthorised routes, the reasons why they do this and how they achieve successful crossings.

Venezuelan Migration to Colombia as a Case Study

It is estimated that by December 2022, 7.4 million Venezuelans had left their country, of which about 6.4 (86%) had remained in Latin America (Gandini and Selee, 2023). Colombia has received the most significant number, taking in at least 39% (Migración Colombia, 2018). These figures place Venezuela’s mass migration as larger than past refugee crises such as Syria in the 2010s or Afghanistan in the 1980s (Arena et al. 2022). However, less attention has been paid to this crisis by the international community, and media coverage has also been sparse in producing content on the life-threatening conditions that Venezuelans are experiencing in their country and the mass exodus that is taking place. This makes the Venezuelan migration crisis a particularly important and under-researched case study.

The unprecedented interregional movement of Venezuelans has put the rights-based liberal migration policies in Latin American countries to a test and yielded different responses from receiving countries that have categorised Venezuelan travellers in various ways (Freier and Parent 2019). Some, like Mexico and Brazil, have adopted the Cartagena Declaration’s definition of refugee and labelled Venezuelans entering their country as such (Herrera 2022). Other countries like Chile and Peru began managing the phenomenon with a human rights approach, but as the number of migrants quickly started to rise, these measures have turned more and more to securitisation strategies such as classifying Venezuelans as economic migrants, imposing work visas for them and criminalising those who are found with irregular status (Freier and Parent 2019; Freier and Pérez 2021).

The Colombian strategy to assist Venezuelan migrants has taken more measures to regularise them as economic migrants than to treat them as asylum seekers (World Bank 2018; Palma-Gutiérrez 2021). It has been praised by the media, academics and policy centres such as the World Bank and the Migration Policy, calling it generous and pragmatic (World Bank 2018; Selee and Bolter 2022). Yet, behind this generosity is a “complex governmentality strategy developed based on exerting control and authority under a humanitarian umbrella” (Palma-Gutiérrez 2021, p.40). Colombia has been primarily a country of high emigration and low immigration. Because of this, it can be said that this is the country’s “first experience” managing such a large inflow of migrants (World Bank 2018, p.53).

From the Venezuelan side, the borders to Colombia have remained mostly closed from August 2015 to September 2022 after a series of diplomatic incidents in border areas. In contrast, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ discourse and that of his successor, Ivan Duque, have been adamant that they are committed to keeping their side of the border open (World Bank 2018). Despite these intentions, from 2015 to 2021, the Colombian border was not open consistently. Closings have been caused by a plethora of reasons that go from public order issues, regional and national elections, and football matches to the Covid-19 pandemic. During the Covid-19 pandemic, only land and river borders were closed, while airports and maritime borders remained open (Acosta 2021).

Regarding entry into the country, Colombia’s policy decrees that nationals from states who are members of regional groups such as MERCOSUR and CAN need to show their national ID upon entry, and they will be issued a Migratory Andean Card (TAM). These persons do not require a passport to enter Colombia (Migración Colombia 2021). However, according to Migración Colombia, the country’s authority on migration, the growing number of Venezuelans arriving in Colombia through illegal channels prompted the Colombian government to start devising a more comprehensive strategy for addressing migrants from this country, which began to operate at the end of 2015 (Migración Colombia 2016). The strategy included requiring Venezuelans entering Colombia to carry passports (Ibid).

Methods

This research was conducted in 2020 in collaboration with ASMUBULI, a sex worker union in Bogotá. Previous to this study, I had a working relationship with this organisation for more than ten years, collaborating on different projects. Initially, I had planned to go back to Colombia to do fieldwork and participant observation, but because of the travel restrictions imposed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the methodology was modified to online interviews. Ten women of working age (between nineteen and fifty-two) and from different cities in Venezuela and sociodemographic characteristics were recruited. Table 1 provides some further information about the participants.

Table 1 Participants’ migration journeys
Full size table

Two rounds of interviews were completed via Zoom, using the Free Association Narrative Interview Method (FANIM) (Hollway and Jefferson 2013). Considering feminist critiques of unequal power relations that may arise when conducting interviews, this method is constructed under the premise of minimising the interviewers’ influence on the respondents’ answers (Ibid). The FANIM was deployed to allow participants to control the narratives of their accounts and empower them to provide their points of view without being guided into certain answers. In this respect, asking simple questions like “Tell me the story of your life” was a strategy to level potential power imbalances that may arise from asking questions that are too technical or using terminology that may lend itself to different interpretations. Questions were followed up using the participants’ words in an attempt both to reduce biases from the interviewer and to continue framing the interviews on the participants’ terms. There was no interview guide, as each of their accounts was different, and follow-up questions required using the participants’ exact words. Apart from follow-up questions from the first interview, the second interview also included questions to elicit participants’ accounts on specific topics, such their experiences crossing the border. The first round of interviews was conducted in a two-week period in July 2020, and the second round in November of the same year. The interviews lasted from forty-five to ninety minutes. Out of the ten participants, nine returned for a second interview for a total of nineteen interviews. This sample size is consistent with Dworkin’s calculations which suggest that an adequate sample size for studies using in-depth interviews is “anywhere from 5 to 50 participants” (Dworkin, 2012, p.1319). Participants’ case studies, interview transcripts and translations can be accessed here: https://osf.io/w7avz/. The participant who did not return was excluded from this study as it was impossible to verify information about her border crossing. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, the participants’ native language, as well as mine, and the transcripts were translated into English. The participants were paid £25 per interview. Given the sample size of nine participants, the findings of this study are not intended to generalise about all female Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. Rather, they provide rich biographical accounts of Venezuelan women’s migration experiences.

Regarding the data analysis, this paper will digress from the FANIM concept of the ‘defended subject’, which claims that interviewees are unable to ‘tell it like it is’ as a defence mechanism against their anxieties and that it is the job of the research to interpret what they say. This article will utilise a more descriptive approach. It will dispense of “sophisticated methodological doubts and philosophical considerations and…claim the value of descriptive interviewing as a pragmatic strategy for liberation” (Kitzinger 2004, p.121). Furthermore, the participants’ different sociodemographic characteristics allowed for an intersectional analysis that took into account the multiple axes of discrimination that may be present in migration policy and may compound female migrants’ experiences crossing the border.

Crossing Illegally Through Authorised Points

Three participants were able to enter Colombia through authorised points. They were of higher socioeconomic backgrounds than those who did not use the legal borders, and while two of them were single and had no children, the one who had children, travelled alone. These cases are relevant to this paper because they demonstrate that violence and victimisation do not have to be inextricably linked to migration for Venezuelan women travelling to Colombia. Instead, their socioeconomic characteristics, their ability to obtain passports and their family composition may better explain why some women may be impacted by the migratory restrictions and others are not.

Passports

As stated previously, since 2015, having a passport has been a requirement for Venezuelans to enter Colombia. This requirement is difficult to comply with because of the delays of the Venezuelan Foreign Office in issuing travel documentation, which may take up to a year (Chaves-González and Echevarría Estrada 2020). In 2022, the passport cost was about USD162. This is more than the average monthly salary for Venezuelan workers in the private sector, which that same year was close to USD108 (Observatorio de Finanzas 2022). These issues have obliged many migrants to leave without the proper identification and travel documentation. Some buy false passports, and some even leave without their children being registered in the system, rendering these children stateless (NTN24 Venezuela 2019). A study with over 10,000 Venezuelan migrants in Latin American countries revealed that 31% of those who migrated through Colombia had problems with documents when entering the country (Chaves-González and Echevarría Estrada 2020). According to this study, compared to other countries in the region, Colombia had the highest number of migrants encountering issues when entering without proper documentation (Ibid). The 2021 Venezuelan Human Mobility report found that of 1,558 migrants interviewed, 98% did not have a passport (Mazuera-Arias et al. 2021). The 2022 iteration revealed that of 3,524 persons interviewed, only 0.9% of women and 1.6% of men reported travelling with a passport (Mazuera-Arias et al. 2022).

Consistent with these findings, five of the six participants who crossed through unauthorised points did it because they had no passports. One of these was Ani, a thirty-seven-year-old business management professional who was recently widowed and mother of two. Ani had travelled for two days from Puerto Cabello to the central border; unaware that Colombian border authorities required Venezuelans to hold a passport, she was rejected entry.

We got to the Simon Bolivar bridge and when I had to give my passport, well, I had left my passport to get it renewed, yeah, and when I got there, they don't want to let me go through and she [Ani’s friend] got in with no problem and they didn't let me in and I said: I didn't come this far so that they would send me back. After all I've been through, I am not taking no for an answer. I tried again but they returned me again and she [Ani’s friend] went in with a guide that was helping us and I tell her: hey girl, take my purse and give me yours, take my sweater, give me yours. I rolled my pants up, and one of the thugs that are working on the bridge says to me: I'll charge you 4000 (80 USD) and I tell him: I'll give you 6000 (120 USD) if you help me cross and I told my friend: look girl, just wait for me over there. Going back is not an option…and between the guide, the boy, another one, I crossed. I was even grabbing the boy’s hand because I was so nervous. When I arrived, I told my friend: didn't I tell you that I was gonna cross?

Considering that, before 2016, Venezuelans could enter with their national ID, it is unsurprising that Ani did not know of this new entry requirement. The passport is the most basic and recognisable tool of migration management. Passports are required from most travellers wishing to exit and enter a country. In this sense, passports can be used to regulate the activities of foreigners in a foreign country: to keep track of when they enter a country, when they should leave and where they should return to (O’Byrne 2001).

Despite the requirement by most countries to enter with a passport, there are agreements between states which can dispense the need to carry a passport upon entry (O’Byrne 2001). This is evidence that passports are unnecessary to ensure safe and orderly migration governance, as is the previously stated case for countries in South America belonging to the CAN and Mercosur, whose citizens can freely transit between member states with a national ID (Migración Colombia 2021). The requirement for Venezuelans to carry a passport can be used as a way to control the number of migrants who can legally enter Colombia and allow entry to only those who can afford the document while, at the same time, keeping the benevolent discourse of having an open borders policy toward Venezuelans.

Ani’s account demonstrates that imposing entry requirements which migrants are unable to meet may not dissuade them from migrating. Instead, they overcome these obstacles by using the services of smugglers. Ani felt that the emotional heartache of having to leave her family and the dire situation in Venezuela, as well as the fact that she had recently become a widow and was the head of her household, justified her actions in entering the country without the requirement of a passport. These findings coincide with other studies on Latin American smuggling in border zones that have concluded that local residents “frequently justify their unlawful – but licit and locally sanctioned – exchanges by critiquing unfair trade regimes and laws emanating from a remote political centre, and benefitting elites” (Schuster, 2021 p.174). When Ani tried passing legally twice but was denied, instead of quitting, she persevered until she managed to enter the country. Ultimately, she fulfilled her objective of making it to Colombia, which was the focus of her narrative, not that she had done something illegal to reach her destination.

Parental Consent Forms

While most participants mentioned that not having a passport was the reason for entering Colombia through an unauthorised point, Diana, on the other hand, had to smuggle her sixteen-year-old son because she did not have a document from her ex-husband authorising their son’s exit. Diana was a professional in education who worked as a teacher and was forty-nine years old, divorced and had two adult children and one minor at the time of the crossing.

First, I want to say that for us, if you go to the beach in Maracaibo, you are practically at the border because it's very close to the ocean. I know the road very well because we used to travel a lot with my ex-husband and with my father-in-law. We came in a car and I remember very well that I was sitting next to a woman and this woman had a baby and they didn't even notice the baby. The two times that they stopped us at the border, she had like a bag on top of the baby, obviously with things that didn't weigh a lot but yeah, she managed to smuggle her baby. Nobody noticed it and with my sixteen-year-old… it was at the last border checkpoint that they asked for my son’s ID. I had heard that I must have a permit from my ex-husband so I could take him out of the country, and if not then I had to bribe someone so they would let him in. So we had to run that risk and we carried the money in case we needed to bribe somebody. When we arrived to the border … a soldier catches him and tells him, young man, where is your ID card? And he says to him: look, my mother has it and she's over there. But at that same moment, a lot of people came to talk to the guard, and my son saw that the guard was distracted so he started running, and the guard didn't even notice. That's how I passed my youngest son from there to here. And the journey was peaceful, really. The times I've returned, they've all been great.

In Diana’s case, although she knew where her ex-husband was, she felt that she had the right to take her child without the permission of a father who had to be absent from their lives and had not contributed economically to raising their son. In this sense, Diana resisted the situation’s unfairness by circumventing the policy. Interestingly, as part of the narrative of her journey with her son, she referred to the story of telling a migration officer in Venezuela that her child was under her custody and showed him the custody ruling as an alternative to the parental consent form, and the officer let them pass. She also noted that another woman travelling with her was also smuggling her baby by hiding it with other packages, which suggested to her that the practice of smuggling children is common and, despite it being illegal, is also not very difficult to carry out.

The notion of safeguarding children from such threats as becoming victims of human trafficking or parental kidnapping has prompted legislation that requires additional documentation for minors travelling abroad. For example, a parent travelling alone with their child must have the express and written consent of the other parent to take the child out of the country (Alanen 2011). This requirement assumes that parents are either together or speaking to each other. In the case of Venezuelans travelling to Colombia, requiring the written consent of both parents for under-age travellers ignores the fact that, as in Diana’s case, Latin American family structures are highly “matricentric” (Moreno Olmedo 2012; Iciarte García 2019). Matricentric family systems are characterised by the mother being not only the primary caregiver but also the provider for the family. The father is an absent figure who does not contribute either financially or emotionally to raising the children and often has lost contact with the mother and his children. In their last report on gender indicators, the Venezuelan Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) revealed that from 2001 to 2011, the number of female-led households in Venezuela rose from 29.4% to 38.7% (INE 2013).

In this respect, the heteronormative assumption that families are nuclear and that fathers must be included in the decision-making process to migrate can shape policies that make it impossible for single mothers to travel with their children unless they resort to a court to prove they are the only caregiver in the child’s life, which is a long and expensive process. Yet, the threats of parental kidnapping and human trafficking, however minimal, have resulted in border authorities having increased pressure to implement more rigorous verification policies for single parents travelling with their children (Alanen 2011). This leaves single mothers with very limited alternatives and makes them, in many cases, resort to illegal and perhaps riskier routes to migrate with their children. The way in which migration policies disproportionally impact mothers travelling with their children is also consistent with Chemlali’s (2023) findings on motherhood and smuggling on the Tunisia − Libya border.

The narratives of Ani and Diana confirm research that has found that the Venezuela − Colombia border is porous and unmonitored in different places (Fundación Ideas para la Paz 2018; Idler 2019; Trejos Rosero 2019). Despite having entered through different checkpoints, they had similar descriptions of overworked and distracted guards unable to control a large number of migrants crossing. This allowed the participants to avoid surveillance and walk right past the migratory authorities without being detected. While their stories show some parallels in the way in which they entered the country, Diana had to travel in a riskier manner as a result of having her minor son with her.

Crossing Through Trochas: “We Came from the Side Where All the Poor People Come”

With the tense bilateral relations between Venezuela and Colombia, a porous border, closures on both sides and the requirement of a passport, many migrants must resort to unauthorised routes to cross from Venezuela to Colombia (Idler 2019; García Pinzón and Mantilla 2021; Torrado 2021; Vivas and Jaimes 2022). Migración Colombia estimates that from 2015 to 2018, at least 33% of irregular Venezuelan migrants were deemed irregular for entering the country through unauthorised points (Migración Colombia 2018). These clandestine channels are called trochas. Since colonial times, indigenous populations belonging to the same group, who were divided by the arbitrary borders imposed on them by the various territorial divisions created by the Spanish crown, devised these pathways to be able to move freely between both countries (Trejos Rosero and Cediel 2014). Since then, these routes have also been used for contraband and illicit trafficking (Trejos Rosero and Cediel 2014). Furthermore, for decades, the border has been a site of armed conflict with different non-state actors fighting over control of these territories (Fundación Ideas para la Paz 2018; Idler 2019; García Pinzón and Mantilla 2021). There are, however, interregional differences between trochas from the northern, central and southern borders.

For example, Katherine, a fifty-year old professional in business management who was divorced and mother of three adult children, came through a trocha located at the northern border that unites the Colombian department of La Guajira with the Venezuelan state of Zulia. This border has been a site of illegal economies, and more specifically, contraband, as its closeness to the Caribbean Sea facilitates the transportation of merchandise (Trejos Rosero and Cediel 2014). The travel distance between Venezuela and Colombia through this border is relatively short compared to the central and southern borders. Katherine described her crossing through this border as harrowing:

It's very dangerous. I also think that the people psychologically help you to become more afraid…the driver kept on saying, hurry up, they're going to rob you, because the motorcycles are coming closer, … when I arrived to the Maicao terminal, I felt like, thank God, I'm alive..

Despite her fearful experience, Katherine was able to pay for transportation and did not have to travel by foot, unlike the poorer participants who had to cross through the even more dangerous and longer trochas that unite the Colombian department of Norte de Santander and the Venezuelan state of Táchira. This central border is the most utilised passage for Venezuelan migrants. Historically, this borderland region has been a site for coca cultivation, cocaine production, gasoline and currency trafficking, among other illegal businesses (Trejos Rosero 2019). García Pinzón and Mantilla (2021) have identified at least eleven non-state actors from Venezuela and Colombia fighting for control of the central border.

Isabel was forty-three years old at the time of her crossing. She came from living in poverty in rural Venezuela, had no formal education and five children from three ex-partners. Her scant narrative of her border crossing simply states: “We came from the side where all the poor people come, by the side of Cúcuta”. During the second interview, she offered more detail about her journey. “It was horrible, we had to walk, it was cold. We were hungry, thirsty, sometimes people would help us with food until we arrived to Cúcuta, and then from there we took a bus to come here to Bogotá”. Isabel is describing the experience of many Venezuelan migrants who, like her, had to walk thousands of kilometres from their cities of origin in Venezuela to get to Colombia because they could not afford bus tickets. Because of this, this group is known as Caminantes or walkers (Acosta 2019; Mazuera-Arias et al. 2022). These people usually walk to Colombia in large groups (Acosta 2019). Initially, it was only men, but then women and children started joining (Ibid). Her account exemplifies how the economic situation is an important marker in understanding how migration policies may impact poorer migrants disproportionally as they must walk through riskier routes to get to Colombia.

Mixed Experiences with Facilitators

Emerging research on migrant smuggling has been critical of the narrative that monolithically links smugglers to organised crime (De Haas 2015; Sanchez 2017a, 2017b; Zhang et al. 2018). While Isabel’s narrative did not include descriptions of smugglers or non-state actors during her journey across the trochas, Angie’s and Kylie’s accounts are consistent with findings from Idler (2019) and García Pinzón and Mantilla (2021) in showing how organised crime groups in the Colombia−Venezuela borders have taken control of the smuggling business and not only circumvent borders but may also enforce and regulate them. Furthermore, researchers such as Zulver and Idler (2020) and Correa-Salazar et al. (2023) have evidenced that women and girls are especially vulnerable to becoming victims of sexual abuse and exploitation from these non-state actors when crossing through trochas.

Kylie was twenty years old when she walked to Colombia. At that time, she had not completed her high school education and had one child whom she had left with her ex-partner’s family. Like Isabel, she was a Caminante crossing through a trocha and related her terrifying experience with the guerrilla smugglers, stating that they steal from Venezuelan migrants on the route and that she protected herself from this by crossing with a large group, as was also true for other Caminantes (Acosta 2019; Mazuera-Arias et al. 2022).

We had to cross a small river, and there was a guy who was waiting for us on the other side with the rope; so they passed the rope through the river and you have to walk holding onto that rope so that the river won't take you. And yeah it was really horrible, and you'd see pregnant ladies and women with babies all around the trocha. And yes you're also at risk of being robbed, and even more so if they know that you are a foreigner, that you're coming from Venezuela. Those, how do you call them, guerrilla or something like that, and they steal from the people who are crossing the trocha, because they already know how we're gonna cross. That's why so many people who cross the border do it in big groups, in crowds, to avoid things, because you might get killed or raped or robbed. Well, I found it horrible.

Angie, who was a single eighteen-year-old high school student and mother when she crossed the border, described a similar experience in a completely different way.

I arrived at the border and saw those people with their guns, the Guerrilla. That part was a real experience, but nothing actually happened. They [the Guerrilla] just check you and you cross the river, and the river was really deep so you have to grab to a rope, and you pass to the other side and stuff. But nothing really happens there because there is respect, and if somebody does something wrong, they chop him up, they kill them and stuff. Angie.

Instead of being terrified by them as Kylie was, Angie claimed that non-state actors helped keep the routes organised and safe. These contradictory accounts of crossing the same illegal route further reinforce existing literature that finds that migrants’ perceptions of smugglers vary depending on their experiences, coupled with cultural and individual characteristics (Sanchez 2017a; de la Rosa and Lara 2021). While Kylie and Angie had similar age and socioeconomic conditions before migrating, their risk perceptions differed. A reason that may have accounted for their different portrayals of the smugglers could be related to previous information they had both received about them.

Contrary to accounts of women crossing through trochas who are sexually abused or exploited (Calderón-Jaramillo et al. 2020; Zulver and Idler 2020; Correa-Salazar et al. 2023), none of the participants reported victimisation during their journey into Colombia. In fact, as Angie and Kylie noted, they did not interact much with the non-state actors who controlled the routes but were just checked and passed. The experiences of those participants who did interact with smugglers are consistent with existing literature on migration, which shows that women’s encounters with migrant smugglers are heterogeneous, ranging from uneventful and familiar to exploitative and violent (Zhang et al. 2007; Fundación Ideas para la Paz 2018; Schuster, 2021; Ávila Méndez, 2021; Gallien and Weigand, 2022). Furthermore, they exemplify Spener’s (2009) resistencia hormiga in that these participants made strategic alliances with their smugglers to help them cross.

Ani related a positive encounter where she was able to exercise agency in her decision to hire a smuggler and was able to negotiate the price and conditions for the services with him. After being refused entry into Colombia twice and noticing that there were people around the border who helped others cross, Ani saw the opportunity and took it. For her, making a “strategic alliance” with the smuggler was a quick and cheap solution to her situation. It is worth mentioning Ani’s use of the term muchacho (boy) to describe the smuggler, which almost infantilises him. Instead of seeing him as a threat or a figure that produces fear, she portrayed him as a young man who was helping her achieve her goal. At one point, she even related how she held his hand because she was scared during the crossing; she perceived him as a figure who offered her security in that uncertain situation.

Ani expressed that she had the power to control the economic transactions with the smuggler. This could be attributed, in part, to Ani’s socioeconomic and individual characteristics. In the context of migrant smuggling, “individual and family life histories are critical in the study of illegal economies embedded in kinship ties and identity groups” (de la Rosa and Lara 2021, p.50). She was a thirty-seven-year-old professional who described herself as an assertive (echada pa’alante) woman. These factors might have given her a position of power when doing a transaction with a young and uneducated smuggler.

Angie got cheated by a smuggler who sold her a fake bus ticket from Cúcuta to Bogotá, and instead of being afraid of him, she confronted him and made him buy her a real ticket.

When we arrived there, there were a lot of people trying to sell us tickets. And I didn't know anything about that, and when they sold me the ticket, they cheated me. So, I was in Cúcuta for a week suffering hardship until finally we found the man who cheated us and he gave me a new ticket.

It could be that Angie’s travelling in a group and going together with the other people to confront the smuggler helped her get him to pay back the money he had stolen. If she, an eighteen-year-old woman, had gone alone to demand that he pay her back, the man might not have obliged. Ani’s and Angie’s accounts of their encounters with smugglers contradict the representations of nefarious, profit-driven and highly organised criminal syndicates associated with the smuggling of migrants; they are more consistent with research that shows that “despite their limitations, migrants have also shown the ability to confront smugglers when abusive situations take place, escape from safe houses, refuse to pay smuggling fees or even report their confinement to the authorities” (Sanchez 2017a, p. 51).

Conclusion

While most research on crimmigration focuses on how stringent migration policies impact the lives of migrants and those who help them migrate, this article demonstrated that seemingly routine bureaucratic requirements such as asking for a passport or requiring parental consent for mothers can also encourage irregular migration. The Colombian migration framework for Venezuelans is an example of how there may be mechanisms to keep unwanted migration out even in countries that proclaim to have open borders. As of October 2022, the newly elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, negotiated the reopening of the border on the Venezuelan side. He also issued a directive that Venezuelans could use their national IDs again to enter Colombia. Further research in this area can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of how the reopening of the Venezuelan border and the removal of the passport requirement for Venezuelans is impacting how female migrants are crossing to Colombia. Despite the importance of these measures towards ensuring that more migrants can travel through safer channels, many single mothers still must deal with getting parental consent from absent fathers to travel internationally. More work is required to study the gendered effects of migration policy on female primary migrants travelling with their children (Chemlali, 2023).

Much literature on female irregular migration, especially Venezuelan migrants, has concentrated on portraying female migrants as extremely vulnerable to becoming victims of sexual violence at the hands of non-state actors and smugglers (Calderón-Jaramillo et al. 2020; Zulver and Idler 2020; Correa-Salazar et al. 2023). This depiction reinforces the idea that female migration is inherently dangerous. In the case of the participants of this study, those who were single, had a passport and could afford a bus ticket had uneventful crossings through legal borders. For those who travelled through unauthorised routes, different markers such as age, economic situation, where they crossed from and whether they were travelling with children impacted their experiences crossing the border. These findings reveal the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding the impact of migration policies on female migrants and also the “emancipatory potential” (Bürkner, 2012, p.192) of this approach in seeing female migrants as more than just “victims of exclusion” (Ibid, p.192).

This paper also demonstrated how some female migrants may actively resist the migratory framework used to prevent them from entering a country by circumventing it. The participants utilised their knowledge of the territory and formed strategic alliances with smugglers to secure their crossings. Simplistic representations of “bad” smugglers and “unknowing” migrants can lead to enacting policies that may not tackle the underlying issues of why people use illegal means to enter a country. Because of this, a critical view of the relationships between smugglers and female migrants and the role that migration policies play in migrants’ decisions to use unauthorised routes can be useful to construct a more nuanced portrayal of irregular migration.