Baseball is not popular in Colombia. Except on the Caribbean coast, football dominates. In Bogotá, the capital, many know very little about “baseball.” And the city has only two public ballparks.
But swing by the Hermes Barros Cabas baseball stadium on any weekend and it won’t feel that way. On a recent Sunday, five groups of children dressed in their team uniforms filled every corner of the main field.
Coaches took batting practice while kids caught ground balls or fly balls. Parents shouted words of encouragement or instruction. The smell of coffee and fried snacks wafted behind the bleachers.
Most of the people present, however, were not Colombian.
The vast majority of the 500 players in Bogota’s baseball league come from neighboring Venezuela, where baseball e.g the most popular sport. As Venezuelans often say, it’s in their blood.
“No matter what country I went to, I would take my refereeing equipment with me,” said the league’s chief referee, Pastor Colmenares, 50. When he left Venezuela for Colombia in search of a better-paying job in 2017, Mr. Colmenares’s only suitcase was filled with his baseball gear.
Venezuela’s economic collapse and political repression have created the largest refugee crisis in the Western Hemisphere, and no Latin American country has seen a larger influx of Venezuelan migrants than Colombia (a valued 2.9 million in a country of 52 million). And no Colombian city has been a more popular destination than Bogotá (an valued 600,000 in a city of almost 8 million inhabitants).
Many Venezuelans, whose lives have been turned upside down in their homeland, now face an uncertain future and, in some cases, have been met with a hostile reception from Colombians. For them, the League offers a measure of refuge.
“For me it means hope,” Félix Ortega, 51, told a software consultant who moved to Colombia from Venezuela in 2018, and whose sons, Sebastián, 13, and Rodrigo, 8, play in the league.
“My children maintain that contact with our culture,” he continued. “But it is also a meeting place for all of us. “It’s like having a piece of Venezuela here.”
The league, in various forms, has existed since 1945 and was composed primarily of Colombians. But the situation has changed in recent years, as more Venezuelans have arrived.
“We opened the door for them,” said the league’s president, Colombian José Francisco Martínez Petro, adding that the newcomers bring consolidated baseball know-how and have raised the level of the league.
Of the nine clubs in the amateur league, each of which fields multiple teams of different age groups, starting from 3 years old, there is one that is decidedly Venezuelan: the Leones. Unlike other teams named after Major League Baseball clubs in the United States, the Leones are a nod to Venezuela’s most successful professional team, which not all Venezuelans in Bogota were fans of back home.
“Once you’re here, it doesn’t matter,” said Gabriel Arcos, a systems engineer who grew up rooting for a Leones rival in Venezuela and moved to Bogotá in 2016. “Maybe you don’t like the Leones from Caracas, but as I always say , these are the Leones of Bogotà”.
Four years ago, when Iraida Acosta took over the presidency of the Leones, she said there were only six Venezuelan children. Now, he said, most of his 64 players are Venezuelan.
Ms. Acosta, 54, said that in 2017, she and her 9-year-old son left their Venezuelan hometown near the Caribbean coast to visit her husband, who had come to Bogota six months earlier to find work. In the end they stayed because the economic opportunities were better.
However, it wasn’t easy.
“The culture, despite being sister countries, is totally different,” she said, later adding, “I cried a lot when I got here.”
When Ms. Acosta surrounded public buses in Bogota, she said she avoided speaking so people wouldn’t hear her accent. She said people would use a disrespectful term for Venezuelans in Colombia and mutter, “Go back to your country.”
He discovered the baseball league on Facebook, signed up his son and started a community. She became friends with the Colombians who ran the Leones club and they handed it over to her when family health complications arose.
Other Colombians Ms. Acosta met through baseball made her feel welcome. Sports, she said, provided common ground.
“Without all the immigration – forced, desired or otherwise – we wouldn’t have the quality here that we have now in players and coaches,” said Hernán Vasquez, 36, Colombian, assistant coach of the Leones and whose 7-year-old son plays in the league.
Mr. Vasquez, who joked that he is now Venezuelan by association given the number of people he spends time with, is angry that many Colombians have singled out Venezuelans as the source of their country’s problems, such as the rise of the crime rate.
“The majority – 99% of the Venezuelans I know – are professionals who have come to work,” he said.
Mr. Colmenares left Barquisimeto, a town in northwestern Venezuela, six years ago because he said his three jobs — metalworker, referee and occasional construction worker — still did not provide him with enough money to adequately feed his family. “When I arrived, my skin was practically attached to my bones,” he said.
At first, Mr. Colmenares said he struggled to find a job, bouncing from one deal to another, offering to do anything. “There were many of us looking for work,” he said. “You would see a lot of, ‘Oh, you’re Venezuelan. No, no, no, we don’t want anything to do with the Venezuelans.’”
After finally finding work as a metalworker, Mr. Colmenares slowly built a life for himself in Bogotá. His wife and daughter later joined him in Colombia, while another daughter and son live in Chile. (He has not met his 6-year-old granddaughter, born in Chile.)
Mr. Colmenares also found jogging in his true passion: refereeing. When he joined the league, he said only one other referee was Venezuelan. Today, 11 out of 12 are.
“The championship means everything to me,” he said through tears. “After my family, it’s up to refereeing.”
Others have found a similar refuge. When Mr. Arcos left Caracas seven years ago because of dwindling opportunities, he arrived in Bogotá alone. He started working, found an apartment and three months later his wife and 4-year-old son arrived.
They spent their first New Year’s Eve alone in the city. For over two years they mostly stayed at home or explored Bogota on their own.
But one day, while going to play soccer with colleagues, Mr. Arcos came across the league’s baseball field and signed his son up the following week. Soon his family was spending every weekend there. The guests at their children’s birthday parties are all from the league.
“It changed our lives completely,” Mr. Arcos, 34, said.
However, baseball hasn’t been quite the same as at home. Parents have complained that competition for their children is not as strong as in Venezuela. The league can’t always field a team for national tournaments, officials said, because Colombian baseball federation rules limit the number of foreign players to 20% of a roster.
And unlike Venezuela, where ballparks are everywhere, Bogota’s league stadium is in the center of the traffic-clogged city, and can take more than an hour each way to reach it.
When Suleibi Romero Gonzalez can’t get her son Darvish, 11, to practice or play because she’s busy running her Venezuelan restaurant, she and another mother take turns taking their kids to the field.
Ms. Romero, 37, a separated mother of three, came to Bogotá alone in 2017, and then brought her family with her. She and her husband at the time both loved baseball and wanted their oldest son to continue playing.
“It’s beneficial because it’s the same group he’s been playing with since they were 5 years old,” he said.
Even as many Venezuelans leave Colombia for the United States, the baseball league remains a nexus for the Venezuelan diaspora. Ms. Acosta’s families said they have not even left Venezuela, but contact each other regularly on social media.
The messages, he said, typically say: “’Hi, I need information. I’m coming to Colombia soon and I want my son to register to play there.’”