On the highway heading to Peru, 21-year-old Javier Caballero dragged a wheeled suitcase stuffed with blankets and a large cross, unfazed by measures to deter migrants. "We're not afraid of anything anymore. We'll keep going. We've seen catastrophic things in Venezuela, people dying of hunger," he said.
"We have no passports but returning to Venezuela isn't an option," he said. "It would be going back to misery."
THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
5 QUESTIONS ABOUT THE VENEZUELAN MIGRATION CRISIS
1 WHAT IS THE SCALE OF VENEZUELAN MIGRATION?
According to the United Nations, 1.6 million Venezuelans have been displaced in the region since 2015 as the fallout from the country's economic crisis took hold.
It says 2.3 million Venezuelans are now living abroad but others put the figure much higher.
Venezuela has a population of 30.6 million. Venezuelan sociologist Tomas Paez Bravo says between 10 per cent and 12 per cent of Venezuelans are living abroad in more than 90 countries.
2 WHEN AND WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
It all began when Mr Hugo Chavez became president in 1999, according to Dr Paez, but the crisis has accelerated since President Nicolas Maduro took office in 2013.
Venezuela's over-reliance on its vast oil reserves - 96 per cent of its earnings come from crude - caused a problem when the price plummeted in 2014, causing shortages of foreign capital.
The government's response was to print more money, but that only pushed up inflation, ushering in four years of recession. Venezuela has also drastically devalued the bolivar, and issued banknotes stripped of five zeroes in new "sovereign bolivars".
The economic plan includes a 3,400 per cent rise in the minimum wage and a hike in petrol taxes, which for years were the world's cheapest.
3 HOW DOES IT AFFECT VENEZUELA?
Initially the country was hit by a brain drain and an exodus of capital.
"At first the immigration was by people with capital and a university education," says Mr Alfonzo Iannucci, who runs a website that runs testimonies from the Venezuelan diaspora around the world.
Dr Perez Bravo, of the Central University of Venezuela diaspora think-tank, says now there is only one type of person leaving the country. "The poor are leaving because now everyone is poor."
He adds that they are fleeing on foot "not because they're not chemists, sociologists or engineers" but because "it would take 30 years to save up for an airplane ticket".
4 HOW DOES IT AFFECT THE REGION?
Mr Iannucci says "the avalanche of Venezuelans" has "collapsed" border towns of neighbouring countries ill-prepared for such an influx.
Venezuelan migrants were blamed for a rise in petty crime and competition for jobs and hospital beds there, leading a band of local vigilantes to torch migrant camps and chase them back over the border.
"We're close to breaking point," says Brazil's Roraima state government secretary Marcelo Lopes.
Mr Iannucci thinks things are going to get worse, saying: "This is just the tip of the iceberg." The impact is not entirely negative, though, Dr Perez Bravo says.
"In Argentina they say that those arriving are young, entrepreneurial and well-qualified."
5 HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO OTHER MIGRATIONS?
In terms of numbers, it has already surpassed the Cuban exodus following late Cuban president Fidel Castro's revolution that toppled the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship.
Around 1.4 million Cubans fled to the US, with a further 300,000 heading for other parts of Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe, according to the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute think-tank.
But that was over six decades, not four years.
The UN has said the exodus of Venezuelans to other South American countries is building towards a "crisis moment" comparable to events involving refugees in the Mediterranean.
Mr Carlos Malamud of the Elcano Royal Institute think-tank in Madrid says: "Given the distances covered, this phenomenon could be compared to the refugee crisis in Syria."
According to the UN, 5.6 million Syrians have fled the country while a further 6.6 million are internally displaced as a result of civil war.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE