The prolonged Economic and political instability in Venezuela has forced millions of Venezuelans to leave over the past decade, quashing many of their dreams and leaving many wondering whether they will ever return to what was once South America’s most prosperous country.
The refugee agency UNHCR estimates that more than 7.7 million Venezuelans left since 2014the largest exodus in recent Latin American history, with the majority settling in the Americas, from neighboring Colombia and Brazil to Argentina and Canada.
On Sunday, Venezuelans will vote for highly anticipated presidential election This, for the first time in years, represents an electoral challenge for President Nicolás Maduro, who is seeking a third term. His main opponent is former diplomat Edmundo González, candidate of the main opposition faction.
Here are the voices of some Venezuelans living abroad. Some created new lives; some hope to return – someday.
Most Venezuelans who left in the last decade settled in Colombia, where the government created a program grant them legal residence status and incorporate them into the formal economy.
María Auxiliadora Añez, 60, left her home in the once-prosperous oil hub of Maracaibo in 2020 to visit her son, who already lived in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá. Her Mexican food business was struggling, and she watched neighbors and friends migrate amid a constant lack of services and frequent blackouts.
Añez decided to stay in Colombia, where she and her husband run a Venezuelan food truck.
She said she didn’t register to vote on Sunday because she found it difficult, but she thinks Venezuela needs more than one election to turn things around. “It’s not just about changing the president,” she said. “We need quality of life, access to basic and essential services such as water and electricity.”
Ana Isabel Gómez, 51, decided to emigrate in 2014 after feeling that her safety and that of her family were at risk.
Gómez lived in the northwestern city of Barquisimeto, where he helped provide humanitarian aid to the population during a period of protests against Maduro, elected in 2013 after the death of former leader Hugo Chávez.
“My eldest son, for the third time, told me: ‘Mom, get me out of here’, because they were murdering teenagers… at that moment, in addition to being a woman, I was a mother,” she said.
Gómez, her then-partner, and their two children, then ages 3 and 13, took a flight to Bogotá, where she eventually settled and now runs a wellness center and a nonprofit that ships medicine to Venezuela. .
She says she is optimistic about Venezuela’s future and would like to return one day.
Emilia Lizbeth Angulo, a 51-year-old lawyer, left the northwestern city of Mérida in 2018 after being harassed by pro-government officials. It was the year that Maduro was re-elected, in an election that saw the main opposition parties and candidates banned from participating.
Angulo was working in human resources at a hospital when she was invited to participate in pro-government demonstrations and refused. Then came the retaliation. The hospital stopped giving her the heart medications her mother needed. Eventually, her position was eliminated.
Angulo said leaving Venezuela initially plunged her into depression. She and a friend left for Colombia, where she spent six months selling coffee and arepas before moving to Chile, where she settled and works as an administrative assistant.
“Yes, I really want to go back, but I’m waiting for the right time to do so,” she said.
Liseth Díaz, a 46-year-old systems engineer, started thinking about migrating in 2015. “One day, leaving the cinema with my daughters in the car, we found ourselves in the middle of a shootout,” she recalls.
Díaz and her family closed their contracting business, and in December 2017, she, her husband and three daughters traveled from the central Venezuelan city of Guacara to Chile. After 14 days crossing Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, they arrived in Santiago, the capital, where she now works in the fiber optic sector.
They haven’t returned to Venezuela, and Díaz doesn’t think they will anytime soon — at least not while what she calls Maduro’s “dictatorship” remains in power.
She will not vote on Sunday because she was unable to obtain the required passport despite several efforts.
In 2016, while struggling to survive amid hyperinflation and widespread shortages, José Alberto Morán was robbed a few times.
Morán, who studied and worked in Caracas, decided to emigrate to Spain. He moved to Valencia, becoming the first member of his family to leave. Later, one brother moved to the Dominican Republic and another to Colombia.
His parents and other siblings remain in Venezuela, where he sends them money.
“What we do is help support them all,” said Morán, 29, who works as a tile salesman in Madrid.
He will not vote in Sunday’s election due to “many obstacles” to registering, but said he does not expect any major changes. Morán said he would not return permanently unless his country could offer him “security and stability,” something he does not expect in the short term.
Jacobo Alonso Sequeiros left Venezuela in 2012, when Chávez was still president. Hoping for a better future, he headed to Europe, first traveling to the UK before finding a job as a computer engineer in Spain.
Born in Caracas, he grew up in Ciudad Guayana, in the south of the state of Bolívar. He left behind his parents and sister, but after his mother’s death in 2016, his sister moved with him to Spain.
Like many other Venezuelans living abroad, Sequeiros will not vote in Sunday’s elections because he considered the registration process too bureaucratic. But he is hopeful that “there could be a big change on July 28th.”
Sequeiros, who now lives in Galicia, does not see himself returning permanently. “Come back to stay? No,” he said. “First, there would have to be circumstances, such as a job offer or economic stability, for me to decide to leave everything I have achieved over the years in Spain and start my life over in Venezuela.”
Yuly Macedo, a 47-year-old lawyer who cleans houses in Miami, said she has always opposed Maduro’s government. In April 2016, she took a plane with her husband and son, then 10, to Miami, where she sought political asylum and has lived ever since.
Before leaving, Macedo worked for more than six years in different positions at the city council of Cagua, about 60 kilometers southwest of Caracas.
She said she was forced to participate in pro-Maduro demonstrations and recruit people to vote for him. She was warned not to talk about corruption and irregularities she witnessed while working in local government, otherwise she would risk losing her job. She remembers receiving death threats and even being followed.
It was “constant harassment and threats,” she said.
She was fired in 2014, but the threats continued, she said. At one point she thought: “I can’t go on with this fear” and she finally left, leaving her parents and two brothers behind.
Venezuelans who like Macedo are unable to vote while in the United States because their country’s embassy and consulates have been closed for years. But she hopes this time there will be a change. “Hope and expectations will never be lost,” she said.
Returning, however, is not in his plans – even if the opposition triumphs.
“I can’t go back to Venezuela, I feel very scared, very afraid,” she added, explaining that those who threatened her still live there.
Mayra José Marchán arrived in South Florida with her husband and two daughters almost a decade ago, but has been helping with the mobilization opposition voters back to Venezuela.
Marchán is looking for donors to help pay for transportation for voters in Venezuela on election day, to buy food and drinks for representatives at voting centers and even to pay telephone bills for activists campaigning for the opposition.
“My slogan is: ‘If I can’t vote, I can help,’” said Marchán, a 52-year-old economist.
Marchán, a former university professor, said she was not affiliated with any political party, but participated in anti-government demonstrations. She said she was threatened and that military personnel followed her in Araure, her hometown, about 340 kilometers (210 miles) southwest of Caracas.
Marchán, her husband and two daughters entered the US on tourist visas and shortly afterwards requested political asylum. They now have a company that dehydrates Venezuelan sweet peppers.
She is confident that the Venezuelan opposition will come out “en masse” to vote on Sunday. And although she fears that Maduro’s government will do everything in its power to stay in power, she is hopeful.
“I dream of a different Venezuela; I work for a different nation, we have to keep working to make this happen,” she said.
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