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The challenge of returning to Venezuela after years of exodus: "The country is not better, but it is another country"

2023-05-15T05:16:43.041Z

Highlights: The tightening of migration restrictions in the region has led to the return of thousands of Venezuelans. They return to a more unequal and expensive country, where dollarization and remote work allow them to establish themselves. At least 2,000 foreigners have left Santiago de Chile this year, according to the Government of that country. The Venezuelan Government reported by the end of 2022 only 31,000 returnees with the so-called Plan Vuelta a la Patria that since the pandemic has arranged flights for the return.


The tightening of migration restrictions in the region has led to the return of thousands of Venezuelans. They return to a more unequal and expensive country, where dollarization and remote work allow them to establish themselves


When Helena Riera left Venezuela fed up with politics, with lines to buy food, she had running water in her house. It was the year 2015 and Nicolás Maduro had starred in a scene that marked her, an episode that in the recent Venezuelan tragedy is known as the Dakazo. The Chavista leader ordered prices to be lowered at an appliance store called Daka and people thronged to fight over a toaster or a hair dryer. He has returned to Venezuela this 2023, after almost eight years living in Chile and somehow he has already adapted to the daily life of waiting for the tanker truck that they must pay to have water in Carora, a town in the Venezuelan plains. The country to which he arrives is not better, but it is different. "If it goes wrong I leave again, but it's not my plan to go wrong. I know where I came from, I don't have any strategic financial goals. I return for emotional and personal reasons," she says by phone.

Helena could be among the at least 2,000 foreigners who have left Santiago de Chile this year, according to the Government of that country a few weeks ago. A flow especially of Venezuelans who have mostly undertaken another migratory process towards the United States, which pressures the Administration of Joe Biden, of which a group touches base in their country of return. They are part of an uncertain return of Venezuelans, a trickle that began to be notorious in the last year, which for some specialists such as researcher Anitza Freites, of the Andrés Bello Catholic University, could be between 3% and 6% of the nearly seven million who have left and continue to leave Venezuela in search of a better life. according to the latest data from UNHCR. The Venezuelan Government reported by the end of 2022 only 31,000 returnees with the so-called Plan Vuelta a la Patria that since the pandemic has arranged flights for the return of Venezuelans, and with this has fed the narrative about the recovery of the country from which everyone was leaving.

In Chile, Helena had papers and voted. Although she is a social communicator, she had jobs as a migrant as a receptionist, in a coffee kiosk that she managed to set up or dictating drawing workshops that allowed her to live. He also had a sentimental relationship that when it ended with the reasons to be in that country. Like her, her brother and sister-in-law also returned from Chile this year, with another story and motivations after accusing the pandemic of the blow. "My brother was fired from a job for downsizing before the pandemic. Then he started working for Uber and the banks were eating them with the payment of a loan for an apartment they bought and could not continue paying. "

In those years Helena saw the evolution of the country that welcomed her. "When I arrived, they told us Venezuelans, 'You do, Peruvians don't.' Now everywhere it's 'Venezuelan culiao, go back to your country'. I saw xenophobia emerge." Upon returning to Venezuela, he also appreciates a change, which bittersweetly pleases him. "Here no one stops the government, that gives me some peace of mind. We are too screwed, this is a disaster, but self-management has emerged and no one expects anything anymore. Like in my house, which has not received water for four years but now the tanker truck is called and each family solves," says the 34-year-old Venezuelan. "Now I feel like this is a stateless country where people do their lives as best they can." Among Helena's plans is to set up an art school for children in her village. "Here I can do it, because I have the networks and the family. Not being isolated helps," she says. "It gives me great happiness to be able to realize this project that I have always had and with it to overcome the conditions in which the country is."

Make dollars

In 2016 Angel Silva made a six-day bus trip to emigrate to Lima. They told him that in Peru he was going to fill up with money. After three months he took his wife and two children. He worked as a mechanic and as a driver of heavy trucks. He lived closely the xenophobia against Venezuelans. At one job he was accused of being a thief. On a bus trip he tried to mediate for a lady to whom the driver did not want to return the return, he received a knife that ended in a fight and was arrested for that. Her children were able to study, learned English from a young age and were able to save up to make an unexpected plane trip last December to attend her father-in-law's funeral, a return they took advantage of to stay after six years without seeing the family. He says his experience wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either.

"When I was in Venezuela they told me to go to Peru, they told me they were going to fill me with money and I crashed. Now when my friends there ask me how Venezuela is, I tell them that it is in a process of change, but that as long as this government is there, it will not change much. I tell them that if they want to go back, try it, without losing their papers there." The dollarization of the country is the main change he perceives. When Angel left, having dollars without government authorization was a crime. "I'm excited about the return, I haven't thought about the possibility of returning to Peru. Of course, I work a lot here. I go out at 3 or 4 in the morning to the street to work because yes or yes every day I have to make dollars, "he says during a break in his day as a taxi driver. He plans to set up a street food stall to round out the income.

Kelinger Colmenares also does not draw a positive balance from her migratory experience in the city of Yachuachí, in southern Ecuador. Three years ago he arrived in that country with 20 years and a baby of months, after his partner of Ecuadorian origin managed to settle down. But she couldn't get papers, or take the makeup course she expected, or work for her own income, or enroll her daughter in a school that could only take dance classes. She also lived in terror of the city's violence taken over by organized crime and drug trafficking. "Everyone tells me why I return, but staying in a country where I have to wait for my partner to get paid to do something wears me down emotionally and mentally," he wrote this week on WhatsAapp from the bus he was returning to Venezuela. This Friday she arrived in Caracas and was received at the bus terminal with flowers, hugs and sweets from her family. He will live with his sister while he manages to make money to finish building the house they left halfway in the neighborhood of Carapita, in western Caracas, when they decided to leave. "They tell me that everything is the same here, but it's very hard to see your family go through difficult situations and not be with them. For me, money is made anywhere in the world."

Kelinger Colmenares, 23, is reunited with her family in Caracas after spending three years in Ecuador.

New destinations

Anitza Freites is about to publish the results of a qualitative research in which she approaches the incipient phenomenon of returnees. "In what we have seen in in-depth interviews done at the border, without knowing if those people have already settled in the country, there is a profile of young people who left without a planned immigration plan, who went to test, with a life experience in Venezuela where the cost of services, for example, It is null, something that is an abnormal situation," explains the researcher. This flow coincides with the tightening of restrictions in several countries in the region that initially opened their doors to them and also with a slight illusion of economic recovery in Venezuela from the lifting of some controls that Chavismo has made and the spontaneous advance of dollarization, along with inflation and the devaluation of the currency. "Thesituation has become very difficult for Venezuelans in recent months who are being deported in Chile and Peru and at the border with the United States. They are in a kind of lack of protection and involved in the political game of some elites who use the immigration issue giving signs of xenophobia to try to increase their popularity." The study Freites is doing anticipates the reintegration challenges that a larger-scale return could entail.

For sociologist Claudia Vargas, who researches the migration issue at the Simón Bolívar University, it is key to evaluate what she calls "the vocation of permanence" to measure the dimensions of this flow. "There is also a circular migration that returns to see the family, run errands and return to the country they left or to others. The evidence of this is the increase in the mobility of Venezuelans through the Darien gap. The hardening of migration policies makes them want to leave those countries but to achieve what they wanted when they left. In the region, which until 2018 was a lifeline of the second wave of Venezuelans, there has been no effective, legal or economic integration of migrants, which feeds political discourses that can end in discriminatory acts.

Vargas identifies a new wave of Venezuelans in a context in which destinations have diversified and also violations of their rights. The new north of migrants, highlights the researcher, is the United States, and as evidence is the crisis on the border with Mexico, followed by Spain, where Venezuelans lead asylum requests.

A survey by Consultores 21 presented last month reveals that 3 out of 10 Venezuelans intend to leave the country, 48% have at least one relative outside and a third of households receive remittances regularly. The search for developed countries after failed attempts in Latin America may be, according to Vargas, the beginning of a trend and refers to the two deportations of Venezuelans that have occurred from Germany this year.

"The country is not better, but it is another country," says Samuel Ramos, who arrived two weeks ago from Buenos Aires without a return ticket, for now. When he arrived in Argentina in 2018 a dollar was worth 20 pesos and today inflation has shot the price to more than 500. Nothing that is not familiar to a Venezuelan. Samuel worked as a laborer, innkeeper and bicycle delivery man until he could establish himself as an online English teacher so he could live there. "I didn't come from Argentina because it was bad, but because I had been away for five years and I wanted to come and evaluate. There are things I can do there and not here and others I can do here and not there."

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-05-15

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