Venezuelan exiles Nayise González and Oswaldo Romero could not be clearer about their desire to return to their troubled homeland.
“Of course we want to go back,” says González, 38, who arrived in the Peruvian capital in November after an eight-day bus ride with not much more than the clothes she was wearing. “It is our country, our home. It is where our lives and our families are.”
But before that day eventually comes, González and Romero, a security guard and former police officer, are very clear about one other thing: They would like to bring their seven children, five with previous partners, to live with them in Peru first.
The couple are from the northeastern city of Barquisimeto, long a stronghold of opposition to the self-styled “Bolívarian socialism” of the late President Hugo Chávez and his political heir, current President Nicolás Maduro. Like millions of their compatriots who have fled the hunger, disease, hyperinflation, authoritarianism, corruption and epidemic levels of violent crime that has brought oil-rich Venezuela — with more crude reserves than even Saudi Arabia, to its knees — they face the dilemma of when to return if there is a democratic transition.
In recent weeks, Juan Guaidó, the leader of the opposition-controlled Congress and self-declared interim president, appears to have harnessed public fury against the floundering Maduro regime in a game-changing manner.
Guaidó has offered Venezuelans a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel with the possibility of forcing free and fair new elections. Challenging Maduro’s democratic legitimacy and labeling him a “usurper,” the youthful lawmaker has won recognition from most Western democracies and, crucially, control of the international bank accounts into which Venezuela’s petro-dollars are pouring. He has also politically checkmated the regime into blockading a border bridge to prevent desperately needed international food aid arriving from Colombia.
Yet even if Guaidó achieves his goal, living conditions are unlikely to ease up for ordinary citizens anytime soon.
“It feels like things might finally be starting to change,” González says. “But until Maduro goes, I am not getting my hopes up. And until the economy starts to function again, and I can get food and other basic necessities for my family, we are better off staying in Peru and, if we can, bringing over our family.”
“Chávez was good for the poor, at least at the beginning. You can’t deny that. But not the people like us, who were neither rich nor poor. But now we are poor, too.”
Life Abroad: Better, Yet Precarious
Romero, who arrived in Peru six months ago, earns the minimum wage of just over 900 sols (roughly $270) a month working as a gas fitter.
González, who had her own small store selling meat and cold cuts in Venezuela until the supply of products to sell dried up, is once again looking for work after stints as a waitress and at a school. She quit the latter job, she says, after they failed to pay her. Asked what kind of work she wants, she responds: “Whatever. I’ll take anything that pays.”
The pair now lives in a small rented room with a shared bathroom in San Juan the Lurigancho, a grindingly poor mega-suburb on Lima’s dusty eastern margins. About twice a month, they wire 60 sols (approximately $18) back to family in Barquisimeto, enough to purchase the basic necessities of life, from toilet paper to cooking oil and rice, for about three people for two weeks.
Yet despite living on or below the poverty line in Peru and missing their children and home, there is no question that the pair is better off than back in Barquisimeto.
With an estimated 650,000 Venezuelan exiles, Peru is second only to Colombia, which has received one million, as a refuge from those fleeing the catastrophe that has engulfed their homeland since Chávez first won power at the ballot box in December 1998, declaring to a crowd of adoring followers: “Venezuela’s resurrection is underway and nothing and nobody can stop it.”
“Nearly all of them express their desire to go back,” says Marianne Menjivar, the Colombia country director for the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit dedicated to helping global refugees. “It is not a romantic desire. It is very concrete. They want to go back to the business of the farm they abandoned, to their home or their family. What has driven them away is the scarcity of food and medicine. They are not overly political. The impression is that politics is not a luxury they can afford. They come across as people who are traumatized.”
“All struggle to make a living here (in Colombia). There are no jobs for the Colombians here, let alone Venezuelans. They are selling ice creams and empanadas in the streets. They’re working as day laborers, whatever work they can find. It is all exploitative, underpaid, informal and precarious.”
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‘You Can Get Rid of Maduro But There Will Still be Hunger’
The trend of Venezuelans fleeing the chaos of “Chavismo” – the left-wing political ideology based on the ideas of former President Chávez – is hardly new. Venezuelans have been leaving the country for years, although it is in the last 18 months that the numbers have rocketed to the point where the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR, describes it as the worst refugee crisis in Latin America in recent history. Globally, only Syria has more citizens fleeing their homeland than Venezuela’s 3 million exiles.
“There is a radical difference with those coming now,” says Santos Guerra, a 43-year-old web developer who moved from Caracas to Lima in 2016 after power cuts and creakingly slow Internet combined with Venezuela’s overall economic meltdown to put him out of business.
“Those who came before were usually professionals and had some economic resources. Those coming now don’t have anything. Some of them may even have been sympathetic, once, to Chavismo. They lasted until the very last minute but have now had no choice but to leave.”
That also means that, unable to even afford a bus ticket, many of them are making the arduous journey to Peru and other countries further south on foot, trekking through tropical heat and freezing Andean highlands. Regina de la Portilla, an official with the UNHCR in Lima, says that the fittest and fastest take 17 days if they are lucky and are able to hitch rides along the way. Many take more than twice as long.
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