The ongoing emigration of millions of Venezuelans from their native country is the largest recorded refugee crisis in the Americas.
The refugee crisis followed the Bolivarian Revolution,
an attempt by the successive presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro to establish a cultural and political hegemony, which culminated in the crisis in Venezuela. The resulting refugee crisis has been compared to those faced by Cuban exiles, Syrian refugees and those affected by the European migrant crisis. The Bolivarian government has denied any migratory crisis, stating that the United Nations and others are attempting to justify foreign intervention within Venezuela.
Newsweek described the "Bolivarian diaspora" as "a reversal of fortune on a massive scale", where the reversal refers to Venezuela's high immigration rate during the 20th century. Initially, upper class Venezuelans and scholars emigrated during Chávez's presidency, but middle- and lower-class Venezuelans began to leave as conditions worsened in the country. This has caused a brain drain that affects the nation, due to the large number of emigrants who are educated or skilled. According to one survey, a sharp increase in the number of Venezuelans wishing to emigrate was observed between December 2015 (30%) and September 2016 (57%). By mid-2019, over four million Venezuelans had emigrated since the revolution began in 1999, the vast majority in just the preceding three-and-a-half years.
Estimates had risen to 7.1 million by October 2022, over 20 percent of the country's population, exceeding the refugees from the Syrian civil war to become the most voluminous such crisis in history. The Norwegian Refugee Council, the Brookings Institution and the Organization of American States commissioner for the Venezuelan refugee crisis, David Smolansky, have estimated that the crisis is also one of the most underfunded refugee crises in modern history.
According to the UNHCR, more than 7.9 million people have emigrated from Venezuela in the years corresponding to Maduro's rise to power and the consolidation of Chavismo. From May to August 2023, 390,000 Venezuelans left their country, driven by despair over challenging living conditions, characterized by low wages, rampant inflation, lack of public services, and political repression. However, R4V suggests that these figures could be even higher, as many migrants without regular status are not included in the count. The organization's calculation method is based on asylum requests and refugee registrations in each country, which might exclude those in irregular situations.
History
The 1814 Caracas Exodus occurred during the Venezuelan War of Independence, when thousands of civilians fled from the capital Caracas towards the east of the country, after the defeat of Venezuelan patriots in the Second Battle of La Puerta on 15 June 1814.
News about the approach of José Tomás Boves and his royalists troops caused panic amongst the population in Caracas, so on 7 July 1814, more than 20,000 people emigrated to the East of the country, along with Simon Bolívar and his remaining Patriot troops. Many thousands perished. Although a large number of people followed Bolívar on the long journey, another group, especially the most politically committed, sought refuge in the Antilles or New Granada, while a third group gave up the march and returned to Caracas to place themselves under the protection of Archbishop Coll y Prat.
In December 1820, the Numancia battalion, a Spanish Regiment formed in Venezuela by Pablo Morillo in Venezuela and sent to reinforce the Viceroyalty of Peru, joined the Patriot governments during the Spanish American wars of independence by crossing the Huaura River. Once the army was formally incorporated in Huaura to San Martin Army, it changed its name to Voltigeros de la Guardia and went on to fight in the Peruvian War of Independence.
Following the victory of the patriot forces at the Battle of Carabobo on September 18, 1821, the Gran Colombian President Simón Bolívar approved a law under which "all Spaniards under the age of 80, whether from the Iberian Peninsula or the Canary islands, who could not prove they had participated in the independence movement would be forcibly expelled from the country."
In Puerto Cabello, approximately 2,000 Spanish civilians sought refuge in the San Felipe Fortress. Bolívar ordered a siege by land and sea to prevent a royalist counteroffensive in Venezuela. Admiral Laborde participated in the evacuation of the first Spanish civilians from the port of La Guaira to Havana.
The garrison of Puerto Cabello withstood the siege until November 1823. That place was the last refuge of a territory that had been Spanish since the time of Christopher Columbus. The surrender of the San Felipe fortress ended with only 400 surviving soldiers. The main destination for those expelled was the Spanish Caribbean islands, especially Cuba and Puerto Rico, where 3,555 refugees arrived.
Between 1823 and 1830, prominent Venezuelans military and political figures served as presidents of various countries in the Andean region and died out the country. General Simón Bolívar held supreme command—either simultaneously or consecutively—over Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Antonio José de Sucre was the first constitutional president of Bolivia, governing formally from December 1825 to August 1828, Juan José Flores Following the dissolution of Gran Colombia, he became the founder and first president of the Republic of Ecuador, serving his first constitutional term between 1830 and 1834. Rafael Urdaneta was the last President of Colombia
Since 1830 several presidents were forced into exile after being overthrown: in 1835, José María Vargas—Venezuela's first civilian president—was arrested and exiled alongside Vice President Andrés Narvarte during the Revolution of the Reforms, though both were reinstated within weeks; in 1858, following the triumph of the March Revolution, José Tadeo Monagas went into exile under the terms of the Urrutia Protocol; and in 1892, Raimundo Andueza Palacio left the country after the victory of the Legalist Revolution, led by Joaquín Crespo. Many instances of exile occurred following Julián Castro's order to expel figures from the Liberal Party, as well as after the triumph of the Legalist Revolution. Common destinations for exiles included Colombia, Caribbean islands (Curazao, Saint Thomas and Trinidad), USA and sometimes Europe. In some cases, exiled Venezuelans planned military incursions or uprisings against the government then in power.
During the 20 century, a significant number of exiles occurred under the dictatorships of Cipriano Castro, Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Following Juan Vicente Gómez's death in 1935, Eleazar López Contreras allowed exiles to return to the country, although on March 13, 1937, he decreed the expulsion of 47 political leaders accused of communism. The trend of presidents and public officials going into exile—often due to coups d'état—continued into the 20th century: Cipriano Castro remained in exile after the 1908 coup, having left the country for medical reasons; Isaías Medina Angarita was forced to leave after the 1945 coup; Rómulo Gallegos went into exile following the 1948 coup; and Marcos Pérez Jiménez did so in the wake of the 1958 coup.
Since 1945, "Venezuela was a haven for immigrants fleeing Europe post war and Latin Aamerican dictatorships repression and intolerance" according to Newsweek. Emigration began at low rates in 1983 after oil prices collapsed, though the increased rates of emigration, especially the flight of professionals, grew largely following the Bolivarian Revolution which was led by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Andrés Bello Catholic University Economic and Social Research Institute head Anitza Freitez said that emigration became more prominent during Chávez's presidency, attributing "individual development prospects and individual security" as the main reasons.
Initial emigration
In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999. Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.
Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt and after Chávez's re-election in 2006. In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president. According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.
Crisis in Venezuela Academics and business leaders have said that emigration from Venezuela increased significantly during the final years of Chávez's presidency and during the presidency of Nicolás Maduro. Over time, emigration increased dramatically during the crisis and began to include lower-income Venezuelans, the people whom Chávez promised to aid and who were experiencing hunger in the country's economic crisis. Venezuelan men initially left their wives, children and elderly relatives behind as they fled the country to find work in order to send money back home, sometimes risking their lives walking the Darien Gap. Mothers and children would later leave Venezuela to find their families as they grew exacerbated with the crisis as remittances could not sustain their daily needs.Genatios, Carlos (2022) “De fuga de cerebros a red de talentos. La diáspora venezolana: análisis y propuestas”
Election of Maduro and 2014 protests After the election of Maduro in 2013 and as protests intensified in 2014, the emigration rate from Venezuela grew. The Associated Press reported that the Venezuelan middle-class began to emigrate at this time as the crisis intensified with more shortages, inflation and unrest.
Between 2012 and 2015, the number of Venezuelans who emigrated increased by 2,889 percent. In 2015, PGA Group estimated that a total of about 1.8 million Venezuelans had emigrated. The following year, an estimated 150,000-plus Venezuelans emigrated; scholars studying the diaspora, which The New York Times referred to as an "exodus", reportedly said that this was "the highest [number] in more than a decade".
2017 constitutional crisis and Constituent Assembly elections During the 2017 constitutional crisis, Colombia prepared for an increase of Venezuelan refugees. According to the Colombian government, more than 100,000 Venezuelans emigrated to Colombia in the first half of 2017. In the run-up to the 2017 Constituent Assembly elections, Colombia granted a Special Permit of Permanent Residence to Venezuelan citizens who entered the country before July 25; over 22,000 Venezuelans applied for permanent residency in Colombia in the program's first 24 hours. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that host countries throughout Latin America recorded more than one million Venezuelans settling between 2014 and 2017. The intergovernmental International Organization for Migration (IOM) had similar figures, with about one million Venezuelans emigrating between 2015 and 2017 in their data; other statistics indicated that the IOM's numbers may have been conservative.
2018 re-election of Maduro