The US ruthlessly deports Venezuelan immigrants it previously favored

CLODOVALDO HERNANDEZ

Caracas

After a period of special treatment, Washington tightens controls on Venezuelans who intend to live their American dream, among whom were those who had crossed the dangerous Colombian-Panamanian Darién jungle

The United States changed its immigration policy for Venezuelans and immediately proceeded to prohibit the entry of those who tried to do so through the border with Mexico. It has also begun to expel some who had already entered, but were illegal.

Until now, Venezuelans enjoyed preference. The authorities turned a blind eye to them, while they continued to prevent the entry of migrants of other nationalities.

The new rules of the game have caused unease and confusion among Venezuelan opponents, since the migratory pressure on the US has been presented for months as the main proof that Venezuela continues to experience a humanitarian crisis and the support of a story according to which thousands people flee daily from the economic ruin caused by socialism and the repression of the government of Nicolás Maduro, which they characterize as a dictatorship.

Now only a maximum of 24.000 Venezuelans will be able to enter and stay in the United States, who, among other requirements, will have to have a US citizen or legal resident who sponsors them and presents a kind of bail.

This decision by Washington is the continuation of one of the components of the multidimensional war aimed at forcing a "regime change" in Venezuela, a long process that has already lasted more than a decade.

Break society through migration
Venezuela had never been a country of great waves of emigration. On the contrary, it is a historical recipient of Latin Americans, Caribbeans, Europeans and Asians. The pressures to instigate a mass exodus began at the beginning of the last decade and intensified after the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013.

It was about a large-scale psychological operation that was carried out through the combination of all kinds of resources aimed at making the country unviable: the economic blockade, unilateral coercive measures, disregard of the constitutional government, electrical sabotage, the declaration of a supposed humanitarian crisis , the shortage of basic necessities, the queues to buy essential goods, hyperinflation, currency attacks and other criminal machinations that generated an unbearable climate for the entire population and prompted hundreds of thousands to leave the country between the year 2014 and today.

Opposition politicians and the so-called “free press” media (media financed by USAID and other foreign agencies) posited the thesis that the solution was to flee a nation that had been turned into hell by socialism.

There the phenomenon of migration became more acute. It ceased to be exclusive to young people from the upper middle classes (as it had been in the early years) and encompassed all social strata and ages. The immediate purpose was to traumatize the main sociological structures, since Venezuelans attach great importance to their family ties, friendships and community life. They wanted to crush national self-esteem, provoke a kind of collective depression that would trigger discontent against the government and justify coup actions or foreign intervention.

The numbers of emigrants are also part of the propaganda war. The most recently released estimate places it at 7.100.000 people who have dispersed around the world. The government, without providing exact numbers, claims that these are highly inflated estimates for political purposes. They allege that in this number the constant mobilizations of exit and entry that take place in the dynamic Venezuelan land border (which only has 2.219 kilometers with Colombia) are added and that they cannot be classified as acts of permanent emigration.

escalation of xenophobia
When a -in any case- gigantic mass of Venezuelans had already left, mainly to other South American countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, the promoters of that great mobilization made an effort to present it as "the greatest migratory crisis on the continent in the whole story." They also began to warn that migrants were a danger to the national security of receiving states. Sowing fear and mistrust, they wanted to legitimize a multinational aggression against the Venezuelan government through neo-imperial modalities such as humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect or R2P (the principle coined by the UN for cases of genocide and crimes against humanity), which before they were used in countries like Libya and Haiti, with the already known disastrous results.

The spokesmen of the opposition, as of 2019 converted into the "interim government", dedicated themselves to turning the public opinion of the receiving nations against the Venezuelans. Julio Borges, who held the position of "foreign minister of the president in charge, Juan Guaidó" from Bogotá, described the migrants as "a contagious disease."

Terrible expressions of xenophobia towards Venezuelans arose in several of the receiving countries, in many cases with fatal consequences.

The assembly of the Darién and the Bravo river
The so-called Venezuelan migration crisis began to run out of steam due to these xenophobic attacks and the labor exploitation abuses committed in various neighboring countries to the detriment of Venezuelan workers. In 2020 and 2021, against many forecasts, Venezuela achieved good results in facing the pandemic, unlike those other nations, where migrants lived through terrible situations.

In late 2021 and early 2022, moreover, the country began to show signs of economic recovery. People began to say that "Venezuela is fixing itself." A small part of those who had left have decided to return.

So a new campaign was launched aimed at producing a new wave of migration. In the hegemonic global and national media and on social networks there were many testimonies according to which the US authorities were acting in a rather lax manner with illegal Venezuelan migrants. A video went viral in which a family, including grandmothers and babies, swam across the Rio Grande and were helped from the North American side by friendly police officers, the same uniformed men who, in other scenes, chased on horseback and linked like animals to Mexican or Central American migrants.

Thus, many Venezuelans were instigated to take a tortuous and almost suicidal path: cross the Colombian-Panamanian Darién jungle, travel through Central America and Mexico, and then cross the borders with the support of “coyotes”, just as the Venezuelans have been doing for decades. natives of almost all other Latin American and Caribbean countries.

It was a speech inconsistent with the signs of reactivation in Venezuela, but the propaganda apparatus continued to repeat it and recruit volunteers to undergo such an ordeal.

In the middle of the current year, information and more videos appeared that gave an account of the presence, not on the border, but in the big American cities, of Venezuelans of humble origins, people from poor neighborhoods and peasant towns in the interior of the country.

Significantly, those who raised their voices of protest against this were other Venezuelans, those from the middle and professional classes who had already been in the US for some time, although, to tell the truth, not all of them had regular immigration status.

These Venezuelans, for the most part, have gone to the US with allegations of political persecution (some of them false), in order to qualify for refugee status.

Spokespersons for that “decent neighborhood”, together with outright enemies of the revolutionary government, such as Republican Senator Marco Rubio, launched the thesis that Maduro was releasing dangerous criminals from the worst common prisons in the country under the condition that they go to the United States. for the purpose of harming the superpower.

Expelled from Paradise
In a way that took almost everyone by surprise, Washington has just changed its policy towards Venezuelans, resolved to treat them as badly as all other illegal immigrants and put in place a regulation that will allow entry only to those selected.

Those who were on the way, dodging all kinds of dangers (geographical, climatic, animal and human) were abandoned. A part of those who had already entered have been deported, via Mexico. And the others are trembling with fear because at any moment they suffer the same fate.

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, opponents linked to the so-called "interim" try to blame the two governments. They say that this measure was agreed upon by the Biden administration with that of Maduro, as part of their still partially secret political negotiations.

The government has remained on the sidelines, but Maduro has in his favor the fact that he has always been declaratively against the exodus and, on the contrary, has established the Plan Vuelta a la Patria to bring back thousands of migrants.

Other anti-Chavista factors (not sympathetic to the "interim government") have lashed out at those who until now had been the leadership of the opposition and maintained deals with the US, especially in the Trump era.

All the opponents beat their chests for the frustrated migrants, but nobody does anything concrete to rescue them from their helplessness, especially the deportees and those who stayed halfway. It would not be surprising if the government from which they supposedly fled ends up rescuing them.

Clodovaldo Hernandez He is a Venezuelan journalist. He has received the Simón Bolívar National Opinion Journalism Award 2022

 

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