(Bloomberg) -- When Venezuelans started leaving en masse at the start of an economic collapse almost a decade ago, South American governments including Brazil and Peru welcomed the migrants with open arms.
Now, as officials in the region gear up for another possible wave after a disputed election that dashed hopes for change, it seems clear any newcomers won’t get nearly as nice a reception.
Since 2015, almost 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in what is considered the largest mass migration in the Americas. As they’ve dispersed around the continent, a backlash has grown amid perceptions that their arrival is often accompanied by an increase in crime.
That anger — a Venezuelan camp was burned down in northern Chile in 2021, and Venezuelans across the region complain of insults and abuse from locals who fear they’re taking jobs — has now filtered through to government policy.
The foreign minister of Peru, already home to 1.5 million Venezuelans, warned this week of “an exodus that we cannot accommodate.” Chile is also increasing border security, and Panama says it’s bracing for a wave of migrants. Even Brazil, which more than any other nation enthusiastically accepted the Venezuelan newcomers of the past decade, has said it’s fortifying its frontier.
Common Sense
“Given a situation like this, borders need to be strengthened,” Manuel Monsalve, a Chilean undersecretary for the interior, said Thursday, adding that means increased patrol vehicles, aircraft and drones. “That is common sense.”
A fresh Venezuelan exodus also risks roiling politics in the US, which is home to more than 500,000 migrants from the country already, according to data from the United Nations. Polling in swing states by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult has shown immigration is the No. 2 issue for voters in the presidential election, behind only the economy.
Donald Trump routinely rails against migrants as he campaigns on the GOP ticket, linking them to crime. Vice President Kamala Harris has been left to defend the Biden administration’s record since becoming the Democratic nominee.
Venezuela is in turmoil and more than 1,200 protesters have been arrested since the July 28 election, which President Nicolas Maduro claimed to win despite evidence presented by the opposition that its candidate took the bulk of the votes. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has gone into hiding, fearing she’ll be arrested. The US has said that Edmundo Gonzalez, a close Machado ally, won the vote, and countries including Argentina, Chile and Peru have questioned the official results.
Airline Tickets
There are early indications that wealthier Venezuelans are getting ready to leave. Amid reduced air service, the one option remaining for a regional flight out of the country is to Bogota, and prices have skyrocketed. A flight two weeks from now from Caracas to the Colombian capital, which takes about two hours, used to cost less than $200, but it was than $800 as of Friday.
While many Venezuelans are still holding out hope that Maduro will ultimately be toppled, Roughly 13% of people surveyed by Caracas-based Delphos in early July said that if Maduro remained in power the best thing they could do was to leave the country. In presenting the poll, Delphos executives said other studies they have carried out showed up to 20% of Venezuelans were willing to migrate in case of a Maduro victory.
The magnitude of Venezuela’s economic collapse is hard to overstate. Its gross domestic product has plummeted 70% since 2012, a year before Maduro became president. Annual inflation soared to 130,000% at one point, and a more recent taming of price increases was only possible through draconian spending cuts and an effective dollarization of the economy that has eroded public workers’ purchasing power. Venezuela’s oil production has also plummeted due to disinvestment and US sanctions, which are unlikely to be lifted given American criticism of how the election was conducted.
Migration has also further reduced the size of the economy, with Venezuela’s population falling below 30 million in recent years.
So the idea that tougher border checks would substantially reduce migration sounded unrealistic to some analysts for the region.
Migrant Backlash
“No country in Latin America controls its land borders,” said Luisa Feline Freier, a political scientist at Universidad del Pacífico in Peru. She warned that cracking down at official ports of entry risks giving more power to regional mafias that run human smuggling networks.
“The only way to manage this flow in a wise way is to provide regular routes for migration,” she said.
But that may not be politically feasible given the backlash in some countries against Venezuelan migrants and the perception that they’ve been infiltrated by gangs, particularly Tren de Aragua.
The group, with origins in Venezuela, has expanded its extortion racket throughout the region and even into the US, taking advantage of disorder at the borders and the precarious conditions in which many migrants travel. Its members have been blamed for boosting homicide rates in countries including Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, and the gang has become a major headache for governments throughout the region.
“Tren de Aragua has gone transnational on the back of the migrants,” said Jeremy McDermott, the co-founder of research group InSight Crime.
That criminal activity and its ties to Venezuelans has weighed on locals’ tolerance for the migrants. In late 2023, Chilean pollster CEP found that 69% of the local population very much agreed or agreed that migration had led to higher crime levels, double the rate two decades earlier. In 2022, 83% of Peruvians said they attributed a rise in criminality to Venezuelan newcomers, according to a poll by IEP.
“The more xenophobic a country and the more uncertain the status of Venezuelans in a country, the more fertile the ground for Tren de Aragua’s continued exploitation,” McDermott said.
While Colombia and Venezuela share a porous border, and officials in Bogota have been generally welcoming of migrants, there are signs tensions have been increasing lately.
“A new wave of Venezuelan arrivals would complicate things for us,” said Governor William Villamizar, who leads the Colombian state of Norte de Santander near the border with Venezuela, in an interview with Colombian news show CM&. “I think the ones we have are enough.”
To the north, in Central America, Panama is also bracing for a wave of migrants. It has deployed security forces to block unauthorized paths through the Darien gap, an area that borders Colombia that is a key migrant route to the US.
“The flow of migrants from Venezuela is going to increase for obvious reasons,” Panama’s President Jose Raul Mulino said this week.
--With assistance from Andrew Rosati, Valentine Hilaire, Andrea Jaramillo, Andreina Itriago Acosta and Michael McDonald.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
