One in four Venezuelans has left their country. Seven years ago the number of those who had left—migrated, fled, been forced out—was still one in ten. For most North Americans it seemed hardly to register, except as a faraway confirmation that socialism “didn’t work” or that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had been some kind of leftist dictator driving the country into the ground. In 2023 more people from Venezuela crossed the US–Mexico border than from any country other than Mexico or Guatemala. In 2024 the official tally was 261,000 Venezuelans, but that’s just the people who were apprehended. One in ten is mass migration. One in four is an exodus. Almost eight million souls.
More people have been displaced from Venezuela than from countries where war and mass slaughter rage, such as Syria and Ukraine. Venezuela is at peace. But it is a peace with galloping inflation, a peace in which people are unable to get their hands on cash, food, or medicine. When they could no longer buy even cornmeal for their families, the farmers put all their belongings up for sale, then gave away the rest, and when all that remained fit in one backpack, they left. Then the teachers did the same. Then the lawyers and doctors, the entrepreneurs, the anti-chavistas and then even the most fervent chavistas. Paula Ramón, a Venezuelan journalist, was one of those who left, along with her two brothers. But her mother stayed behind.
In her memoir Motherland, Ramón tells the story of Venezuela’s implosion as so many families have lived it. Those who departed have frantically tried to ensure basic livelihood and dignity for those who stayed. It is a scramble of bank transfers and packaged food sent by container ship from Miami, an almost cartoonish supersizing of the usual worries of watching a parent age from a distance. The popular political movement known as the Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to break down class barriers beginning in the 1990s, but the recent crisis has shaken up hierarchies in Venezuelan society as much as Chávez ever did. A working-class family with one son in Chile sending back remittances was suddenly better off than a middle-class family with everyone home in Venezuela.
Ramón’s middle-class family in Maracaibo, the sun-drenched oil city that is Venezuela’s second largest, split over chavismo. Her mother grew up impoverished but clawed herself up into the middle class by talking her way into a spot at the public university in Maracaibo and working as a teacher. She became an enthusiastic chavista, then turned against Chávez just as vehemently when the economy spiraled downward in 2014. (Ramón’s father was a Spaniard who fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, volunteered to fight the Nazis on the western front, and was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp before moving to Caracas. He died a year after Chávez’s first attempted coup in 1992.) Ramón, a tepid supporter at first, also became disenchanted. Some of her cousins and siblings remained believers.
Ramón left the country earlier than many of her compatriots, in 2010. She had studied journalism and was working as a reporter covering chavista politics and rallies—“People’s emotions rode high, to the point of tears,” she recalled—when she married a Brazilian journalist. She later followed him to China when he was reassigned. (Many moves later, she is currently a correspondent for Agence France-Presse based in Los Angeles.) Ramón’s two brothers left Venezuela several years after she did, when the country was in full collapse. The elder, after running his own small grocery store and working as a bank teller and then as a baker, finally gave it all up to find a job as a waiter in Chile. The younger, an ardent chavista to the end, tried to stay but found he was making the equivalent of $3.40 per month as a police officer. Police were in charge of repressing opposition marches. “There’s nothing for me here,” he told his sister before he packed his backpack in 2017.
The basics of what happened and who is responsible are sharply contested both inside and outside the country. Switch on US talk radio, and the cause is clear: socialism is hell. Chávez and his handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, drove Venezuela to ruin. Vote socialist, and you will no longer be able to buy toilet paper. The specter of castrochavismo has helped Donald Trump in Florida—in 2020 Trump’s campaign ran an ad in the state falsely claiming that Maduro had backed Joe Biden. Turn on state television in Venezuela for a completely different story: a hostile empire wouldn’t allow Venezuela to flourish; Venezuelans can’t buy basic goods because of the economic war waged by the US. So which is it?
The answer—setting aside for a moment that Chávez’s major commitment was to redistribution rather than any rigid socialist ideology—is a bit of both, compounded by the inherent instability of an economy entirely based on oil extraction. Prospectors drilled Venezuela’s first oil well in 1914. The country turned out to have the world’s largest proven oil reserves—in the second major discovery, in a town called Cabimas, it rained oil for nine days. Oil money built long boulevards in Caracas, and the rich went on shopping trips to Paris for the latest fashions. In the 1970s, and especially after the nationalization of the oil industry in 1976, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. No government ever made a serious move to diversify the economy. Why should they, when the country was called la Venezuela saudita (“Saudi Venezuela”) and awash in petrodollars? People flew to Miami to shop for electronics, furniture, anything their hearts desired. Venezuelans were so wealthy that the catchphrase of the 1970s for those who traveled abroad was ’Tá barato, dame dos! (“It’s cheap, give me two!”)
In a fair-minded book on the most recent collapse that also chronicles earlier crises, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse, the former New York Times correspondent William Neuman writes that the unwavering focus on oil “accentuated an existing tendency toward a highly centralized government with a powerful executive.” Venezuela has a long tradition of dictatorship, though it also has a tradition of democratic openings, such as the brief 1948 presidency of Rómulo Gallegos, one of the most famous Latin American novelists of his day. Neuman quotes the first oil minister of Venezuela’s democracy, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, who helped create OPEC, warning in the 1970s that the country’s wealth would be its ruin and calling oil “the devil’s excrement.”
In her classic book The Paradox of Plenty (1997), the political scientist Terry Karl shows how countries that discover large reserves of oil, such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Algeria, and Indonesia, tend to first experience the illusion of prosperity, then become petrostates destabilized by the increasing dominance of those who have grown rich from oil. In Venezuela the benefits were coming hard and fast, and crucially, the rich got bigger handouts than the poor. Labor unions got deals with state companies, which agreed to hire more workers than they needed; private businesses got low-interest loans, state contracts, and low taxes. Poor people got housing, old people got pensions, everyone got nearly free gasoline. “While governments in every country offer some or all of these benefits and pork directed at preferred constituencies,” Neuman writes, “Venezuelans came to view them as essential attributes of citizenship—regardless of whether oil prices were high or low.” The wealthy and powerful took extra—corruption in the country is legendary. “In the eyes of its citizens,” he writes, “the Venezuelan state is little more than an ATM.”
Ramón writes that “Venezuelans had come to believe in a false reality: that discovering oil had made them rich forever…. As a country, they’d won the lottery, and the government was in charge of administering the prize.” Ramón’s family, like many others, rode the oil wave to become middle class. Her mother got herself a college degree and a mortgage for a house in Maracaibo through determination and government subsidies. When she became chronically ill with severe arthritis and Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disorder, the government paid a pension equivalent to her full teacher’s salary for her to stay home. Even before the country’s socialist turn, it provided some of the most generous social welfare policies in the region, aside from Cuba.
Ramón’s family also suffered from the oil economy’s crashes, with jobs lost and pensions slashed. Inflation began to surge for the first time in the late 1970s, up to 20 percent in 1979. Foreign debt ballooned. In 1983—on a day that became known as Black Friday—the government devalued the currency and imposed exchange controls to rein in inflation. The economy recovered somewhat after the crash, but all the oil money in the world could not blind middle-class and poor Venezuelans to the way that the richest were continually lining their pockets through blatant corruption.
Money flowed, then ebbed, but the poor were still poor. Trickle-down economics wasn’t trickling. Popular mobilizations had been successful before: a series of uprisings by leftists and student organizers brought down a dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, in 1958. But even under democratic governance, persistent racism and classism were sources of frustration and anger. A friend of mine who grew up in Venezuela recalls constant gibes throughout her childhood from her light-skinned mother’s family about her mother’s decision to marry a charming, funny, and dark-skinned man from Maracaibo (not to mention the comments about my friend’s own appearance, which favors her father’s side).
Beginning in the 1990s many leftist governments were elected throughout Latin America in the so-called Pink Tide, buoyed by promises of better social programs for the poor paid for by high commodity prices. Enter Chávez stage left. He attempted a military coup in 1992, a frankly ridiculous bid to take over from a democratically elected government that was imposing austerity measures—he sent a tank to ram through the door of the presidential palace when he had the following of less than 10 percent of the army—and was arrested. At that time he was not the leader of a popular movement but a barely known brown-skinned army cadet in fatigues and a red beret who led a small secret cell within the military. But his capture was broadcast on live television, and people were struck by his cool ease. “First, I want to say good morning to the people of Venezuela,” he said, as if he were making a nice little speech rather than getting arrested for leading a coup. “Unfortunately, for now, the objectives that we laid out for ourselves were not achieved in the capital.” For now. “New possibilities will arise again.”
Some Venezuelans were appalled. Others welcomed the coup, seeing it as an attempt to address ferocious inequality and corruption. Chávez’s humble upbringing, his mixed African and Indigenous heritage plain on his face, was not lost on anyone. On live television Chávez thanked his followers for their bravery, told them to lay down their arms, and said his inspiration was the Liberator of Venezuela, the nineteenth-century independence leader Simón Bolívar.
After he was released from prison, Chávez assumed that he would have to resort to military action to take power. But he was wrong. In 1998 he won a free election with 56.2 percent of the vote. A short time later Gabriel García Márquez shared a flight from Havana to Caracas with Chávez and, Ramón notes, wrote an article called “The Enigma of the Two Chávezes.” He wrote that he felt he’d spent time with two different men: “One, to whom luck had offered the opportunity to save his country. And the other, an illusionist, who could go down in history as just one more despot.”
In the US, Chávez is often thought of purely as a dictator. But it is worth remembering that his message—condemning corruption and calling for more equitable distribution of goods, economic sovereignty, and social rights for Venezuelans of all backgrounds—was, at least at first, extremely popular. He entered office on a wave of democratic support. Chávez is also thought of purely as a socialist, though he began as a social democrat and started pursuing avowedly socialist policies only after six years in power.
Chávez soon deeply polarized the country. You were either part of el pueblo (“the people”) or the enemy—usurpers, the rich, oligarchs who had held back Venezuela and who would lose their privileges. He used public referenda to dismantle the legislature and the judiciary and to beef up the army’s presence in the government. He convened a new constituent assembly that gave itself the right to dismiss any member of government it deemed corrupt, and he pushed through a new constitution in 1999 that extended the presidential term to six years and allowed a second term. This was the beginning of a slide away from democracy, though Chávez was once again duly elected in 2000. He took over the state-run oil company and plowed its profits into literacy and antihunger programs, and in 2005 he proclaimed for the first time that Venezuela was headed to “socialism of the twenty-first century.” He was elected again the following year, in a free and fair election, but opposition was rising, especially after he shut down an independent news channel, which, along with his close relationship with Fidel Castro, spooked many Venezuelans. In 2009 he won a referendum to remove term limits altogether.
Chávez’s popularity and repeated electoral success were in part due to the social programs that were generously funded by the state-run oil company. From when Chávez was first elected in 1999 to his death in 2013, Venezuela saw an oil bonanza far bigger than that of the 1970s. By June 2014 oil was close to one hundred dollars a barrel. Then came the bust. In part thanks to booming US shale oil production, by January 2015 the price had fallen to less than half that, at which point it was discovered that the government had spent all the country’s money, and there was no more. Corruption, price exchange controls, and a crazy import system were also involved, but the most basic explanation for what happened is, as Neuman writes, that “there was a law that said the government had to put money in a rainy day fund. Chávez repealed it and spent the money that had been set aside.”
Chávez, already stricken by cancer, won a final election in 2012. He named Nicolás Maduro, a loyalist and charisma-free former bus driver, as his successor, and after his death, Maduro took over the presidency on an interim basis—though legally Chávez’s replacement should have been the head of the National Assembly. Faced with a crisis, Maduro by all accounts acted as if frozen. Inept and fatalistic, he didn’t know what to do and so did nothing, except to ever more violently repress his opposition. After a series of elections marked by less and less convincing claims of freedom and impartiality, Maduro remains president. His most flagrantly stolen election was last July, against a popular opposition candidate.1
Since 2005, supposedly in response to Chávez’s lack of cooperation in the war on drugs, the US has imposed a wide range of sanctions on Venezuela, blocking access to the US financial system and exports of Venezuelan oil. In 2017 President Donald Trump ramped up sanctions with the explicit aim of regime change. (Venezuela cut off diplomatic relations in 2019 after the US recognized an opposition leader, rather than Maduro, as the winner of an election.) Anyone still convinced of the efficacy of economic sanctions, currently the US’s foreign policy tool of choice (with penalties that affect one third of the nations in the world), would do well to consult Jeff Stein and Federica Cocco’s reporting2 and a new book, How Sanctions Work, by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez.3 Their writing on the perverse incentives created by economic sanctions shows obvious parallels between Iran’s and Venezuela’s reactions to economic isolation: a pervasive culture of blaming US imperialism for domestic problems and a resulting militarization of everyday life. In neither country, obviously, have sanctions prompted regime change—not to mention in Cuba, where sixty years of sanctions have achieved nothing other than the immiseration of the Cuban people.
Did sanctions accelerate migration and cause the absolute breakdown of Venezuela around 2019? Or was it, as some researchers at the Brookings Institution have argued,4 economic mismanagement, hyperinflation, and what economists call a “collapse in living standards,” by which they mean the inability to buy a bag of black beans without a whole paper bag full of cash? While both external restrictions and internal instability contributed to the crisis, the idea that the sanctions weren’t a major part of the problem is untenable. Even the US Government Accountability Office—something like the government’s own internal auditing service—found that the sanctions placed on the Venezuelan state oil company “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy.”
One way to stem the flow of Venezuelan migrants to the US border would be to lift sanctions. For several years Democrats from border states have requested that the US government relax sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela. They know it would immediately result in fewer people crossing the border—the US’s myopic desire in all this. Afraid of seeming soft on a geopolitical enemy, former president Joe Biden waffled, at first maintaining tightened sanctions and then loosening them, ostensibly to facilitate free elections but also likely for another reason: as long as Russian oil is out of the question, the US is more in need of Venezuelan oil than ever.
Paradoxically, in some ways it might have been more politically feasible for the Trump administration, which cares little for diplomatic convention, to ease sanctions on Venezuela. During his first term Trump heavily criticized the Maduro regime, but after he took office for the second time, there was a brief opening when Trump and the Venezuelan dictator seemed open to striking a deal in which the US would lift restrictions on oil exports if Venezuela accepted deportation flights. (Deportees cannot be removed to countries that refuse to accept them, a reality that suddenly has more significance since the new administration canceled Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the US.) The détente didn’t last, and the US has once again made wielding the economic weapon a top priority. In February Trump canceled Chevron’s license to pump in the country, which had enabled exports of crude to the US and buoyed the Venezuelan economy. The next month, amid threats of further sanctions and after Trump sent 238 Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, Venezuela agreed to accept deportation flights, a move Maduro announced was intended “to continue rescuing and freeing migrants from prisons in the United States.” That didn’t stop Trump from announcing a 25 percent tariff on any country that imports Venezuelan oil soon after, or from continuing to attempt to deport Venezuelans under the act, presumably to El Salvador. On April 19 the Supreme Court issued an emergency order pausing the deportation of Venezuelans being held at a detention center in Texas; some days later a Reuters drone observed men there spelling out “SOS” with their bodies.
What would have to change in order for Venezuelans to stay in Venezuela? The IMF estimated that between 2013 and 2019 two thirds of economic activity ceased in Venezuela. That’s a 65 percent drop in GDP. By comparison, during the Great Depression the US GDP fell by 27 percent. Maduro’s government stopped publishing most economic data for several years. Then in 2018 it revealed that inflation was at 130,000 percent. Stores raised prices several times a day. Ramón urged her mother to spend the money she wired right away, because it would be worthless tomorrow. Her mother, a habitual saver, always left a bit in the account, to Ramón’s great frustration. People stopped eating meat, then ate only lentils three times a day, then ate only one meal of lentils a day. A friend who was a correspondent in Caracas at this time was forced to fly out of the country regularly to pick up suitcases of cash to pay for basics. (Lucky him.)
There are different kinds of violence—at the point of a gun (fast) or through environmental degradation or hunger (slow). The effect, mass migration, is unstoppable in either case. There is a reality beyond the legal distinction between the supposedly voluntary economic migrant and the fleeing asylum seeker. Ramón’s relatives, like so many Venezuelans, weren’t persecuted by the state in any meaningful sense. Her brother was a chavista police officer, after all. But neither did they leave their home in a manner that could be described as voluntary—not when runaway inflation means that a full-time salary is never enough to buy food.
North Americans are sometimes subject to the delusion that everyone, especially Latin Americans, wants to come here. Neuman writes straight against this idea:
No one wanted to leave Venezuela. Your people were here—your family, your parents, your friends. It was the life you knew. There was a kind of light in Venezuela that you didn’t find anywhere else: the honeyed light of a Caracas evening, filtered through the dark green leaves of the mango trees, against the eternal backdrop of the forested Ávila mountain that stood like a guardian between the city and the sea; the intense white light of the Caribbean littoral, which makes you squint and washes the world clean of color.
Neuman writes that when he interviewed people in Maracaibo, hit harder by power outages and looting than any other city in Venezuela, what he was really covering was “the ripping apart of families.” He said it was men, “always older men,” who would weep when they told him about children forced to leave the country.
Like most migration stories, Ramón’s is also a story of family separation. The focus tends to be on those who go, but it is an unusually small family in which no one is left behind. Some people are too stubborn, too sick, too immobile to migrate. Ramón’s mother at first clung fiercely to her house in Maracaibo, and then as the crisis deepened she was pinned in place by a worsening chronic illness. Her children calculated that they could not afford health insurance if they relocated her to live with one of them in either Brazil or Chile. At first, maintaining her from abroad seemed the only option.
The strongest parts of Motherland are detailed descriptions of how Ramón managed this increasingly difficult financial and logistical dance. She had to arrange to send her mother nearly everything. On visits, she writes, “the only products you’d regularly see on the supermarket shelves were nonessential, random items like plastic cups or shoe polish.” Her apartment in Brazil was full of Post-it notes with bank account numbers to send money in different ways to Venezuela.
Then her mother lost mobility and was confined to a wheelchair that had been nearly impossible to procure. They needed home help, and after cycling through various caretakers they found a woman named Luz from La Guajira, a region on the border with Colombia.
I would have liked to know a lot more about Luz, who is Wayuu, belonging to an Indigenous community that has long suffered vicious discrimination and high levels of malnutrition. If Ramón’s family was struggling without access to resources, how and what did Luz eat? Ramón’s mother kept her food under lock and key in the bedroom, and to prepare even a coffee Luz had to open the pantry under her supervision before taking supplies down to the kitchen. But Ramón provides few details, except that Luz’s home had no electricity or running water. She does share this image, which is both striking and strikingly uncurious about the perspective of its more vulnerable figure:
Luz was slight, but her arms were so strong, you could see the veins. They installed an umbrella on the back of the wheelchair to shield them from the white-hot sun in the city Mamá was determined to live in. Just five years earlier, she had moved around Maracaibo in a sedan with leather seats and a satellite phone. Now, wearing oversized sunglasses and a panama hat I had gotten for her, Mamá was being wheeled along nearly deserted streets in a metallic contraption by the ever-silent Luz. It was like something out of a dystopian colonial painting.
Even though the family had enough money in the bank to pay her, wild inflation meant no one could easily get their hands on the cash. Luz would have had to go to an ATM every day for forty-eight days straight just to withdraw enough for a month’s bus fare to work. Eventually, Luz decided to follow her sister to Colombia, where she found work as a domestic servant earning wages in a more stable currency. Ramón’s mother commented, “She’s tired, and she has a point.”
In 2018 Ramón’s mother died. The anticipated event came in nightmare form: a call, a phone dropped to the ground, aunt and caretaker both screaming. Ramón returned home for the burial. Her local family members fought over who would inherit her mother’s cell phone and iPad, and they looted the house for her remaining food. The bereaved daughter tried without success to swallow her anger, knowing that they were forced into the position of vultures, since they had nothing.
With her mother’s death, Ramón writes, “the umbilical cord tethering me to her and to the terra-cotta floor of our house was suddenly severed.” It is impossible to remain unmoved by Ramón’s cry of mourning, her “letter of farewell to my parents and my country.” She entered her mother’s home for one final visit four months after the wake, in 2019. Maracaibo was wracked by food shortages and blackouts:
This was my first time walking into that space without her there. There were no snacks, no coffee, no “Hi, sweetie.” My mother’s home was just an empty house in a country that was slowly emptying out.
English (US) · 