Marlene and I sat on the back patio of her home in Villa del Rosario, a town near Venezuela’s border with Colombia, sipping our coffees. A 44-year-old Venezuelan school teacher and single mother, Marlene painstakingly made a list of everything she could sell in her home to finance her trip to escape the crisis in Venezuela. On that list were her oven, pots and pans, tennis shoes, a swivel chair, and her two kids’ toys — items that represent the remnants of a once-stable life. The $12 she earns per month teaching would not be enough to travel to Chile, where she has family with whom she can stay.
To survive, Marlene sells homemade desserts and offers manicures on the side. Now, she plans to sell the same childhood home where we sat for a mere $2,000, a fraction of its worth, to finance her move.
“I love my country, but this is what it has come to,” she told me.
Marlene, however, still hopes that the opposition will defeat the dictator Nicolás Maduro, whose party has imposed authoritarian rule over the past 20 years and destroyed what was once Latin America’s richest and most stable democracy.
For the first time in decades, millions of Venezuelans, both in the country and the diaspora, feel there is a chance of political change, but, like Marlene, many experience a flurry of emotions as they move between hope and desperation, anticipation and uncertainty, and most importantly, staying and leaving. A non-stop limbo.
If Maduro manages to steal the elections yet again, we will undoubtedly witness an exodus of hundreds of thousands of new migrants coming from Venezuela and a renewed migration crisis in the Americas.
Regional governments are turning their backs
While Venezuelan migrants can flee the crisis in their country, they come face to face with another as soon as they leave: a new landscape of vulnerability, informality, and exclusion that they must endure as regional governments turn against them.
In mid-June, the US government announced a new border policy that essentially blocks the unregulated entry of Venezuelan migrants and other asylum seekers, in turn pushing migrants to reconsider their options and look at other countries in the Americas. Additionally, Donald Trump has promised “the largest deportation operation” in US history if he wins the November presidential election, which polls suggest is likely.
In 2021, the Colombian government introduced a comprehensive programme to support Venezuelan migrants, offering legal migratory status and access to formal work, education, healthcare, and financial services for 10 years. However, since 2023, the programme has stopped accepting new applications. Recent hopes for a similar new initiative were dashed when the government announced a more limited programme, granting legal status (lasting just two years) only to undocumented Venezuelan migrant parents of children with legal status. This shift signals a reduced commitment from Colombia to support Venezuelan migrants, raising concerns given that it is the largest host country for these migrants and shares a border with Venezuela.
In June, the Peruvian government imposed a new visa requirement for Venezuelans and will no longer accept expired Venezuelan passports. This is troubling as most Venezuelan migrants do not qualify for available visas, and renewing a passport in their country can cost over $200, a prohibitive expense for many. Consequently, many Venezuelans arriving in Peru in search of stability will now be forced to live without legal immigration status, lacking guaranteed access to healthcare, education, and labour rights.
With limited pathways available to secure a regular migratory status and a lack of comprehensive support programmes, Venezuelans are left exposed to exploitation and violence, deepening their already precarious situations.
Other countries like Ecuador, Brazil, and Chile offer few alternatives for Venezuelan migrants, and now Panama is closing off the Darién Gap, a perilous jungle route used by many, leaving Venezuelans with even fewer options and effectively locking them in South America. This outlook is further exacerbated by growing xenophobia across the region, which makes integration difficult and discourages governments from creating new legal programmes to support migrants.
With limited pathways available to secure a regular migratory status and a lack of comprehensive support programmes, Venezuelans are left exposed to exploitation and violence, deepening their already precarious situations. This landscape pushes them into increasingly unstable conditions in host countries, paving the way for a continent-wide, man-made, humanitarian crisis that demands urgent attention and political action.
The threat of a deepening crisis
Despite all this, the Venezuelan crisis remains one of the most underfunded humanitarian emergencies, but now it really can’t afford to be overlooked.
If the current regime retains power, the region could face an even graver crisis, as millions of new Venezuelan migrants scramble for stability amidst the exclusions and restrictive laws. If no measures are taken to address Venezuelans’ current challenges, more migrants will flee their country only to find themselves living in open-air prisons, locked into certain geographies and without guaranteed access to healthcare, education, or labour rights.
Governments must act decisively to not only safeguard electoral freedoms and democracy within Venezuela, but also to develop new programmes that offer legal status and protections to vulnerable migrants traversing the region.
Meanwhile, humanitarian organisations must sustain their funding and support for Venezuelan programmes. The tendency to close offices and reallocate resources away from Venezuela, treating the crisis as less of an emergency, poses a significant risk. Without continued and focused support, the situation could spiral downward, further jeopardising the lives of people like Marlene who seek stability in these tumultuous times.
The current outlook is indeed alarming. As countries increasingly turn their backs on Venezuelan migrants to mitigate domestic political concerns and limit new arrivals, the opposite approach is needed: a concerted mobilisation to support these migrants should such an exodus occur.
The potential for a renewed and even deeper humanitarian crisis looms large, and we must start building bridges instead of walls.
