THE BIG READ: Why are thousands of Venezuelans fleeing their country?
BEING Irish, I’m familiar with emigration. I’m an emigrant. My Venezuelan wife is an emigrant. We live in Barcelona, Spain. But the scale of emigration from the middle class of her country, Venezuela, is a shock to me.
Eighty percent of Venezuelans live among the necklace of cities along the Caribbean coast, of which Caracas, the country’s capital, is the largest, with a population of seven million. It’s my wife’s hometown. Every year, in January and February, we travel there.
If I run a finger down through the list of her friends from high school and university, 12 from 16 of them have left the city. They live now in cities like Lima, Buenos Aires, Toronto, London, Barcelona and the biggest chunk of them have washed up in Miami, which is known as ‘Little Venezuela.’
Valentina is a typical example. She’s the godmother of our two-year-old daughter. Valentina’s sister lives in Miami, her brother in São Paulo. Two years ago, Valentina didn’t want to leave Caracas, but when her parents moved to Miami last year, she followed them.
There was no-one left.
This is a social phenomenon — Venezuelan parents, on the cusp of retirement, trying to get a foothold on the job market in a new country, leaving along with their grown-up children.
Hazel is another friend of my wife’s in Barcelona. Her parents left Caracas and moved in with her last year.
“Leaving your country is not an easy thing to do, but there just came a moment when it was too much to deal with,” says Hazel’s father, Neftali Prato. “There was shortages of everything, and personal safety was an issue. One thing led to another. I had a job and was earning pretty good money, and I was earning American dollars, which is a good thing in Venezuela. Can you imagine how bad it was that I was willing to trade it in for a new life, at this age — 61?”
Venezuela is broken. Prices have shot up by 60% in the last year. There are shortages in basic goods like flour, nappies and condoms. Every day, thousands of people line the streets outside supermarkets, as they queue in baking equatorial sunshine for limited produce, breaking into scuffles on occasion.
In January, McDonald’s diners in Venezuela ran out of potatoes, so they couldn’t sell French fries. A few weeks later, the local café in my parents-in-law’s El Cafetal neighbourhood didn’t have coffee, this in a country that used to be one of the world’s finest coffee producers.
“The biggest problem — other than personal safety, which can be handled by not going out and just staying at home — was the shortages,” says Prato. “When you live in a place that you have to hunt for food — and that’s what it was like, hunting for food — my wife and I said ‘we have to get out, and should be nearer to our children, who live in Europe’.
“We didn’t need much — there was only two of us; I can’t imagine what it’s like for a family with young children — but we did have problems getting things like milk, cereal, meat, chicken and personal care products. We would get the news, or a Twitter feed that would tell us where trucks had come in with products. Then, we’d make a queue at the cash register. Now it’s worse, what I’m reading about the situation.
“You hear of lines of six, eight hours, or people sleeping overnight just to get ahead of the queue.”
The country is suffering a debilitating brain drain. Based on the Central University of Venezuela’s recent emigration study, 90% of emigrants have at least a bachelor’s degree.
Daniel Escovar is an example. He’s 34. He got married in January. He will leave Caracas in June, with his wife, to start a two-year hospital residency in dentistry in Cleveland, Ohio. Inflation is crippling his dental clinic. Last year, for instance, he could buy dental implants for 2,000 bolívares. This year, they cost 16,000 bolívares.
“For anyone who does regular hard work — as a dentist, a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor, whatever — it’s impossible to think about getting your own house. It just doesn’t add up,” he says. “If you walk into a bank, here in Caracas, even if you have good connections, the most you could get for a housing loan would be three million bolívares. But to buy a regular, 80-metre-squared apartment with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, in a middle-class area, nothing too fancy, it would cost $180,000. If you make the calculation in bolívares, it would be over 30 million bolívares. It would be absurd to think you could come into that kind of money.
“I have a car since 2007. It’s impossible for me to think about getting a new car. There isn’t any car manufacturing in the country. There is some assembly of some brands of cars, but they don’t get the pieces, and the price of new cars is in dollars.
“If you go to a car dealership to ask for a car, the first reaction you will probably get is laughter. The most common answer you get from a dealer is that there is a waiting list. The amount of time to wait for a regular car, for, say, a four-door Mitsubishi sedan, would be six to eight months. To import cars costs too much — you’d have to pay in dollars.
“A regular price for a car would be, say, $20,000. If you convert that to bolívares, it would be almost four million bolívares. The average monthly salary for a Venezuelan worker is 5,000 bolívares. You’re talking about 800 months of work to buy a car. It’s ridiculous, but that’s the reality.”
Anabella Ramírez and her husband, Alejandro, share this frustration with Venezuela’s runaway inflation, which is 64%, the world’s highest. They left Caracas with their son, Andrés, who is now two years old, in September, and moved to London.
Alejandro, who is trained in logistics, has found a job in supply chain management. Anabella was a graphic designer, but given the cost of childcare in London she’s a stay-at-home mom.
“Alex and I were both working back in Venezuela, and had jobs with very good positions,” she says. “We were at the top, but with both salaries we never had enough money. It made no sense. Here in London, we see that we can live with one salary. Not with much money, but we can live.
“In London, we can easily go to a park without the fear of getting robbed. I can go freely, walking with my son in his buggy and I’m not afraid. I wouldn’t have done that back in Venezuela. I was afraid to go to parks alone with him. To entertain him — to get out of the apartment in Caracas — we had to get in a car and drive to a shopping mall. That’s what we considered safest. Of course, the best thing for a child is to play in playgrounds and do things in the outdoors. It’s ironic, because Venezuela has great weather and you cannot enjoy it.
“My dad has an apartment at the beach, but we all stopped going there because it got very dangerous — you could get kidnapped on the road there. The last time we were there was in 2013.”
What really frightens Venezuelans is the violence. Everyone has a story about a family member, or a friend, who has been robbed, shot or killed. Ramírez — who was robbed by gunpoint while driving into a graveyard for a funeral — says the sense of danger before they left for the UK was suffocating.
“I felt, every time, the stories were coming closer — the stories about people I knew, the friend of a friend, then a friend, then family. We were afraid that, by random selection, it would soon happen to us.”
On a typical weekend in Caracas, for instance, 60 bodies will end up in the city morgue — all murder victims. Venezuela has the world’s second-highest murder rate in the world, according to the World Health Organisation.
No-one knows the exact figures. The government gave up publishing its statistics years ago. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence put the number of homicides nationwide at 29,980 for 2014. The government criticises such reports, and claims the rampant murder rate is an “inherited” problem, even though there were 4,550 murders in 1998, the year before Hugo Chávez ushered in his Bolívarian revolution.
Wearing jewellery or fiddling with a smartphone in your car is an invitation to get attacked.
Many cars are fitted with tinted windows, bulletproof panels or tracking devices, in case of hijack. Restaurants carry prominent signs, warning patrons that “it is prohibited to carry firearms”.
At night, streets are church quiet and traffic lights function merely as suggestions.
Posters warn people “don’t pay kidnappers”, while reassuring that 95% of kidnapped people return alive. One of my wife’s friends is the son of high-profile parents. He was kidnapped twice. After his parents paid the ransom for his second release, his father said to him: “Kid, you’ve got to get out of here.” He now lives in Spain.
Jordi Donadeu moved to Barcelona, with his wife, in 2008. Both are from Caracas. He last visited the city a couple of years ago. “I remember, when I was younger, living in Caracas, thieves used to break the window and steal cars,” he says.
“I had my car and I had all kinds of gadgets to protect it, to lock the steering wheel, an alarm, and so on. I was with my brother when I visited in 2013 and he parked his car and he didn’t have any gadgets to lock it. I said to him, ‘What about all the security stuff we used to have for cars?’ He said they don’t steal cars anymore; they just come to you with a gun and rob you, or ask you to deactivate any security the car might have.
“There is a lot of intimidation. The guy who is robbing you or kidnapping you tells you that if you call the police he’ll kill someone from your family. They usually know something about you, so they intimidate you. They’ll say, ‘I know your mother. I know she goes to this supermarket every Thursday, so if you call the police I’ll kill her.’ People avoid calling the police because things are not going to be resolved — police are not really effective — and, on the other hand, you have this threat.
“Many people have decided not to go out at night, because it’s very dangerous. But if you have to, let’s say you own a restaurant, you have bodyguards.
“There are now many sophisticated companies who bring very well-trained bodyguards from Russia or employ ex-army guys. You go out to a restaurant and you see bodyguards outside the restaurant.
“Years ago, homes used to have little backyards with a little fence. Now, they have electrified fences, with a guard at the entrance to the house or apartment building. You see cameras. You have to get invitations to visit a friend’s house. But what happens is that they get you when you’re opening your door. They’re not going to jump an electrified fence. They follow you and when you’re about to enter your house, they put a gun to your head and say, ‘Let’s go in.’
“Many of these gangs are run by people in prison. They phone you from prison. One of my wife’s friends was receiving phone calls all the time, saying, ‘I know your address. You were wearing white pants and a red shirt today.’ They didn’t even kidnap her. They just phoned her and said: ‘We’re following you all the time. We’ll kill your mother. Just deposit money into my bank account.’ She’s left for Peru,” Donadeu says.
Pedro José Hernandez moved to Dublin, from Caracas, with his wife, Jenesis, in January, 2014. Two months before they emigrated, he was attacked, with his mother and stepfather, entering his house.
“They got in behind us in the parking lot — three guys with guns,” he says.
“They kept hitting me with the back of a gun in the head. We went up to the apartment. They tied us up — hands and feet, faces down on the ground. They kept hitting us. They took, basically, everything of value from the house.
“One of the things that got imprinted in my head was that my mum kept asking them not to hurt us, and kept asking them: ‘why are you doing this?’ We live in a place that these people consider makes us rich, which we’re not.
“They said: ‘Look where you live. You have everything. We don’t. We have a family to support. It is our job.’ That is ridiculous. Sadly, that is what President Chávez put in their heads. It makes me very sad and very emotional. We shouldn’t be like that with each other.”
Chávez came to power in 1999. “He saw himself as being on a mission,” says Bart Jones, author of Hugo! The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.
“Chávez was outraged by the social injustice in Venezuela, which he lived through himself, having been raised in poverty. He said he wanted to transform the country. He saw it as a very corrupt place, run by a small group of elites.
“In 1989, the government led a massacre, killing hundreds, if not several thousand people, in the wake of protests at IMF austerity measures.
“He saw the country’s leaders as having blood on their hands, and believed that they squandered some of the richest oil reserves in the world,” says Jones.
When Chavez was being sworn in as president in February, 1999, he marvelled at the “mathematical mystery” that a country as rich in natural resources as Venezuela could be so poor.
It has the largest oil reserves in the world. It costs about two cents to fill a tank with petrol at a gas station. Drivers tip fuel attendants with more bolívares than they pay for their petrol. Jones says oil has created “a piñata culture” — where citizens and officials have been busily elbowing each other out of the way to grab whatever they can from the “piñata oil wealth”, and siphoning the money offshore. According to David Smolansky, who is a city mayor and opposition leader, $20bn has been lost to the economy by corruption.
“Chávez promoted the dream that we are a rich country that does not need to work,” says Alberto Barrera Tyszka, co-author of Hugo Chávez sin Uniforme. “It’s the illusion that oil changed the country, since it was unearthed in the early 20th century — the fantasy that wealth should not be produced, but that it only has to be divided. The dream that we are all rich, but we were robbed, ‘disinherited,’ and that his policy was to return what was taken from us.”
Chávez died two years ago, but his minions still run the country. His economic theories were half-baked. Currency controls introduced in response to an oil strike in 2003 are still in place today, and drive the country’s galloping inflation. His defenders support him staunchly. Giant billboards and murals of his image adorn the streets of Caracas.
The government covers the cost for citizens who want to get his tattoo on their bodies.
“Chávez didn’t stay in power just because he was a very charismatic person, or because people sympathise with the way he spoke,” a Chavista told me.
“We are not stupid. We have had charismatic and intelligent presidents before, but that never made them eternal. Chávez stayed in power, because people noticed that there was a change under him, that there was an improvement.”
He caused a schism in Venezuelan society, however, with his aggressive language, calling anti-Chavistas “enemies”, “vampires”, “squealing pigs” and other derogatory names. “The thing that hurts the most is that the Chavistas have divided us,” says Ramírez.
“They’re based on resentment. I think it’s beautiful that everyone has the right to be equal. That’s fine, but in Venezuela it’s like the Chavistas want to punish the ones who are middle-class or upper-class and point at them and say that they are guilty and the cause of poverty in Venezuela.”
It is unsettling how Chávez militarised Venezuelan life. Soldiers are the most prominent sight at airports.
My wife’s two sisters received military training in their convent school, a new addition to school curriculums, which included lessons about guns and grenades, drill practice, and demonstrations in how best to crawl on their bellies in a war zone.
“Chávez ran the country as if it was a barracks,” says Barrera Tyszka.
“He infected society with this worldview, which is profoundly militaristic. He despised certain aspects of civilian life. The Chavista government is not a dictatorship, in the terms that we understand what has been the traditional dictatorships in Latin America — Augusto Pinochet, the Castro brothers, for example — but I think it is not a democracy as understood in the West.
“There is a concentration of power around a group of soldiers, who have hijacked the country’s institutions. The government has absolutely taken over the state and manages it at its will. [The Chavistas] control the parliament, judges, the unions.”
It is difficult to see how things will improve. The dollars Chávez used to fund his extravagant, ad hoc social programmes have evaporated. Oil prices have plummeted. The barrel has lost more than half its value since his death.
A sizable portion of Venezuela’s future oil production has been traded to China for loans.
Anti-government protests last year were violently repelled — 43 people were killed, others have “disappeared”.
The opposition’s figurehead, Leopoldo López, was put in prison, where he still languishes. Last month, Antonio Ledezma, another opposition figure and the metropolitan mayor of Caracas, was jailed, allegedly without a warrant, and charged with plotting against the president.
Ominously, the government has just authorised the military to use arms against protestors.
Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is a former union leader and bus driver who calls himself “the son of Chávez”.
He’s weak, volatile and lacks the charm and political savvy of Chávez. He claimed on television that the spirit of Chávez visited him in the shape of a bird that flew in a window while he was praying in a chapel.
While Maduro and the Chavista movement holds onto power, it seems the country’s middle class — those who have the means to escape — will continue to take flight.
Emigration from Venezuela
Emigration is a new experience for Venezuelans unlike other countries in South America like, say, Colombia or Peru, which have 4.7 million and 3.5 million ex-patriots living abroad.
Throughout the 20th century, Venezuela with its oil-rich economy was a magnet for immigrants from Europe and the Middle East. The country is stocked with Spanish, Italian and Portuguese diaspora. Colonia Tovar, which is about 48km outside Caracas, is a little slice of Germany. Its restaurants are more likely to serve schnitzel than arepas, Venezuela’s quintessential corncake snack.
Now however, Venezuelans go in the other direction. Neighbouring Colombia is the first port of call. Venezuelans have more official identification cards in Colombia than any other nationality — over 10,000, as of August 2014, according to the country’s foreign ministry. Panama, the US and Spain are other popular destinations.
Official statistics are difficult to find but, according to recent research by sociologists at the Central University of Venezuela, 1.6 million Venezuelans live abroad. This compares to only 50,000 in the mid-1990s, according to researchers at Simon Bolivar University, who found that the rate of emigration has increased since Nicolás Maduro came to power two years ago.
Killing Police
Police in Venezuela have a thankless job. They are poorly paid — the equivalent of about €27 a month — and run the risk of being killed every day. The fashion nowadays is to kill cops for their guns. Policemen in Venezuela are killed at a rate of more than one a day in Venezuela.
Last January in Tácata, a town about an hour from Caracas, a policeman named Álvaro Blanco was at the deli-counter in his local panadería ordering breakfast when a teenager with a backpack calmly walked up behind him. The youth shot the 49-year-old policeman in the head in order to steal the 9mm Glock pistol from his holster. Mr Blanco was married and the father of two children.
The CCTV footage of the murder is on YouTube.
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