Fleeing Venezuela means ‘starting from zero’
In past two decades, as many as 2 million Venezuelans have migrated abroad, with exodus accelerating under Maduro’s rule
María Abad Cruz, 90, sits on the cusp of her fourth migration, and it may be the hardest one.
Within a few months, if her children’s plan works out, she will move to Spain, the country of her birth, leaving behind Venezuela, the country where she has lived most of her long life and has loved like no other, even if that love these days has been painfully unrequited.
Venezuela is where she met her husband, raised three children and suffered a sorrow so great that she fled to Spain, only to return some years later because Venezuela, after all, was the place she felt most at home.
But amid the worsening economic and political crises, life has become too difficult and, with reluctance, she is coming to the realization that she might be better off leaving.
“Venezuela, for me, is the greatest there is,” Abad said. “But at the moment it’s impossible.”
In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans — by some estimates as many as 2 million — have migrated abroad, with the tendency accelerating in the past several years during the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Nicolás Maduro.
The vast majority have been younger Venezuelans in the prime of their working lives. Yet the huge flow of émigrés has also included a smaller number of older Venezuelans, driven abroad for many of the same reasons, including scarcities of food and medicine, soaring poverty and crime.
Many are following the steps of their children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren who have been imploring them to leave, too.
But for older migrants, the decision to leave is fraught with unique anxieties and uncertainties: about access to health care in destination countries, about the loss of social networks and the comforts developed over a lifetime, about starting from scratch in a brand-new place just when they expected to be enjoying retirement.
Ligia Reyes Castro, 71, and her husband, Mario Reyes Trujillo, 76, started thinking about migrating two years ago.
Trujillo, who spent his career running small businesses, has glaucoma. With medicine increasingly scarce in Venezuela, it has become a near-daily ordeal for him to visit as many as seven pharmacies in an often fruitless search for the eye drops he needs.
Castro, a retired employee of Venezuela’s Education Ministry, was told by her doctor that the cancerous lesion on her forehead was probably the result of all the hours she was forced to stand in lines in the sun waiting to buy food or withdraw money from the bank. As inflation has soared, the value of the couple’s pension has diminished. The last 3-milliliter bottle of drops Trujillo bought cost him more than half his monthly pension.
“All our life is here, we have our roots, our house, we’ve lived nicely, we have our family,” Castro paused. “But a bad government.”
Older Venezuelans who have recently migrated say that arguably the biggest hardship is coming to terms with the challenges of starting anew in their sunset years.
“Very hard, very intense,” said Fernando Galíndez, 75, who left Venezuela with his wife and a son several years ago and resettled in South Florida.
To prospective migrants, Galíndez offered this advice: “You have to understand that to be an immigrant means starting from zero.”
The current rush for the borders is a reversal of a generationslong trend. For decades, Venezuela was a destination for economic migrants and political refugees seeking security and a new life in a country that was once one of the wealthiest in Latin America.
Now many older Venezuelans, in deciding where to flee, are reconnecting with those foreign roots, some nearly forgotten.
María Mata, 67, a retired government social worker, plans to migrate to Germany, the birthplace of her great-grandparents.
Two of her three sons have moved abroad, one to Ireland and the other to Spain. Now Mata and her third son, Eduardo Delgado, 39, are planning to move together to Munich. Both have obtained German citizenship based on their family lineage.
“I feel like a foreigner in Venezuela now; it’s not the Venezuela I know,” Mata said in an interview at a bakery in Caracas near her home. “It’s difficult to stay in a country when the identity is broken. It’s very, very sad.”
Mata said she hopes to find employment in Germany, anything that brings in an income and allows her to save a little. She has heard there is work in caring for the elderly and infirm.