Venezuela leader offers flights to lure countrymen home

BOGOTA, Colombia — Facing financial ruin, hyperinflation, hunger and power outages, the Venezuelan government has a plan to lure its fleeing countrymen back home: free flights.

“Operation Return to the Fatherland” comes as South America is banding together to deal with the more than 1.6 million Venezuelans who have left their country and flooded the region in recent years. And regional leaders are demanding that President Nicolas Maduro modify his disastrous economic policies.

Maduro’s government claims the migratory crisis is “fake news,” painting Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and elsewhere as suffering and desperate to come home.

When Maduro announced the flights last week, he said they were a mission of mercy to help Venezuelans “escape the economic slavery, persecution and contempt” they were facing throughout South America.

“Quit washing toilets abroad and come to live in the fatherland, love Venezuela and value Venezuela,” he said.

Since the operation began, the government says, more than 1,000 migrants have accepted free rides home, including 1,239 from Brazil, 89 from Peru and 92 from Ecuador. The Brazil numbers, however, likely include migrants who returned overland — not on flights — after anti-Venezuelan protests erupted along the border.

Calls to Venezuela’s Ministry of Information seeking clarification were not returned.

While there are certainly migrants in Peru struggling to make ends meet, the charter flights are more about propaganda than goodwill, said Oscar Perez Torrez, head of the Union of Venezuelans in Peru, an association that represents the estimated 400,000 Venezuelans in that country.

“This is just a show, trying to generate a smokescreen to hide the magnitude of the crisis” in Venezuela, he said. “They’re trying to create this fiction that things in Venezuela are changing and everyone knows that’s not true.”

The program also seems designed to create friction between Peruvians and Venezuelans by accusing the host country of being xenophobic, despite opening to the migrants, Perez said.

State-run television in Venezuela has been broadcasting interviews of the returning migrants decrying long working hours, wage theft and other abuse.

Martin Mejia The Associated Press A Venezuelan migrant holding a national flag waves from a bus Saturday that will transport him to the airport in Lima, Peru. About a hundred Venezuelans are being flown to Caracas on a flight financed by the government of President Nicolas Maduro.