The call for elections dominated by Chavismo aggravates social discomfort in Venezuela

The stagnation of the political crisis, the state of widespread apathy and the arrival of a new economic winter with walkways of international sanctions have installed a deep climate pessimism in Venezuela. The call for this Sunday of a legislative and governor elections, which will be dominated by Chavismo before the announced boycott of the majority of the opposition, now aggravates the conflict in an already exhausted society. With these premises, fears extend for a new mass migratory wave after the gradual return of Venezuelans registered in recent years.

The trend was exacerbated after the outcome of the presidential elections of July 28 and the new inauguration of Nicolás Maduro, to which the electoral authority awarded, amid accusations of fraud, a triumph that was never corroborated by the publication of the minutes. Opinion polls now report that 22% of the population has decided, they are thinking or has ever thought about leaving the country.

Monthly inflation is already around 20%, in accordance with what different independent economic reports report in the absence of official data, and the country returns to the perspective of three -digit inflation in 2025. The exchange rate has devalued at 50%. In short, the modest recovery of the consumption of the period 2021-2024 This year is exhausted: firms such as Ecoanalitics foresee a fall of 4 points of GDP and problems with national income.

The Venezuelan Observatory of the Diaspora, led by the sociologist Tomás Páez, estimates that, since 2013, 9.1 million Venezuelans have emigrated from the country, one of the highest rates in the world and one of the greatest exodus of humanity in recent decades. The United Nations figures do not differ much and are located in the eight million.

The Venezuelan immigration emergency, a load for the rest of South America in recent years, has other aggravating ones. The last one, and one of the most important, is the elimination of temporary protection status, (TPS) offered by the government of Democrat Joe Biden to migrants arriving in the United States. This veto affects more than 350,000 people, who face an imminent threat of deportation.

In the United States, a large opposition sector fears that the Donald Trump administration, through its special envoy to Caracas, Richard Grenelll – and the Maduro regime work in an agreement. The Pact opens the gates for the mass deportation of Venezuelan emigrants without TPS in exchange for the extension of the oil license to Chevron, that Chavismo urgently needs to stabilize its accounts.

Thus, in the face of the hardening of Washington with Venezuelan migrants -which daily receives emails from federal offices so that they self -support -the destinations most invoked by the population to emigrate in opinion polls are Spain and Chile. The United States, before the first option, continues in third place. Colombia and Argentina are also named.

Meanwhile, the Chavista regime, knowing that this is a situation that, for now, will not be able to remedy, has resolved to change their speech and put on the side of the diaspora, a human cosmos where the resentment abounds precisely with Maduro and the official apparatus. The determining majority of Venezuelan emigrants consulted in surveys conditions their return to the country to the feasibility of a peaceful political change that draws the government’s Chavism.

In the time of Hugo Chávez, many officials laughed at the concerns expressed by the opposition about the increase in migration and gave importance to their possible consequences. Those citizens “who do not like socialism” were often invited to go to Miami. Already in the government, Maduro regretted that the population prefers to move to the United States, Colombia or Chile, “to wash toilets”, instead of staying to fight in their homeland for the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Venezuelan diaspora who, between 2016 and 2019, went out for Colombia and ended up arriving at Ecuador, Peru and Chile, was not taken seriously as a social phenomenon from the government, which then did everything that could be for omitting the problem.

In recent months, on the other hand, Maduro has granted interviews where he has expressly expressed, perhaps for the first time, that the country wants to recover its diaspora. “I always say, my dear migrant brothers, Venezuela awaits you,” Maduro said recently, in the informative context of the revocation of the TPS that affects so many Venezuelans in the United States. “Everyone will return to be happy on this earth: working, producing and hugging us. And they will also rescue the most precious of all rights, which is the right to like (to party)

The deportations of Venezuelan citizens from the United States to the Center for Confinement against Terrorism, in El Salvador, were conveniently exploited by the Revolutionary Government of Maduro, who has closed ranks with their relatives in the defense of the judicial case of these people, demanding justice and respect for due process. For this, important informative deployments have been organized in the National Public Media System.

One of the best known cases is Maykelis Espinoza, a two -year -old girl separated from her parents, who was returned to Venezuela after they were deported. The Maykelis Espinoza girl was received at Simón Bolívar International Airport by Cilia Flores, wife of Nicolás Maduro, and Diosdado Cabello, Minister of the Interior and Justice.

Maduro said that his government worked with lawyers and human rights groups to ensure the girl’s return, and even thanked Donald Trump, and his special envoy, Richard Grenell, for attending to his request.

“It is not worth being subject to that risk, see Venezuela,” Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly, and one of the Chavismo hierarchy, addressed to the millions of emigrants in the country. “It is not worth it that the day less thought, and God keeps them, a United States official will grip them, put them in a plane, and end up kidnapped, as slaves, deprived of liberty.”