Venezuela Surpasses Syria as World’s Largest Migrant Crisis
CARACAS, Venezuela – The Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V) announced on Monday that the number of Venezuelan migrants that have so far fled from their country and its socialist regime had reached 6,805,209 by August 5, more than 20 percent of the nation’s population.
The amount officially puts the Venezuelan migrant crisis ahead of the Syrian migrant crisis as the world’s largest emergency exodus, on par with the ongoing war-fueled migrant crisis in Ukraine.
The R4V platform is a joint effort between the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to address the Venezuelan migrant crisis in Latin American and the Caribbean. The organization bases this number on data provided by each of the region’s governments, clarifying, “as numerous government sources do not account for Venezuelans without a regular status, the total number of Venezuelans is likely to be higher.”
El número de personas refugiadas y migrantes de Venezuela 🇻🇪 sigue en aumento. 🌎 A agosto de 2022, 6,81M de personas salieron de Venezuela. El 84% vive en América Latina y el Caribe. Estos son los países que las acogen 👇 https://t.co/BKnOknFG4J pic.twitter.com/9LQsvz1SJR
— Plataforma R4V (@Plataforma_R4V) August 29, 2022
R4V does not officially have up-to-date data on the number of Venezuelan migrants in every country. In the case of the United States, for example, the number of Venezuelan migrants reported by R4V is based on 2019 data. The majority of the 6.8 million Venezuelan migrants currently reside in Colombia (2.5 million) and Peru (1.3 million).
Unlike the Syrian conflict’s 5.6 million refugees and Ukraine’s 6.8 million refugees following Russia’s invasion, Venezuela’s migrant crisis is not the result of a war nor was it caused by any natural disaster. It entirely originated with the collapse the South American nation under the once-celebrated ideology of “Bolivarian Socialism” spearheaded by late dictator Hugo Chávez and now led by his successor Nicolás Maduro.
The Maduro regime – which both the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have accused, citing “reasonable evidence,” of having committed crimes against humanity – has created one of the world’s worst hyperinflation spirals, severe shortages of food and medicine, destroyed the nation’s public utilities and health infrastructure, and has left more than 75 percent of the remaining population living in extreme poverty.
Since 2019, Venezuela faces a presidential crisis following Maduro’s refusal to step down after holding sham elections in 2018, which caused the then-president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó to assume the interim presidency of the South American nation. Venezuela’s constitution required the National Assembly to choose an interim president as the sham election constituted what it refers to as a “rupture in the democratic order.”
Guaidó has been unable to exert any kind power within the nation’s borders and Maduro, who controls the military and all branches of government, remains the de facto ruler of the country. Despite Venezuelans having essentially two governments — that no one believes in — neither has done much with regards to the ongoing migrant crisis.
El diputado chavista Roberto Messuti aseguró que la crisis del Darién es una producción de TV “con cámaras y luces” https://t.co/d7J1sZcLoj pic.twitter.com/mdCvZhruhL
— Monitoreamos (@monitoreamos) August 26, 2022
“Why has this been happening? Because unfortunately there was a group of Venezuelan compatriots who fell into the trap of disinformation,” Messuti said, “of the inoculation of hate, of despair, and believed the story that they were told by unscrupulous media, who told them that there was no future here, that Venezuela had been lost and that they had to run away.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Source: Breitbart