The governments of Colombia and Peru reportedly began plans on Tuesday to reinforce their borders out of concern that the ongoing political chaos in Venezuela – triggered by a sham presidential election the White House pressured the country to hold – will prompt a new wave of mass migration.
The Venezuelan socialist regime, which has been in power since 1999, has already resulted in the exodus of nearly 8 million people from what was once Latin America’s wealthiest nation. Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, and Chile in particular have taken in hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the past decade, straining their already delicate political and law enforcement structure. Venezuelans have also fled en masse to the United States, Spain, and Italy, among other Western nations.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro renewed fears of yet another migrant wave by declaring himself the “winner” of a sham election on Sunday in which his regime ensured citizens were presented with no meaningful choices on the ballot. Maduro himself appeared on the ballot 13 times, while the other positions were occupied by communists, socialist-friendly puppet candidates, and one legitimate opposition figure: elderly ex-diplomat Edmundo González. González took the position that would have rightfully gone to former lawmaker María Corina Machado, who won the anti-socialist opposition primary in October.
Maduro banned Machado from running for public office and used the nation’s Supreme Court, controlled by the regime in its entirety, to invalidate the primary.
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González, alongside Machado, announced on Monday that her team had obtained ballot results from local voting stations nationwide and published a website showing what the opposition asserted were the true results of the election. According to those results, González won the election with 67 percent of the vote, compared to Maduro’s 30 percent.
As a result of the evidence, most Latin American nations have refused to accept Maduro as the victor. The Maduro regime responded on Monday by formally cutting diplomatic ties to Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay.
Popular outrage over the overt theft of the presidency has led to widespread protests across Venezuela, featuring protesters toppling statues of the founder of “Bolivarian socialism,” Hugo Chávez, and banging pots and pans, a traditional expression of dissent in Latin America. As of Wednesday, local civil society organizations have documented the killing of 13 protesters in over 200 protests nationwide.
In Colombia, a nation that has taken in 2.8 million Venezuelans but experienced a similar exodus of its citizens to Venezuelans in the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Ministry organized a meeting on Tuesday to discuss reinforcing the countries’ mutual border. Venezuela and Colombia are connected by a bridge in the city of Cúcuta, where Venezuelans often transit to buy basic goods not available under socialism.
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Colombian Defense Minister Iván Velásquez met with several authorities in the North Santander region to discuss “the strengthening of foot forces in the region and the migration situation on the Colombian-Venezuelan border,” according to the Defense Ministry. Colombia shut down the border during the election but reopened the Cúcuta bridge on Monday, reportedly with a stronger security presence.
The Argentine news agency Infobae reported that, as a result of the meeting, the Colombian federal government will activate several military police battalions elsewhere in the country to allow the placement of more soldiers on the border.
In Peru, which does not have a border with Venezuela, the government rapidly reinforced its border with Ecuador to prepare for Venezuelan migrants. Radio Programas del Perú (RPP) reported that the government of President Dina Boluarte sent over 1,000 police forces and additional soldiers to the Ecuadorian border this week and has begun placing surveillance drones in the border area.
“We cannot take in [people] at the scale that we did in the prior exodus,” Peruvian Foreign Minister Javier González-Olaechea said on Tuesday.
On the other side of the border, in Ecuador, local media quoted Venezuelan transplants concerned that the country, already strained by an ongoing gang war, would soon be hit by a new migrant wave. According to the Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo, Ecuador – a country of 18 million people – has taken in nearly 2 million Venezuelans in the past 6 years. Ecuador struggled with a humanitarian crisis in 2018 partially as a result of a mass migration wave, which Venezuelans in the country recalled and worried could repeat in the near future.
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has not directly commented on the potential for a new migrant wave from Venezuela but his government refused to recognize Maduro as the winner of the sham election and Noboa himself acknowledged the plight of Venezuelans in his country in remarks on Tuesday.
“Many of them have endured very hard days, especially in these hard times, seeing what happens in our brother nation,” he said of Venezuelan expatriates in Ecuador. Noboa also reportedly recognized that, like Colombia, Ecuador lost thousands of people to migration to Venezuela when it was the wealthiest nation in the region in the 1960s and 1970s.
Noboa called an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) scheduled to take place on Wednesday to discuss the Venezuelan sham election.
Chile, another nation that has taken in thousands of Venezuelans, expressed concerns about a migrant surge this week but has not yet moved troops to its borders (Chile does not share a border with Venezuela).
“Everything indicates that we are going to have a new migrant wave in the next weeks or months, very similar to what we had in 2018, with Chile as one of the destination countries. It is a very complex situation,” Chilean Vice President Carolina Tohá predicted on Tuesday. Maduro was similarly “reelected” in a sham vote that year.
Tohá noted, however, that “the migrant wave has not for a minute stopped.”
“All this time – and not just in Chile – we see with a lot of intensity our experience because obviously that is what we get, but when we see the experience of other countries in the region,” Tohá explained, “the number in which people from Venezuela looking for the possibility of remaking their lives have arrived is much larger than what has happened in Chile.”
Tohá asserted that the government “must prepare” for larger numbers of incoming migrants.
The lone exception to widespread concerns about Venezuelan migrants has been Argentina, where libertarian President Javier Milei, a longtime foe of Maduro’s, issued a statement welcoming Venezuelans to his country.
“We do not recognize the fraud, we call on the international community to unite to restore the state of laws in Venezuela, and we remind the Venezuelan people that the doors of our nation are open to all men who choose to live in liberty,” Milei wrote in a message on social media on Monday.