The worsening of the economic and social crisis in Venezuela since 2015 has led nearly 8 million Venezuelans to leave the country in search of a better life. In October 2023, the governments of Venezuela and the United States announced repatriation flights. At that time, Venezuelan authorities announced that the “Return to the Homeland” program would allocate the resources to care for repatriated Venezuelan nationals.
The situation changed a little more than 3 months later when the United States started pondering the re-establishment of sanctions after Venezuela’s Highest Court decided not to lift the disqualification of the opposition presidential candidate María Corina Machado. In response, the government of Venezuela threatened to suspend the repatriation flights, in a show that Venezuelan migration is being used as a bargaining chip.
According to Ana María Diez, president of the civil society network Coalición por Venezuela, the Venezuelan government uses migrants as political bargaining chips: “Wrongfully, the government ties up the repatriation mechanisms of Venezuelan migrants in a precarious humanitarian situation or who wish to return to the country to the agreements signed in Barbados. The right to return to one’s own country or by repatriation is part of international standards of protection. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes that ‘everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’. In this sense, the announcement of Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez of a reconsideration of these mechanisms of cooperation and assisted return or repatriation of Venezuelans may constitute a violation of the human right to return,” Diez explained.
In the same sense, Francisco D’Angelo, legal director of the civil association VeneMex, believes that Delcy Rodríguez’s statements demonstrate how the Venezuelan government has used migration as a form of pressure on the United States.
Translated by José Rafael Medina
