Dire conditions in Venezuela prompted an exodus. In the wake of the attack that ousted its top leader, the question is whether things have changed enough to make a return appealing.
On Jan. 3, in the middle of a Buenos Aires summer night, a Venezuelan immigrant shook his girlfriend awake to tell her that Nicolás Maduro, their country’s authoritarian leader, was gone.
Another migrant jolted upright in Santiago, Chile, as her phone buzzed with the news that the United States had captured him. Many more woke up to a photograph of Mr. Maduro handcuffed aboard a U.S. warship.
The reactions were immediate.
“I am going back,” Yanitze Gutiérrez, a Venezuelan migrant in Uruguay, told her son as she called him in Spain, where he lives.
When Andreína Di Giovanni opened her Venezuelan grocery store in Buenos Aires, she said frenzied clients started rushing in.
“People were crying with happiness,” she said. “And I started hearing it: ‘I am going back. I am going back. I am going back.’”
But, so far, the enormous Venezuelan diaspora spread across many countries is largely staying put, the United Nations says.
After the initial shock many felt when learning of Mr. Maduro being dragged away to a New York jail, a sobering reality has set in. The factors that compelled many of them to leave — a broken economy and repressive leaders — are still in place.
“The problems are not resolved,” said Greces Vicuña, 32, who migrated to Chile in 2018, after, she said, she was jailed for three months for attending antigovernment protests. “I am not going back.”
The exodus of Venezuelans created one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. Roughly eight million Venezuelans, about a quarter of the country’s population, have fled the country over the past 11 years, according to the United Nations, becoming perhaps the most visible consequence of Mr. Maduro’s oppressive rule.
Though some went to the United States and others to Spain, a vast majority, nearly seven million, stayed in South America, pouring into Colombia, Peru and Brazil.
Venezuelan migrants have surged into the region’s labor markets and filled millions of jobs. Their sheer numbers have, in some places, including the United States, spurred a backlash and become an issue in national elections.
This mass migration has also upended Venezuelan lives and careers, emptied neighborhoods across Venezuela and broken households apart.
Many Venezuelans hoped the U.S. intervention would yield more than just the removal of Mr. Maduro. They saw it as the beginning of a great homecoming, a new era of family reunification and relief from the fear that parents and grandparents would die without a goodbye.
Instead, the U.S. left the ruling party in power, opening for many a new chapter of uncertainty. In the aftermath, organizations that track migration reported no significant movement of people back to Venezuela.
The direction the country takes in the coming months may provide clearer hints on whether those abroad will return in meaningful numbers.
In a U.N. survey in February, 9 percent of Venezuelans interviewed in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala and Chile said they planned to return home in the next year.
If the gargantuan migration out of Venezuela was a sign of the country’s collapse, the decisions on returning could be a key measure of the reality the U.S. intervention left behind.
Hesitation may indicate that despite the operation’s military success, and some gradual improvements, there is not yet the change many Venezuelans wanted.
‘We Couldn’t Feed Them’
In 2022, as Venezuela’s economy cratered under Mr. Maduro, Maritza Durán, now 59, and her two grandchildren, 7 and 4, left their home. They walked across a stretch of the Bolivian Andes and into Chile.
“It wasn’t because I wanted to,” said Ms. Durán, a government secretary for 35 years who lived in the western Venezuelan state of Mérida. “We couldn’t feed them,” she said of her grandchildren.
Amid crippling U.S. sanctions and the government’s mismanagement of the economy, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans like Ms. Durán fled acute food shortages and hyperinflation.
Many walked to Colombia, then hitchhiked to Ecuador. Others walked into Brazil, then Bolivia, and then crossed Chile’s mountainous border. The sight of Venezuelan families ferrying backpacks became a fixture of mountain highways.
Colombia granted nearly two million Venezuelans temporary residency.
Venezuelans added new words to local dialects and arepas to restaurant menus. Venezuelan stand-up comedians filled Buenos Aires theaters.
Migrants from Venezuela disproportionately work in the informal sector, often for delivery apps, struggling to make ends meet.
Venezuelans in Chile also face a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment, and José Antonio Kast, the country’s newly elected right-wing president, said recently that Mr. Maduro’s removal would make it easier to repatriate them.
Many of those who fled to the United States were granted Temporary Protected Status, given to nationals of designated countries experiencing upheaval or other adverse conditions. But last year, the Trump administration eliminated this protection for over half a million Venezuelans, making them also potentially eligible for deportation.
A Hopeful Reaction
Others thought that Mr. Maduro’s capture would create a natural flow of people back to Venezuela.
“You are all going to return,” Patricia Bullrich, a powerful Argentine senator, said at a rally of Venezuelans in Buenos Aires the day after the U.S. operation in Caracas. “We are going to miss you.”
In podcasts and in YouTube and TikTok videos, Venezuelan migrants reacting to the news of Mr. Maduro’s toppling discussed returning. Jokes spread about Venezuelan returnees with Peruvian accents.
“All the Venezuelans outside of Venezuela, we are all asking the same question: ‘Are you going back?’” Daniel Enrique, a Venezuelan comedian who lives in Mexico City, said on his podcast.
Génesis Hidalgo, a Venezuelan teacher who last year chronicled her return from Argentina to Venezuela on social media, said she had received a flurry of new messages from followers showing interest in returning after Mr. Maduro’s fall.
Mr. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, now the country’s president, has urged migrants to return, and in a television ad Venezuela’s government promised “its children” that it was “waiting for them with open arms.”
Ayrton Monsalve Barrios, 31, a Venezuelan journalist who advocates for democracy, stopped the transfer of his cats from Caracas to Buenos Aires, where he lives.
He has sold his furniture and terminated his lease, and is making plans to return home. He visited a former military compound in Buenos Aires where Argentina’s military dictatorship tortured political prisoners to learn how to repurpose brutal detention centers in Venezuela into sites of memory.
“We have a unique opportunity,” he said.
“I don’t want to go to Venezuela when everything is ready,” he added. “I want to go back to build democracy.”
A Long Wait
Samuel Díaz Pulgar, a Venezuelan opposition activist, is already back home.
After Venezuela’s government passed an amnesty law for political prisoners, Mr. Pulgar flew to Caracas from Colombia on March 15, his mother’s birthday. He fled Venezuela last year, changing vehicles four times and crossing into Colombia by boat.
He dived back into politics. His party organized a meeting attended by over 100 people, Mr. Pulgar said.
“The fact that from one day to another four people show up at a cafe to meet and talk about politics is something that a couple of months ago would be completely unheard-of,” he said.
While Venezuela’s government has freed hundreds of political prisoners, many more remain imprisoned, and dissidents are still being jailed. Alexi Paparoni, one of Mr. Pulgar’s party colleagues, had been recently detained though he was released hours later, he said.
And daily living is hard in other ways. Venezuela is still plagued by blackouts and water shortages, Mr. Pulgar said. Food prices are high, and salaries extremely low.
“Things are different, but they haven’t fully changed for people to fully come back,” he said.
Mélanie Gallant, the Latin America spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency, as well as organizations in Colombia, Peru and Chile, said there had not been any quantifiable spike in people returning to Venezuela.
Migrants cited a lack of jobs, inflation, security and difficulties getting access to food and health care as their primary concerns, Ms. Gallant and others said. The lack of political change also played a role.
Despite the removal of Mr. Maduro, the government’s authoritarian apparatus remains in place.
“They took one criminal, but there are still 10 left,” said Iván Alcalá, a Venezuelan taxi driver in Buenos Aires who said he was not going back.
The Trump administration says it is running Venezuela and it has decided to work with the current authorities to make deals to obtain Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources over promoting democracy.
U.S. officials say elections will eventually take place. But what Venezuelans hoped would be a rapid transition has felt increasingly permanent since the White House recognized Ms. Rodríguez as the country’s leader. Mr. Trump called her “a wonderful president.”
It has been a painful blow to many Venezuelans outside the country.
“When Trump comes out saying anything positive about her, it’s a terrible humiliation,” said Ms. Di Giovanni, the Venezuelan grocery store owner in Buenos Aires.
Ms. Di Giovanni, who has lived in Argentina for 13 years and has built a life and business there, says she has no intention of returning. Many Venezuelans who walked into her shop on a recent afternoon to buy plantains or spicy pork cracklings said the same.
“I want to give a better education to my daughter,” said Lisbeth Fran, 42. “So I stay.”
What it would take to return varies depending on age, family circumstances, legal status and personal financial outlook.
For established migrants like Ms. Di Giovanni, Venezuela would have to undergo a complete transformation. For more vulnerable migrants, the criteria is modest: basic services, food and security. But the country thus far cannot provide even that.
“All of us who have families in Venezuela know that things haven’t changed,” said Ms. Gutiérrez, who lives in Uruguay.
She worries that Mr. Trump had shifted his attention elsewhere.
“Trump hasn’t finished with Venezuela, and he started with Cuba and Iran,” she said. “Time is going by, and the pain keeps growing.”
Mitra Taj, Genevieve Glatsky and Lucía Cholakian Herrera contributed reporting.
