Why a fair election in Venezuela could affect the fate of millions of migrants – and Joe Biden

CNN
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A little corner of Venezuela slowly spreads along 77th Street in Bogota, the capital of Colombia.

Municipal maps officially refer to this district as Unite II (“unite”)but to many of its inhabitants it is known as Hugo Chavez Neighborhoodin honor of the late Venezuelan president.

Among the more than seven million Venezuelans who have fled their country in the past decade, many now call Bogota home. The city is full of informal communities where migrants gather to help each other and combat the ever-present melancholy and homesickness.

Maria Alvarez is one of those migrants. A 27-year-old single mother from Valencia, she left Venezuela in 2017 when her son Gabriel was just one year old. They have never returned since. Gabriel only knows his grandparents through the photos on his mother’s phone and occasional video calls.

“Everyone left… I have family in Brazil, in the United States, here in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Chile too. We are all abroad: uncles, aunts, cousins… only my father, my mother and one of my brothers remained in Venezuela,” Alvarez told CNN.

According to the United Nations, most of these seven million migrants left Venezuela after 2014, amid an economic and political crisis caused by the collapse of the price of oil – a key Venezuelan export – combined with chronic corruption and mismanagement by government officials.

Nearly two million of them have been granted work permits to work in Colombia, where life is going well for Alvarez and many others like her. After the Covid pandemic, she helped create a foundation in Unit II to offer vocational courses and psychological counseling to Venezuelans and Colombians. She now earns her living as a manicurist and has met a new partner.

Despite everything, she still feels the pull of Venezuela. “I dream of going home and building a life here. Colombia is a nice country, I feel welcome here, but well, I want to go back,” she told CNN, tears in her eyes.

An election and a credible opposition

But with Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian government firmly in power, those dreams of return have remained elusive for many years. Until now.

This month, for the first time in a decade, Venezuela will hold elections in which Maduro’s government will be challenged by an opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, who has a strong chance of winning.

In October last year, Maduro formally committed to ensuring free and fair elections in 2024 after a lengthy and secretive negotiation process with the US State Department.

That promise has been partly undermined by a new conflict between Washington and Caracas: opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado was excluded from the race for power earlier this year, as was her immediate replacement Corina Yoris. The Venezuelan government has accused the White House of failing to lift all economic sanctions against government officials, and in recent weeks, opposition supporters and members of Machado’s team have been arrested.

Despite this, many experts believe that after the July 28 elections, the opposition has a real chance of ousting Maduro from power.

Recent polls show Gonzalez with a lead of more than twenty percentage points over Maduro, and for the first time in years, election observers from the Carter Center and the UN have been invited to monitor the vote.

Such a lead would make Gonzalez the clear favorite in almost every other democratic country. Yet in Venezuela, the government has a history of clinging to power. Its critics have long accused it of rigging elections and silencing the opposition.

Opposition protests were repeatedly repressed in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and hundreds of opposition leaders were arrested or exiled.

Yet for many, this year feels different.

“Personally, I find it hard to believe that Maduro is just going to give up power,” said Laura Dib, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

“However, you know, if there is massive participation with international observation and, of course, with pressure from within the government itself and international pressure… that could create leads,” she told CNN.

Alvarez and many other migrants in Bogota feel the same way: “Maduro can only win the elections if he steals them. But if there is a new government, I will go back the same day. Not just me, hundreds, thousands… there won’t be enough planes for everyone to go home,” said Endel Gonzalez, a 54-year-old from Maracaibo who has worked as a food courier in Bogota for five years.

It is the plight of migrants like Alvarez and millions like her that makes this election such a closely watched event.

Before the pandemic, it was common for Venezuelan migrants to seek opportunities in neighboring countries, but in the past three years, more than half a million headed toward the southern border of the United States, moving directly overland from Colombia through Panama and Central America, to northern Mexico.

Venezuelans were the second-largest group of migrants apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in 2023, totaling more than 260,000 encounters, a fivefold increase. from 2020, when there were fewer than 50,000, putting pressure on the White House to stem the flow.

With the Democratic administration facing uncertain elections in November and migration policies at the heart of the debate, this month’s elections in Caracas could have profound consequences for US President Joe Biden.

Most experts who spoke to CNN believe that if Gonzalez wins, many migrants will decide to return to Venezuela — but if Maduro clings to power, even more migrants will be tempted to head to the U.S. border, for both political and practical reasons.

In the early years of Venezuela’s migration boom, many Latin American countries offered emergency permits and ad hoc policies to migrants from the country, but today many are erecting barriers to prevent the free movement of people.

Colombia, for example, has stopped issuing documents to newly arrived migrants, while Panama’s newly elected president, José Raúl Mulino, has proposed fencing off the jungles that connect his country to Colombia.

Dib estimates that up to two million more migrants could be on the move by next year.

The Biden administration has been instrumental in making this ambition a reality. Maduro agreed to hold free and fair elections only after the United States partially lifted oil sanctions and resumed repatriation flights for undocumented migrants to Caracas in October.

Direct negotiations between Maduro and the State Department appear to have broken down, although Maduro announced last week that his chief negotiator, Jorge Rodriguez, had held a meeting with U.S. officials to resume talks.

Washington openly supports Gonzalez, apparently believing that a transition to democracy in Venezuela would not only help negotiations on energy and migration policy, but would also help Caracas move away from its ideological alliances with countries like China, Russia and Iran.

But as both countries go to the polls this year, it may be the decision of voters in November, rather than July, that really makes the difference.

“If the Biden administration remains in power, I think the (bilateral) negotiations will continue,” Dib said.

“If the Trump administration exists, it will probably just do business… without really caring about what’s happening in terms of democracy and human rights.”