Nearly eight million Venezuelans have been forced to flee. It is one of the largest refugee crises in the world, surpassing even Syria and Afghanistan. Yet as their numbers have grown, Venezuelan’s access to regional protection has disintegrated. With Nicolás Maduro’s capture in January 2026, Venezuela faces a new political moment. The stories of those persecuted and in exile must guide what comes next. To understand this experience, USCRI Policy Analyst Alexia Gardner spoke with three Venezuelan refugees. These are their stories.*
Data current as of November 2025, obtained from the IOM-UNHCR’s R4V project. Although there are displaced Venezuelans throughout the Americas, the map focuses on South America, where the majority have settled.
- As a result of political persecution and a humanitarian emergency, eight million Venezuelans have been forced to flee.
- Venezuela’s humanitarian emergency is defined by widespread food insecurity and electrical blackouts, which threaten citizens’ access to lifesaving medical care.
- Under the Maduro regime, political dissidents were arbitrarily killed and detained.
- Nearly seven million Venezuelans have found refuge in other countries in Latin America. With three million in neighboring Colombia, the country is the one of the world’s predominant hosts of people in need of international protection.
I.The Anatomy of a Collapse
Venezuela did not collapse into crisis overnight. Once the wealthiest country in South America, with a thriving democracy, it was a haven for the exiled. At midcentury, it sheltered Colombians fleeing civil war, Cubans seeking freedom, and Brazilians escaping authoritarian rule.
Venezuela’s economy, however, is highly dependent on petroleum. In the 1970s, oil prices were at an all-time high. The state nationalized the oil industry, founding Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). But with oil producing a glut of revenue, the state neglected to develop other economic sectors, such as agriculture. Economic growth became synonymous with the price of oil.
When the price of oil collapsed in the 1980s, so did Venezuela. This recession marked the early signs of the country’s current problems: oil made Venezuela rich, but reliance on it weakened the economy.
Venezuela tried to recover in the 1990s by inviting foreign companies, including Chevron, to upgrade its technology, allowing it to pump more crude oil. Such efforts were unsuccessful. A drop in the price of oil again in 1998 laid the groundwork for Hugo Chávez’s rise to power. Chávez, a revolutionary inspired by Che Guevara, won the 1998 presidential election on an agenda of squashing poverty and inequality.
Immediately after taking office, Chávez fired the long-time head of the PDVSA, marking the beginning of his tension with the agency, which he proceeded to gut over the course of his presidency. Under his leadership, inflation in Venezuela rose rapidly, and food shortages became increasingly normal. But Chávez remained popular amongst the working class, a leverage he used to reform the national political system: he removed term limits, took control of the judiciary, and nationalized dozens of companies.
Chávez died in 2013. His handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, initially won power through elections. However, when oil prices plummeted in 2014 and the country plunged into poverty, his popularity cratered. Instead of stepping aside, he consolidated power and turned towards autocracy. He persecuted dissidents, arbitrarily killing and detaining protesters. To block them from fleeing, human rights defenders often found themselves stripped of their passports. Freedom of expression eviscerated, political dissidents increasingly sought refuge outside Venezuela.
Marisol’s* is one such story. The daughter of Chávez dissidents, she was raised to protest. After the 1998 election, her family’s home was requisitioned by Chávez supporters, locking them out of their house for days. Despite the risks, her parents stayed politically active. At a protest in 2012, her father was detained. Marisol was there too; officials pointed a gun at her head because she was fighting for democracy.
Marisol, an engineer, eventually took a job on local public works projects. As Maduro gained power, she found her position increasingly politicized. Officials asked her to go to marches in Caracas, to wear red, to show support for the government. She evaded, making excuses, but increasingly worried that her refusals would brand her a traitor.
“There came a point where we no longer felt that it was our home and our haven, because at any moment we could be threatened, we could be arrested,” she says. In 2019, Marisol fled Venezuela, joining millions of others searching for safety.
When Marisol fled, she left a country embroiled not just in autocracy but on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. By the time she left in 2019, Venezuela’s economic and political crisis had metastasized into an emergency marked by hunger—a crisis that, despite the recent change in the country’s leadership, remains alive today.
People wait for days at a time to get eggs and milk. Nearly half of Venezuelans under the age of five suffer from acute or chronic malnutrition. In a country of 31 million people, more than five million are severely undernourished. During his rule, Maduro used food as a tool of control; who did not support the government found their rations restricted.
Santiago* is a Venezuelan refugee who experienced this firsthand. As a member of the LBGTQ+ community, Santiago found it difficult to find and hold a job in Venezuela, a country where speaking openly about sexuality and gender identity is taboo.
“The lack of acceptance or the ridicule began within my own household. It was a very difficult subject that couldn’t be discussed. You basically had to live almost in hiding. And that also extended to the workplace.”
Santiago was fired from his job for being gay. With no income, he struggled to afford to buy food on the black market, leaving him with little protection against Venezuela’s deepening food crisis.
“I did not support the government. So my situation [of food insecurity] became quite bad, and I had to migrate. I had to leave. When I left Venezuela, I weighed 52 kilos (114lbs), down from the 80 (176lbs) kilos that I once weighed,” he shared.
The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and ensuing shortage of crucial supplies also impact the medical care that people received. Hospitals run out of medication. Constant blackouts cause key equipment to fail, endangering patients’ lives. This too, impacted Santiago. As Venezuela’s crisis deepened, his mother was diagnosed with cancer.
“The machines were always broken,” he said. “Medicines didn’t arrive, nor did medical supplies. So she died.”
Venezuela’s medical infrastructure did not only suffer from shortages and mismanagement but also became a tool of control for the regime as a mechanism of repression.
Mateo* ran the trauma unit at a large hospital in Caracas. For him, medicine was not just a career but a principle, a responsibility to treat the sick. One day, a riot broke out in one of the prisons. 175 patients filled the hospital. On his feet for more than 48 hours, Mateo found his office full of government officials. They demanded that he release information about the prisoner’s health, pushing him to justify why he had chosen to pursue certain courses of treatment. He refused, choosing to resign.
“Unfortunately you don’t resign from those kinds of positions, they fire you,” he said. “They declared me in contempt, they pursued me throughout the country. I moved from one state to another to see if it would be better. They pursued me there too, coming to my private practice and intimidated my patients. They sent a notification to the medical association that they were going to give me an award, but they were actually hoping to lure me in to arrest me, to deprive me of my freedom.
With that kind of persecution and that kind of threat and stress, I had to leave my country across the border, in hiding, without papers. They had revoked my passport…it was terrible.”
To date, Venezuela’s combined political and economic crises have forced eight million people—people with stories like Marisol, Mateo, and Santiago—to flee.
Marisol wishes that more people understood that Venezuelans migrate out of necessity. “People believe that Venezuelans migrate because we want to, because it is enjoyable,” she shares. “No. We migrate for our survival. We pack up a small bag, and leave our life, our childhood, our parents, our families —because we want a future.”
II. Exile
Nearly seven million of the eight million exiled Venezuelans have found refuge in a neighboring country in Latin America. Colombia hosts at least half of them, making it one of the top refugee-hosting country in the world. Peru and Brazil are the other major hosts of displaced Venezuelans.
Colombia’s treatment of Venezuelans was initially one of welcome, but protections have corroded in recent years. In 2021, the Colombian government granted ten-year regularization permits to one million previously undocumented Venezuelans, with more eligible to register. The then UN High-Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, praised the move as a “humanitarian gesture of an unprecedented scale.”
Colombia’s decision, which entitled most Venezuelans to work, receive healthcare benefits, and attend public schools, was significant for improving refugee’s well-being. However, as the years have passed and fears over the economic impacts of welcoming Venezuelans have amplified, this generosity has corroded. Colombia’s new president, Gustavo Petro, formerly a Marxist guerilla, aligned himself closer to the Venezuelan government. Given Maduro’s opposition to the outflow of Venezuelan refugees, Petro implemented a ‘policy of silence’ on Venezuelan refugees. When giving speeches, Petro refers generally to migration in the region and does not make space for them on the national policy agenda, an obfuscation at odds with the scale of need. Although Venezuelans are still eligible for a national ID card and the right to work, the Colombian government has not taken substantive steps to integrate them economically. Most live in poverty, finding work only on the margins of the economy, where they are often abused and mistreated.
After fleeing Venezuela, Marisol spent several years in Colombia. Although free of the Maduro regime, she entered a kind of purgatory: her future put on hold by the lack of opportunities.
“As Venezuelans [in Colombia], we only had a short-term residency permit,” she said.
“We couldn’t even open a bank account because the permit wasn’t valid for that purpose. We didn’t file taxes, we didn’t have any opportunities. That permit was only good for a job and health insurance. Nothing else…Many places wouldn’t allow you to rent a house; they wouldn’t accept you because you were Venezuelan. And in many jobs, they wouldn’t hire Venezuelans.”
III. Refuge
Struggling in Colombia, Marisol and her family applied for refugee status in the United States. After years of interviews with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization on Migration, and the U.S. Government, her family were resettled as refugees in Vermont.
“I—my family in particular—we are very, very grateful to [the United States], very grateful, because even though we know it is not an easy country to make ends meet in…we feel very, very blessed to be here…this is a country of opportunities for those who want them.”
Like Marisol, Santiago resettled in the United States. Here, he marvels at the openness with which LGBTQ+ can show love and affection.
“Being able to go out and show yourself exactly as you are feels really good,” he shares. “On the other hand, when I was in Venezuela, I couldn’t show any signs [that I was LGBTQ+], I couldn’t be who I really was.”
Meanwhile, Mateo found refuge in Peru. However, after the Venezuelan government continued to extort him, threatening to kidnap his child, he too resettled in the United States as a refugee. Although he is saddened that he cannot continue to practice medicine as a doctor, he has found work as a Certified Nurse’s Assistant (CNA).
For the three of them, life in the United States is far from perfect. Mateo, Marisol, and Santiago lost the careers, communities, and country that they once knew. Still, none can return to Venezuela. With Delcy Rodríguez, Maduros’ vice president, still in power, going home would be dangerous.
Despite the new political moment in Venezuela, millions of people remain displaced, and some may still be forced to flee. The process of rebuilding a country amid conflict and atrocity requires more than political promises. It demands acknowledgment of the profound human cost of hunger and persecution. Repair must consider not just the needs of Venezuelans in Venezuela, but the stories of those exiled and displaced.
*all interviewee names have been changed.
