'Hate and love at the same time'

PROVIDENCE — With two men claiming the presidency, protests in the streets, the Army putting down the protests and inflation running at over 2 million percent, Venezuela today is a portrait of strife.

And among the nearly 800 Venezuelans living in Rhode Island, there’s a complicated mix of feelings as they look at their South American homeland almost 2,500 miles away.

"It is very difficult to describe this feeling of hate and love at the same time,” Oscar Mejias, director of the Rhode Island Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and a former resident of Maracaibo — Venezuela's second-largest city and oil industry center — said in a recent interview. "I hate what has happened in Venezuela ’cause of the damage it has caused me and my family. But, of course, I still have friends and it’s my place, so I want to be there....

“Sometimes I try to imagine myself flying and arriving, and I cannot."

Venezuela’s freshest troubles include the offsetting presidential claims of opposition leader Juan Guaidó — a dashing, charismatic 35-year-old chosen by the country’s National Assembly — and the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, the successor to Hugo Chávez, whom many blame for the nation’s woes.

It was under Chávez that Mejias left, in 2003, filing for asylum because of political persecution.

Chief among the reasons that he does not know if he can go back, he says, is that he is not even sure if he is still a Venezuelan citizen.

"Technically, I should be," he said. "But I do not know.... I do not have Venezuelan documentation with me.

“I cannot take the risk” to find out, he continued. "I cannot go to the embassy or to the consulate [because] that space are Venezuelan territory. We could go in through the door, and they could say, ‘We’re going to arrest you.’”

Mejias said he owned a large home that sheltered his wife, their two children and four cars in 2002, when he was a mid-level technocrat at Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the state-run oil company in a nation with the largest proven reserves in the world. In December of that year, he went on strike with thousands of other workers in an attempt to force Chávez to resign. The government then pressured him to give information, he said, but he refused to cooperate.

"I was on strike and I was [persecuted] by the government because they tried to force me to give up information that I should not have had to," he said, "such as passwords and very sensitive information at management level. They wanted that information to create cases against management in the company, so I refused to do it.

"I had to hide my family in different places. I was hiding in other houses," he added. "They were parked in front of my house, just [waiting for me to] arrive to put me in jail."

So it was that Mejias fled to Orlando and applied for asylum. His request was finally granted eight years later, in July 2011, four years after he landed in Providence.

Mejias is one of only 1,961 petitioners whose requests for affirmative asylum — requests from people who are already in the the U.S. before asking for protection — have been granted since 2001, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearing House/Immigration. Yet these are far from the only cases.

According to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 68,809 Venezuelans filed affirmative asylum petitions since 2016 — the largest group of petitioners in the category every month since September 2016.

Of course, the U.S. is not the only country feeling the hit. In a November 2018 report, the United Nations said that 2.4 million Venezuelans were seeking refuge in Latin America and the Caribbean, motivated by a search for greater economic, political and social opportunities abroad.

Colombia — Venezuela's Andean neighbor — is the focal point of this exodus, hosting over a million refugees and migrants. In addition, 159,669 people at the nation’s 16 diplomatic missions in Venezuela have been granted Colombian citizenship since 2014, according to the Consulate of the Republic of Colombia in Boston.

These numbers are not surprising to Varsobia Gallego-Acosta, a Venezuelan woman who moved to Pawtucket in 1998 and recently returned to attend to duties surrounding her mother’s death.

"We are in a really hard situation," said Gallego-Acosta, who founded a group called SOS Venezuela Rhode Island in January 2017, following opposition protests of multiple high-profile arrests in the country that month. "I am almost sure that it is nothing that [has been] seen in another country.

"To be honest, when I went in December, for me it was quite shocking," she continued. "We made a party for the neighbors and I couldn’t believe how the people were crazy. They came from other towns ’cause we were giving out hot dogs."

The currency — the sovereign bolivar — is one of the main culprits behind resource scarcity in Venezuela, although it was introduced in August to help stabilize the inflation rate of its predecessor, the bolivar.

"Now, everything is under [digital] transaction.... There is no cash," she said. "I saw this guy making baskets [out] of money of Venezuela. He was doing that. It was incredible."

The situation has caused her to work an extra job, cleaning someone's house, on top of her full-time job as a legal secretary in the state attorney general's office, so she can send money to help her seven siblings and their families still in Venezuela.

"I send around $500 a month," she said matter-of-factly.

Gallego-Acosta decided to make the SOS group active again once the current crisis broke out at the beginning of January. She said that the first time around, the group couldn’t get off the ground because there was not a critical mass of Venezuelans in Rhode Island, a group whose population stands at 792, according to the 2017 American Community Survey one-year estimate.

"I am hoping that now we can do something," she said. "As a Venezuelan, I can say that now, there is hope."

Betzy Escobar is a 21-year-old psychology student at the University of Rhode Island. She was born in Barquismeto, Venezuela, but hardly remembers her time there, since she left when she was about 4 years old. But there is one thing she recalls clearly.

"I do remember being washed in buckets," she said. "Not like buckets, but the sink where you washed the laundry, where you washed the dishes, that's where I was bathed.... All of my cousins were bathed there."

Escobar came to the United States in 2002 with her mother and brother. Her mother got the family tourist visas and stayed past their expiration date, as 42 percent of the undocumented population did in 2014, according to a 2017 study by the Migration Policy Institute. Their status became regularized after her mother married a man in the U.S.

Escobar said her mother moved because of the Chávez presidency.

"She has always been against Chávez," Escobar said. "She would just say there was not anything out there to live for.... The jobs weren't really good. There was always violence and she feels as though the government never really did much for their people.… Imagine now, which is like 10 times worse.

"When Maduro came, she described him as just a bus driver," she continued. "It [the crisis] has been going on for years."

While Escobar has not spent most of her life there, that does not mean the current crisis is not affecting her. On top of her full-time studies, she works full time in a group home for young women, and also works in green energy as a self-styled entrepreneur part-time, largely to be able to help her mother send some money back home. She gives her mother around $200 of a $1,200-to-$1,300 monthly salary to send back to the beleaguered nation.

Yet one thing she said she cannot have right now is a connection with her family in Venezuela.

"I want to see my family," she said. "I don't want to keep seeing them through Whatsapp and Video Chats.

“I'm older now. I want to be able to provide for them and just spend time with them and be with them."

The three said that even if Guaidó is not perfect, they feel he can do much better than Maduro.

Gallego-Acosta, after saying that supporters of Fidel Castro often treated him as a messiah-like figure, said that she feels similarly about Guaidó.

"Right now, yes," she said. "I see in him a redemption.”

Others take a more practical view.

"I believe in him, in what he is doing as someone who is trying to create solutions," said Mejias. "Not as a savior."

Escobar said that she supports the change for the future, a future which, for her, includes owning property and raising her own future family — at least partly — in Venezuela.

"I see my future there," she said. "We need that attention drawn to us so that people know what is going on.

"I am proud to be a Venezuelan. I'll never forget where I came from. I'll never forget being washed in buckets."

— kandrade@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @Kevprojo