Paper short abstract:

After a brief history of major political and economic changes leading up to the current Venezuelan refugee crisis, ethnographic case studies among Venezuelans at home and abroad will demonstrate the emergence of transnational networks across the Americas.

Paper long abstract:

The migration of Venezuelans to neighboring South American countries currently numbers approximately 5 million people, making it the largest transnational migration in the history of Latin America and the second largest (after Syria) in the world today. This massive exodus must be seen in historical context: deteriorating economic conditions of the 1980s and '90s; sharply declining poverty levels during the Chavez presidency (1999-2013) alongside increasing oil dependency and lack of structural economic reforms; and extreme polarization resulting in part from a failed coup d'etat in April 2002. Chavez's successor, Nicolas Maduro, reacted to the rapid decline in oil revenues in 2014 and 2015 with economic policies and political maneuvering having disastrous consequences for the Venezuelan people: hyperinflation (1.3 million percent), weaponizing of food and medicine, and flagrant abuses of power aimed at silencing political opponents. Meanwhile, international support for Venezuelan refugees remains at only $750 million, and US policy under Trump has further intensified the crisis by tying aid to an extractivist neoliberal political agenda and by taking explicitly anti-immigrant/ anti refugee policies in the U.S. The Venezuelan people are thus caught between incompetent and corrupt political forces both at home and abroad. Ethnographic cases will demonstrate some of the ways in which Venezuelan citizens at home and abroad are developing transnational networks for responding to a crisis in which remittances to the homeland, and sharply decreased oil revenues, have produced new forms of inequalities and host country resources for housing, feeding, employing, and providing medical care are extremely inadequate.