A high-profile spate of Venezuelan migrant crime, from New York to Chile, has the exile community wrestling with its own 'Mariel boatlift' divide. But do data show the 'crisis' is being greatly exaggerated?
The Venezuelan-American community is painfully divided right now. Not over the dictatorial government that rules Venezuela; they still unanimously hate that regime. What's split them instead are the most recent Venezuelan migrants escaping that regime — and their reputation of late, not here in South Florida but on opposite corners of the western hemisphere.
One focus is New York City, where newly arrived Venezuelan migrants have recently been arrested for taking part in a cell phone robbery ring; or for attacking police officers and even shooting a tourist in Times Square.
Another flashpoint, on the other end of the hemisphere, is Chile. There, authorities are sounding the alarm about cells of violent Venezuelan gang members who've been immigrating into that country alongside law-abiding migrants. They've even been mentioned in the investigation into wildfires there that killed more than a hundred people this month.
All of this has stained the image of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who are fleeing Venezuela’s repression and humanitarian crisis, which is the worst in modern South American history. But Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S. and other countries a long time ago fear their image is being tainted too.
“People are concerned here, especially Venezuelans who are U.S. citizens,” says Maria Trina Burgos, a Venezuelan-American immigration attorney in Doral.
Like many expats in South Florida right now, Burgos feels a big problem with the current wave of migrants is that most of them are young. The only social reference point they’ve ever known is Venezuela’s corrupt and often brutal left-wing rule, which started 25 years ago.
“Of course we can’t generalize and say everybody that is coming now, they are criminals, no," says Burgos.
"But they were born and raised in that regime. So they don’t know democracy, and some people, well, they believe here they can do whatever they want.”
In fact, many, more conservative Venezuelan exiles — who are often called "MAGAzuelans" and tend to support former President Trump and his anti-immigration policies, which push the myth that immigrants raise U.S. crime rates — have unjustifiably generalized the Venezuelan newcomers as "criminals."
On social media this month, talk show host Lourdes Ubieta of the Miami AM station Radio Libre said the migrants raised under Venezuelan socialism are todos delincuentes — all delinquents. Ubieta did not respond to our requests for comment.
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That has drawn rebukes from other Venezuelan expats, who see exile classism at play.
“When so many Venezuelans leave the country, not everybody’s going to be good people. We know that," says Miami-Dade College government professor Vilma Petrash. "But we’re losing perspective. We are stigmatizing our own people.”
Petrash points as reference to the Mariel boatlift, when tens of thousands of poorer Cubans arrived in Miami in 1980 — among them criminals whom then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro spitefully released from jails to be part of the exodus. Though the vast majority of those "Marielitos" were not criminals, more established Cuban exiles largely ostracized them for years.
Petrash says Venezuelan exiles, whose largest U.S. community is here in South Florida, have now arrived at their own "Mariel moment." She argues they shouldn't make the mistake of shunning the current, desperate wave of migrants — most of whom are arriving not in the comfort of trans-Caribbean flights but through by foot via the perilous Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama — even if many of them do hail from lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder back in Venezuela.
“They want to protect the reputation of the good Venezuelans, you know — a model minority, and now they say they are having this problem with these newcomers," Petrash says. "Yeah, I understand the preoccupation. But I fear that there is also some social, and maybe racial, discrimination involved, too.”
And that, she adds, is exactly the sort of wedge left-wing dictatorships like Cuba's and Venezuela's hope to drive into their enemy exile enclaves in the U.S.
Another bottom-line question, though, is whether the Venezuelan migrant crime crisis is really a crisis at all — and that the new wave of Venezuelan refugees is being unfairly painted by the isolated acts of a small minority.
"Because of the historic size of the Venezuelan exodus, everything Venezuelan migrants do now gets magnified — they're often scapegoats."Jefferson Diaz
The Venezuelan-American Caucus, a liberal exile nonprofit based in South Florida, says its own estimate of crime data gathered from select police departments around the U.S. shows fewer than half a percent of the 650,000 Venezuelans who’ve come to the U.S. since 2019 have committed a crime here.
Venezuelan exiles in South America also say migrant delinquency is overblown.
Jefferson Díaz, a Venezuelan exile journalist based in Quito, Ecuador, who covers immigration and publishes the newsletter Visa a Cualquier Parte — or Visa to Everywhere — notes that almost eight million migrants have fled Venezuela in the past decade. That's about a quarter of Venezuela's population, thought to be the largest South American exodus in a century. Venezuelans, in fact, are now the biggest national group crossing the U.S. southern border illegally.
Because of that reality, says Díaz says, "now everything that is bad about migration is because of the Venezuelans. Countries were not prepared for this phenomenon, so many are using us as political scapegoats."
Gang migration
Díaz points out that after this month’s deadly, devastating wildfires in Chile, xenophobes there have been quick to raise the possibility that the Venezuelan criminal gang called Tren de Aragua, which police say has a significant presence there now, may have been involved in setting the blazes. Authorities, anonymously, have told Chilean media they are at least looking into the possibility.
But far less attention, Díaz says, has been paid to the fact that many recently arrived Venezuelan migrants in Chile — especially a cohort known as Grupo de Panas, or Group of Buddies — have been at the forefront of the volunteer effort to aid the fires’ victims. Many have told media like the U.S. outlet Voice of America that they wanted to repay Chile for its kindness to them.
Still, the border-hopping of Venezuelan criminals like Tren de Aragua — which authorities say now has a presence in U.S. expat enclaves like Doral in Miami-Dade County — casts its shadow.
"And we would have to be naive to think that doesn't please the Venezuelan regime," says Nitu Pérez Osuna, a Venezuelan exile journalist who hosts a YouTube talk show from Panama called No Me Callaré, or I Won't Be Quiet.
Pérez Osuna echoes the concern of many expats that Venezuela’s authoritarian regime, like Castro during the Mariel episode, is opening its jail cells, hoping to dump gangbangers into adversary countries like the U.S.
“The Biden Administration has to turn around and see Venezuela is exporting these delinquents as a means of destabilizing public security” and exacerbating the U.S.'s immigration crisis, Pérez Osuna says, mostly as a means of gaining leverage in talks to get the U.S. to ease economic sanctions against the regime.
That theory may or may not be true. And even if it is, it doesn't erase the fact that the vast majority of today's Venezuelan migrants are law-abiding, peaceful and productive, say immigration advocates.
Still, for the time being, it’s a stigma that those Venezuelan migrants — and the Venezuelan exile community they're joining — are having to deal with in their Mariel moment.
