Requiem for a Dream: Venezuela's Descent into Madness

How Did Venezuela Go From Richest Country in LatAm to Biggest Migrant Crisis in the World?

(Conference read at Sciences Politiques University in Paris, France, on April 11th., 2025).

My name is Vicente Ulive-Schnell. I’d like to state that I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization. I say this because currently, Venezuelans are being stigmatized by the Trump administration. At the time of this writing, over 250 of my countrymen have been “deported” if you can call it that, from the United States, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, a country 2500 Kms away from Venezuela.

In order to justify this atrocity, President Trump invoked an obscure XVIII-century law that had been used only 3 times in history. He said the Tren de Aragua represented some sort of migrant invasion that needed to be stopped without due process. After using the Alien Enemies Act, as the law was called, in World Wars I & II, and before during the war of 1812 against the British, the United States were now using this law to go after Venezuelan gangsters.

How did we Venezuelans get here? We are now accused of perpetrating -I quote- “an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States”. And when I say we, I’m not saying that I’m a member of the Tren de Aragua; I’m referring to those wrongly accused, as has been reported in major news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Miami Herald, Reuters and AP, as reported by Venezuelan journalist Alejandro Tarre.

II.

The explosion in Venezuelan migration has had a huge impact on the continent. But you should know this is a very recent phenomenon; when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, nobody talked about leaving. We still thought we were a “rich country”, or at least, that we had what it took to recreate the glorious seventies, when Venezuela was the richest country in Latin-America.

The problem wasn’t the economy, though. Venezuela’s economy has been a disaster for as long as I can remember. My generation was born in a crisis, we were raised in a crisis and, to this day, the few friends I have in Venezuela are still going through a crisis. We survived the devaluation of 1983, when all our savings lost half their value overnight; we survived the neoliberal economic adjustments and the riots of 1989 that left thousands dead; and we survived the worst banking crisis in history, when, in 1994, a third of all financial entities disappeared (nota bene: with our money, of course).

The problem was the violence, the explosion of kidnappings and murders. I’d like to emphasize the word “explosion”, because Venezuela has always been a violent country. Even our petrol is extracted with violence, poisoning our indigenous communities, as evidenced in the 2005-documentary film "Nuestro petróleo y otros cuentos".

Petrol corrupted all our society, leading economist Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso to call it “The Devil’s Excrement”. It’s difficult to explain the amount of damage the nationalization of petrol did in 1975. Sometimes I like to imagine that when Venezuela started drilling for petrol, we not only extracted this bilious liquid, we also unearthed a monster. Something like a Greek Minotaur that we have to feed with fourteen virgins every year. Because as Venezuela started belching its petrol into the international markets, its cities grew more and more bloodthirsty, reaching record heights in 2011, when Venezuela was the most violent country in all of the world.

Violence drove us all away. My cousin got robbed at gunpoint three times in two months. The last time, he really thought he was going to die, so he went as far away from this horror as he could: he migrated to Australia.

Now, even though the country had always been violent, things got considerably worse towards the beginning of the century. After the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the Eternal Commander, as he called himself, decided to arm people in the barrios. Unconfirmed rumors had it that he’d watched the movie Black Hawk Down and thought he’d copy the tactics used in Somalia.

However, our good old revolutionary gangsters got bored of waiting for the gringo invasion, so criminality skyrocketed. Guns were ubiquitous: thugs even came up with creative ways to extort you, like the “Express Kidnappings”, where you’re kidnapped for two hours or so until your family pays a very small sum, of maybe 500€.

Another key issue was the collapse of our prison system. The government abandoned the internal control of our jails to the inmates, allowing them to organize as they wished. This lead to the consolidation of criminal gangs like the aforementioned Tren de Aragua, that transformed into what is called a Megabanda or Megagang of over four thousand members.

Now picture all this in the middle of an oil boom: between 2004 and 2014, the price of a barrel of petrol exploded, going from about 30$ per barrel to 150$. This economic bonanza saw the government fill its coffers with fresh petro-dollars, redistributing some of the wealth via a consumption boom. Social plans offering all kinds of products, from refrigerators and washing machines to Chinese motorbikes, allowed Chavez to shower the population with money and become extremely popular.

The increase in spending evolved parallel to the increase in violence we talked about before. However, juicy economic opportunities and even government-sponsored grift schemes, like the CADIVI subsidized dollars racket, lead many people to stay and take their chances in the Chavez-led money extravaganza.

The country woke up from this drunken frenzy in 2014, when the chickens came home to roost. Oil prices collapsed, reducing government spending dramatically and wiping out many of the State programs. Then, inflation hit. In 2013, annualized inflation reached 56%, a terrible number that kept on increasing exponentially. Years later, 2013 would be seen as a “good” economic year, since by 2018, inflation in Venezuela hit a whopping 65000%, according to the IMF.

At this point, the country had been bled dry. The State had focused on stealing all our money, abandoning their most basic duties, like guaranteeing the safety of its citizens. By the year 2010, megagangs like the Tren de Aragua had taken control of large swaths of our highways, making inter-state travel extremely dangerous. By 2014, armed gangs were increasingly targeting drivers on highways for extortion, robbery, and kidnapping, with the government slowly caving in and ceding control of many areas to ganglords, even letting them build nightclubs inside the prisons they now managed.

III.

This is why 2014 is the year when migration exploded, with people pouring over the frontier with Colombia on foot and finding their way into other countries. However, this was a new kind of migration. Contemporary Venezuela went through different migratory waves since the beginning of the century.

The first wave of migrants was largely formed by professionals and students, many from the middle and upper class, who chose to leave and went mostly to the United States, Spain or some Latin-American country. This was the “brain drain” phase that lasted roughly from 2000 to 2014, when people left mostly due to political strife and tensions, like the huge disagreements the professional class had with the Bolivarian Revolution’s project and tactics.

The second wave took place between 2014 and 2017, when leaving the country went from being an exclusively bourgeois concern, to becoming a reality for younger generations looking for a better life. Hyperinflation, shortages of basic goods, criminality on the streets and the political repression of protests by the government, sent Venezuelans out of the country in droves.

The third wave goes roughly from 2017 to the present, when people of all demographics started seeking to flee the country. Hyperinflation got worse, there was widespread food insecurity and shortages, and the healthcare system collapsed. A humanitarian crisis ensued, leading people to leave in desperation by any means possible. A staggering 92% of Venezuelan households lived under the poverty line, with over 60% living in extreme poverty.

Today, Venezuela’s economy is in shambles. Hyperinflation lead people to peg prices to the American Dollar, to avoid huge fluctuations. Paradoxically, the socialist revolution that promised independence from American hegemony, wound up dollarizing our economy, making us even more dependant than before.

Now, I won’t have the time to develop possible solutions or future perspectives for Venezuela in this presentation. However, I can say that things are getting worse, not better. Last year, Dictator Nicolás Maduro perpetrated the biggest fraud in Latin-American history. I say this without hyperbole: the election was stolen so brazenly, that even long-time Maduro allies like Colombia, Brazil and México refused to recognize Maduro as President.

This led the Maduro dictatorship to ramp up violence and repression. Many Human Rights activists and NGO members have been illegally detained, some even tortured, as I’m sure we’ll learn from the other presenters here, today.

I’d just like to finish by saluting the efforts of the millions of expats living abroad who haven’t forgotten our country and who try to contribute as best we can from afar. My generation lost everything to an autocratic political regime that started in 1998 and is still ongoing. They tore our families apart, destroyed our dreams and forced us to start anew. But we didn’t give up: Venezuelans are thriving, everywhere, contributing actively to the societies kind enough to take us in. No, not all of us are Tren de Aragua psychopaths pillaging other countries. We’re just the latest exhibit in the never-ending history of peoples displaced by political, economic and social turmoil. So please have some empathy with us, and don’t hold Venezuelans responsible for the terrible actions of our government or even our gangsters.

All political regimes pass, all dictatorships fall.

Thanks for dedicating your precious time to my country and the people of Venezuela.