Hamerling Dronowski said migrants around her at the West Loop shelter broke down in tears when Venezuela's incumbent president, Nicolas Maduro, announced his victory Monday night.
From her bed she could hear the cries of people around her.
“They left us without a soul. We are soulless,” Dronowski, 27, told the Tribune on Monday morning. “We are bodies with bones, but we have no soul.”
Her children, Leanne, 6, and Ashlyn, 4, watched their mother stand outside the brick warehouse where they've lived since April, tears filling her eyes.
“We're thinking about our children,” she said. “We want them to have the childhood we had. This is not the way we want them to live.”
For Dronowski and the thousands of families like her who fled and settled in Chicago. Venezuela's economic collapse, political persecution, and the possibility of reelection of its authoritarian president Maduro has brought mistrust and despair.
The country's National Electoral Commission, controlled by President Maduro's allies, declared him the winner of the country's contested election on Monday, a day after both he and opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, a former diplomat, claimed victory. But the council has not released the results of the tally from 30,000 polling stations across the country, only promising to do so “in the next few hours”, hindering the ability to verify the results.
The delay in announcing the results six hours after polls were scheduled to close suggested there had been intense debate within the government over how to proceed after Maduro's opponents declared victory earlier in the evening.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Tokyo, said the United States “has serious concerns that the announced election results do not reflect the will and vote of the Venezuelan people.” Several other countries around the world also condemned the election results.
Under Maduro's leadership, Venezuela has become the source of one of the world's largest migration crises, with more than 7.7 million Venezuelans leaving the country since 2013 to seek opportunities abroad. More than 45,000 migrants have arrived in the Chicago area since August 2022, when Texas Governor Greg Abbott began bussing migrants across the state border to sanctuary cities as a way to protest federal immigration policies.
As climate change looms, Chicago's current influx of immigrants is “just the beginning”
Immigration and migration experts say the new victory for Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela could lead to more Venezuelans fleeing to the United States and block the return of those who have left the country.
“As long as we continue to receive support from President (Joe) Biden, this will bring more people to the country,” said Elias Herrera, 35, from Caracas, Venezuela, who is almost 18 years old. 500 Venezuelans gathered in Humboldt Park on Sunday To show support for the opposition and “change in Venezuela.”
The migrants waved the flag in celebration of unity and community, and their cars were decorated with balloons in the flag's colors of yellow, blue and red, as well as “Venezuela LibreCar windshields were painted with the words “Liberate Venezuela!” Crowds and cars blocked traffic around the park for several hours.
“I have some friends who are already on their way to the border and on their way to Chicago,” said Herrera, who now lives in Joliet after arriving in Chicago in November 2022. “We knew Maduro would win again. That's what dictators do.”
Migrants said they hope Maduro's eventual departure and Gonzalez's takeover will give them hope that they may one day be able to return home.
But Ricardo Villasmil, a senior fellow at Harvard University's Growth Institute, said Venezuela's institutions are so broken that many of the migrants are unlikely to return even if there is political change.
Villasmil, who lived in Venezuela until 2017 and worked on economic planning for the opposition party, said it could be decades before migrants return to the South American country in large numbers.
“Where does it look in one to three years? What opportunities are there?” he asked.
Monday Morning, Migrants at shelters across Chicago were skeptical about whether Gonzalez, a proxy for popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who was barred from running earlier this year, had actually lost the election.
Anibal Gonzalez, 55, stood outside a shelter in Streeterville with his son-in-law, Julio Reyes, 35, watching videos of the unrest in his hometown of Caracas. Mr. Gonzalez had heard from relatives about rigged election practices. People were protesting at polling stations.
“We spoke to our relatives there about the shootings and the terrible things the government has done,” he said. “The government has deprived us of the opportunity to vote fairly. … The people are powerless to do anything.”
Reyes said Venezuela was once a haven for migrants. The country boasts the world's largest oil reserves and was once Latin America's most advanced economy, but it has plummeted since Maduro came to power. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation of more than 130,000 percent first sparked social unrest and then mass migration.
The United States has long opposed the Maduro regime, and officials have used sanctions that limit Venezuela's international oil sales as a form of pressure. Economic experts say the U.S. has recently used the sanctions to pressure Venezuela into holding elections.
Lilia Fernandez, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in Latino history in the United States in the mid-to-late 20th century, said sanctions would likely continue under Maduro and would make life in Venezuela even more difficult.
“Our foreign policy has had a huge impact on our country, our economy and the exodus of our people,” Fernandez said.
Outside a West Loop shelter, Kayla Rodriguez, 43, said she no longer had any hope of survival in Venezuela and came to Chicago with her daughter and grandson because she had no other options.
Rodriguez said her 80-year-old father still lives in Caracas but doesn't have enough money to buy food. She worries about how it would affect her father's life if Maduro becomes president again. If she could, she would like to return to her home country to be with her father.
“We've seen so many families separated for the same reason,” she said.
Rodriguez's daughter, Marian Castro, 24, bought 5-year-old Thiago Gonzalez a glass of orange juice from a stand outside the shelter and gave him a hug. She said she was grateful the United States had opened its doors but missed her home country.
“It's like we're fighting against the tide,” she said. “We want our country to be free.”
The Associated Press contributed.
First published:
