For Older Venezuelans, Fleeing Crisis Means ‘Starting From Zero,’ Even at 90
“You work toward your golden years, you save,” she said, “and then everything goes toward survival.”
There was no alternative, she said, but to leave: “To stay is to die.”
In October, Carmen María González de Álvarez reversed her parents’ journey from Europe.
“We want to live in tranquillity,” Ms. Reyes said in the couple’s homey four-bedroom house in the rolling hills
of Los Teques, a suburban area south of the capital where they have lived since they were married 50 years ago.
“I feel like a foreigner in Venezuela now; it’s not the Venezuela I know,” Ms. Mata said in an interview at a bakery in Caracas near her home.
“But at the moment it’s impossible.”
In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans — by some estimates as many as two million — have migrated abroad,
with the tendency accelerating in the past several years during the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Nicolás Maduro.
“Very hard, very intense,” said Fernando Galíndez, 75, who left Venezuela with his wife and a son several years ago and resettled in South Florida.
Who’s going to give me work?”
The family also had to tear themselves from the close-knit cocoon of their extended family
and their community in the Caracas municipality of El Hatillo, where Mr. Álvarez was a civic leader.
“All our life is here, we have our roots, our house, we’ve lived nicely, we have our family,” Ms. Reyes paused.
