Venezuelan migrants
CARACAS, March 24 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The Government of Venezuela announced that at least 250 Venezuelans returned to the Caribbean country from Peru under the government plan “Vuelta a la Patria”, which was launched in September 2018, to facilitate the return of migrants who were victims of xenophobia in receiving countries.
The Foreign Ministry explained in a statement released on its website that Wednesday an Airbus A340-300 aircraft from the Venezuelan state company Conviasa left for Peru for a “new day” of repatriation. He also said that this is the first flight to the Andean country in 2022 in which the return of “more” than 250 Venezuelans is estimated.
The agency indicated that, since its creation, the “Return to the Homeland Plan” has repatriated a total of 28,020 citizens, compared to 6,041,690 people who have left the Caribbean country in the face of the crisis it is experiencing, according to the Regional Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela (R4V).
The R4V estimates that, of this total number of migrants, 4,992,215 live in Latin America and the Caribbean.
On Feb 3, the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, promised that from March the flights of the government plan would triple. “For the months of March onwards, we are going to have a new phase of the Vuelta a la Patria Plan, we are going to triple the number of flights to bring Venezuelans who are already registered in the plan,” he said in a ceremony broadcast on the state channel Venezolana de Televisión (VTV).
Maduro said that Venezuelans left the country looking for a “better economic opportunity”, but there has been “a lot of discrimination, a lot of xenophobia that has been sown against Venezuela.”
Meanwhile, 97 Venezuelan migrants were repatriated from Ecuador on Wednesday as part of the Return to the Homeland Plan (Plan Vuelta a la Patria) promoted by the Venezuelan government to support its nationals abroad, Foreign Minister Felix Plasencia said.
The migrants arrived from the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil and landed at the Simon Bolivar International Airport near Caracas.
The Venezuelan official explained on his Twitter account that this is a “new phase” of the program, “to continue serving our compatriots and bringing them back.”
The Ministry of Popular Power for Foreign Affairs detailed on Tuesday that the new phase involves “tripling the number of flights” for the return of Venezuelan citizens to the South American country.
The program, initiated in August 2018, has facilitated the return to Venezuela of over 28,000 people from 19 countries.
The Ministry of National Security of Trinidad and Tobago reported on Feb 12 that it completed a process of repatriation of 38 Venezuelan migrants who had tried to enter the country illegally. This was the second such process after the repatriation a day before 35 of the 39 Venezuelans who were arrested on Feb 6 after a shooting in which the Trinidadian coast guard killed a baby. The Coast Guard justified their action by saying that they fired in an attempt to arrest migrants and in “self-defense”, claiming that Venezuelan citizens had tried to “ram” them. — NNN-AGENCIES
