A Venezuelan family’s Christmas: From the American dream to poverty

This was not the Christ­mas that Mariela Gómez would have imag­ined a year ago. Or the one that thou­sands of oth­er Venezue­lan im­mi­grants would have thought. But Don­ald Trump re­turned to the White House in Jan­u­ary and quick­ly end­ed their Amer­i­can dream.

So, Gómez found her­self spend­ing the hol­i­day in north­ern Venezuela for the first time in eight years. She dressed up, cooked, got her son a scoot­er and smiled for her in-laws. Hard as she tried, though, she could not ig­nore the main chal­lenges faced by re­turn­ing mi­grants: un­em­ploy­ment and pover­ty.

“We had a mod­est din­ner, not quite what we’d hoped for, but at least we had food on the ta­ble,” Gómez said of the lasagna-like dish she shared with her part­ner and in-laws in­stead of the tra­di­tion­al Christ­mas dish of stuffed corn dough hal­la­cas. “Mak­ing hal­la­cas here is a bit ex­pen­sive, and since we’re un­em­ployed, we couldn’t af­ford to make them.”

Gómez, her two sons and her part­ner re­turned to the city of Mara­cay on Oct. 27 af­ter cross­ing the U.S.-Mex­i­co bor­der to Texas, where they were quick­ly swept up by U.S. Bor­der Pa­trol amid the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s crack­down on im­mi­gra­tion. They were de­port­ed to Mex­i­co, from where they be­gan the dan­ger­ous jour­ney back to Venezuela.

They crossed Cen­tral Amer­i­ca by bus, but once in Pana­ma, the fam­i­ly could not af­ford to con­tin­ue to Colom­bia via boat in the Caribbean. In­stead, they took the cheap­er route along the Pa­cif­ic’s chop­py wa­ters, sit­ting on top of slosh­ing gaso­line tanks in a car­go boat for sev­er­al hours and then trans­fer­ring to a fast boat un­til reach­ing a jun­gled area of Colom­bia. They spent about two weeks there un­til they were wired mon­ey to make it to the bor­der with Venezuela.

Gómez was among the more than 7.7 mil­lion Venezue­lans who left their home coun­try in the last decade, when its econ­o­my came un­done be­cause of a drop in oil prices, cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment. She lived in Colom­bia and Pe­ru for years be­fore set­ting her sights on the U.S. with hopes of build­ing a new life.

Trump’s sec­ond term has dashed the hopes of many like Gómez.

As of Sep­tem­ber, more than 14,000 mi­grants, most­ly from Venezuela, had re­turned to South Amer­i­ca since Trump moved to lim­it mi­gra­tion to the U.S., ac­cord­ing to fig­ures from Colom­bia, Pana­ma and Cos­ta Ri­ca. In ad­di­tion, Venezue­lans were steadi­ly de­port­ed to their home coun­try this year af­ter Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro, un­der pres­sure from the White House, did away with his long-stand­ing pol­i­cy of not ac­cept­ing de­por­tees from the U.S.

Im­mi­grants ar­rived reg­u­lar­ly at the air­port out­side the cap­i­tal, Cara­cas, on flights op­er­at­ed by a U.S. gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor or Venezuela’s state-owned air­line. More than 13,000 im­mi­grants re­turned this year on the char­tered flights.

Gómez’s re­turn to Venezuela al­so al­lowed her to see the now 20-year-old daugh­ter she left be­hind when she fled the coun­try’s com­plex cri­sis. They talked and drank beer dur­ing the hol­i­day know­ing it might be the last time they share a drink for a while — Gómez’s daugh­ter will mi­grate to Brazil next month.

Gómez is hop­ing to make hal­la­cas for New Year’s Eve and is al­so hop­ing for a job. But her prayers for next year are most­ly for good health.

“I ask God for many things, first and fore­most life and health, so we can con­tin­ue en­joy­ing our fam­i­ly,” she said. —MARA­CAY, Venezuela (AP)

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Sto­ry by MA­TIAS DELACROIX and REGI­NA GAR­CIA CANO | As­so­ci­at­ed Press

Regi­na Gar­cia Cano re­port­ed from Cara­cas.