The 7.9 Million: Faces of the Venezuelan Diaspora
One in four Venezuelans has fled their homeland. This is what exodus looks like.
Esmeria is eleven years old. Somewhere in the Darién Gap—a 60-mile stretch of roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama—she became separated from her mother. For days, she crossed swollen rivers alone, passing injured and hungry strangers slumped against trees. At night, she heard sounds in the darkness she couldn't identify. She hadn't eaten in two days.
Esmeria is one of 7.9 million Venezuelans who have left their country since 2014. That's one in four people. An entire quarter of a nation, scattered across the Americas and beyond.
This is the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere's modern history. And unlike wars that eventually end, Venezuela's exodus continues—2,000 people leave every single day.
A Country Emptied
To understand the scale, consider this: imagine if 83 million Americans simply left. Or if the entire population of Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark combined packed up and walked away from everything they knew.
That's what Venezuela has experienced in a decade.
The numbers are staggering, but numbers don't capture what it means to abandon a home, a career, a language, a life. They don't capture the pediatrician now working as a nanny in Lima, or the petroleum engineer waiting tables in Santiago, or the eleven-year-old girl alone in the jungle.
Where did they go? Mostly, they stayed close:
| Country | Venezuelan Population |
|---|---|
| Colombia | 2.8 million |
| Peru | 1.7 million |
| Ecuador | ~500,000 |
| Chile | ~500,000 |
| Brazil | ~500,000 |
| United States | ~500,000+ |
Colombia alone hosts more Venezuelans than the entire population of Chicago.
Through the Darién: A Journey No One Should Make
For those heading north toward the United States, there is no road. There is only the Darién Gap.
The jungle crossing takes anywhere from five to ten days on foot. The path—if you can call it that—winds through some of the most dangerous terrain in the Americas: rivers that surge without warning, poisonous snakes, unmarked trails that lead nowhere.
But the jungle's creatures are not the greatest danger. That would be the humans.
Criminal gangs control the route. The Gulf Clan, a Colombian paramilitary organization, charges $330 per person for "safe passage." Robbery is constant. Kidnapping is common. Sexual violence is epidemic.
Médecins Sans Frontières treated 676 victims of sexual assault from the Darién crossing in 2023 alone. In just the first two months of 2024, they recorded another 233 cases.
Guailis, a young Venezuelan woman, made the crossing with her husband and two-year-old son in early 2023. They walked for ten days through rain. "Among the numerous corpses we stumbled upon," she later recounted, "was an elderly man curled up under a tree."
Corpses litter the route. The International Organization for Migration has confirmed at least 312 migrants missing or dead between 2015 and 2022. The actual number is almost certainly far higher—the jungle keeps its secrets.
The Children
Perhaps nothing captures the desperation more than the children.
In the first four months of 2024, more than 30,000 children traversed the Darién Gap. About 2,000 of them were unaccompanied or separated from their families—like Esmeria.
Child migration through the Darién is growing five times faster than adult migration. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, 1,216 unaccompanied children were identified—a 124% increase from the previous year.
These are not statistics. These are eleven-year-olds crossing rivers alone, not knowing if their mothers are alive.
Welcome Worn Thin
For those who survive the journey and arrive in host countries, the challenges don't end. They transform.
The initial welcome across Latin America was remarkable. Colombia offered temporary protection status to nearly 2.5 million Venezuelans. Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Brazil opened their doors. It was, for a time, a model of regional solidarity.
That solidarity is fraying.
In Peru today, 73% of Venezuelan migrants report experiencing discrimination because of their nationality. In Colombia, it's 58%. The discrimination takes many forms: being passed over for jobs, denied housing, insulted on the street, blamed for rising crime.
"We are living in the middle of a society that discriminates on many levels," says Richard O'Diana, an advocacy officer at Save the Children Peru. "From the state, Congress, within civil society, and in society at large."
The accusations are familiar—the same ones leveled at migrants everywhere. They steal jobs. They commit crimes. They're a burden on public services.
The data tells a different story. Research consistently shows that Venezuelans in Colombia are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. But perception has its own momentum.
After a Venezuelan migrant stabbed a bus passenger to death in Bogotá, Mayor Claudia López declared: "I don't want to stigmatize immigrants, but there are some Venezuelans involved in crimes who are making our lives impossible."
One crime, millions stigmatized.
The Credential Trap
Perhaps the cruelest irony is this: Venezuelan migrants are among the most educated refugee populations in the world.
Over 90% of Venezuelan emigrants are college graduates. Forty percent hold master's degrees. Twelve percent have doctorates.
Yet in Peru, while 32% of Venezuelans have post-secondary education, only 2% work in professional positions. Twenty-eight percent work in "elementary occupations"—the lowest-skilled category.
Stella Spattaro, a former teacher who emigrated to Lima, describes the reality: "The normalization of the migratory situation forces many professionals to work in other fields, even at a lower level. I know pediatricians who work taking care of children in a house, or engineers working as waiters."
Doctors become nannies. Engineers become servers. University professors become delivery drivers.
They accept these positions because visa requirements demand formal employment—any employment. They accept them because their families back home are counting on the money they send. They accept them because the alternative is returning to a country that has nothing left to offer.
The Brain Drain: A Country Losing Its Future
Venezuela isn't just losing people. It's losing the capacity to function as a society.
In the 2010s, more than half of Venezuela's doctors fled the country. By 2019, over 24,000 physicians had emigrated. Health facilities lost 60% of their 2011 capacity by the end of the decade.
The petroleum industry—once the backbone of the Venezuelan economy—has been gutted. More than 50,000 engineers and architects left in the six years before 2019. The specialized knowledge required to operate oil fields, accumulated over generations, walked out the door.
Some of these positions have been filled by foreign workers, including Chinese nationals. But expertise cannot simply be replaced. Institutional knowledge, professional networks, mentorship of the next generation—all of it vanished.
And there is no next generation coming.
Between 2016 and 2017, higher education enrollment dropped from 48% to 38%. Some 2.5 million young people aged 18-24 stopped attending classes. Of more than 4 million potential students, only 426,000 completed their professional training.
"If there are no students, there is no research or production of knowledge," one researcher told SciDev.Net. "This tells you the seriousness of the talent crisis: it no longer has the conditions to prosper. Under current conditions, it is no longer possible to produce knowledge."
A country cannot simply rebuild its professional class. It takes decades to train doctors, engineers, scientists, professors. Venezuela has lost a generation of talent, and the pipeline to replace them has collapsed.
The Remittance Lifeline
Yet even as they struggle in foreign lands, working jobs far below their qualifications, facing discrimination and precarity, Venezuelan migrants have become the primary support system for those who remain.
Remittances to Venezuela now total between $3 and $4.5 billion annually—somewhere between 3% and 6% of the country's GDP. One-third of Venezuelan households receive money from abroad.
How is that money used? The answer is stark:
- 94% use remittances for food
- 58% use remittances for healthcare
For many families, money from abroad represents up to 80% of their monthly income. These aren't optional supplements. They are the difference between eating and not eating, between medicine and going without.
The senders themselves are often barely surviving. Nearly two-thirds of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and Peru report that their household income is insufficient to meet their own basic needs. They go without so their parents, siblings, and children back home don't starve.
Traditional remittance channels—banks, Western Union, formal transfer services—charge fees up to 7% and can take three business days. With the bolivar's ongoing collapse, delays mean lost value. So Venezuelans have increasingly turned to cryptocurrency: faster, cheaper, and beyond the reach of government currency controls.
It's a 21st-century solution to a crisis that feels medieval in its scope and cruelty.
Those Left Behind
And what of the 22 million who remain?
The statistics are almost impossible to comprehend:
- 78.4% live in monetary poverty
- 56.8% live in extreme poverty
- 70% have lost access to the healthcare system
- 50% with serious health problems received no medical care in 2024
- 47% had no access to medicines
The basic food basket—the minimum required to feed a family—costs 250 times the monthly minimum wage. The official minimum wage is approximately $4 per month. The government provides additional bonuses totaling about $70 monthly, but even this is grossly insufficient.
In August 2025, the World Food Programme announced it would cut its assistance to Venezuela by half due to lack of funding. Only 13% of the UN's Humanitarian Response Plan has been funded.
The international community, it seems, has moved on. Other crises demand attention. Venezuela's slow-motion collapse has become background noise.
Meanwhile, diseases that had been eliminated are returning. Measles. Diphtheria. Malaria. Vaccination programs have collapsed. Sanitation has deteriorated. The health system that once made Venezuela a regional leader has lost 80% of its capacity over two decades.
The Question That Has No Answer
Why do they leave?
The question answers itself. They leave because staying means watching their children go hungry. They leave because hospitals have no medicine and schools have no teachers. They leave because the economy has collapsed 80% and inflation runs at 500% per year. They leave because the government has become a dictatorship that steals elections and imprisons opponents.
They leave because there is no future.
But leaving means the Darién Gap. It means discrimination and xenophobia. It means doctors working as nannies and engineers as waiters. It means sending most of what little you earn back home while you yourself go without.
There is no good choice. There is only the least terrible one.
What Remains
Despite everything—the discrimination, the credential trap, the precarity—81% of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and 77% in Peru believe a positive future is possible in their host countries.
That resilience is remarkable. It is also fragile.
The Venezuelan crisis is, by some measures, the most underfunded displacement emergency in the world. Less than 12% of the regional response plan was funded in 2023-2024, down from 27% in 2022. Donor fatigue is real. Attention spans are short.
But 7.9 million people cannot simply be forgotten. They are in your city, your neighborhood, your workplace. They are the doctor who examined your child, the engineer who designed your building, the teacher who educated your students—now working jobs that don't match their capabilities, sending money home to families who would otherwise starve.
They are Esmeria, eleven years old, alone in the jungle, not knowing if her mother is alive.
They are 7.9 million individual stories of loss, survival, and hope.
And their story is not over.