On August 3, 2024, dozens of drones flew over the city of Carora, the capital of the Torres municipality in Lara state, northwestern Venezuela.
The drones circled the home of Iraida Timaure, the acting mayor of the area after Javier Oropeza had to go into hiding due to political persecution.
The Torres municipality, a semi-desert region in western Lara, had been under the control of the Chavista government since 1999. However, in 2021, the local political landscape changed when Javier Oropeza, an agricultural entrepreneur and owner of the newspaper El Caroreño, won the municipal elections as an independent candidate.
For Iraida Timaure, Oropeza’s substitute believed to be temporary, that August morning, just days after the presidential elections on July 28, 2024, would not only mark the first time she saw drones flying overhead but also a moment when she had to confront a decision that many Venezuelans faced after the fraud committed by Nicolás Maduro’s regime during those presidential elections and the unprecedented repression that followed: leaving the country for exile, specifically to Buenos Aires in her case. This event not only meant an unexpected exodus for Iraida; it was also the first time in her 62 years that she left Venezuela.
The situation was dire. Carora was experiencing the same turmoil as other municipalities across Venezuela. Part of the population that had voted for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia—who, based on numerous pieces of evidence, was the actual winner—took to the streets to protest the fraud committed by the regime. Security forces retaliated, making thousands of arrests in major cities. Between July 28 and 29, 2024, over 915 protests were reported across the country, leading to more than two thousand arbitrary detentions and a death toll of 25 people during the repression; one of whom, notably, fell in Carora. Walter Páez, 29, a father of two, was shot in the abdomen by a projectile that caused his death.
During those chaotic hours of brutal repression, various civil organizations and human rights defenders condemned the use of drones as a tool not only for surveillance but also for intimidating protesters. Again, Carora was no exception to this new tactic employed by the regime’s shock forces. The drones also flew over the homes of Oropeza, his neighbors, some municipality employees, as well as food businesses, inns, and grocery stores.
The intimidation proved effective and imposed “the silent exile of a significant part of the country’s associative fabric,” as described by an initiative of various NGOs called Human Rights of Venezuela in Motion. Carora was also rich in examples of this: from the municipal government’s payroll in Torres just over a year ago, today Javier Oropeza and 41 employees are in exile, along with seven of their relatives. Two other workers remain arbitrarily detained in the buildings of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (Sebin, political police) and the National Anti-Extortion and Kidnapping Command (Conas, a special unit of the Bolivarian National Guard) in Barquisimeto, the capital of Lara state.
Oropeza also had his apartment confiscated, along with two family farms—named Copacoa and Bariquigua— and the headquarters of El Caroreño and El Diario de Lara. The confiscation of properties from exiled individuals, along with the persecution of their relatives, has become a systematic practice of the Chavista regime in recent years. Iraida Timaure, the acting mayor, lost her home in Carora. It was her only asset. “They took everything: curtains, mattresses, beds, furniture, fridge, stove, air conditioners, vehicles, computers. Everything.”
The violence unleashed by the regime after Nicolás Maduro’s “victorious” re-election, which he had supposedly solidified in 2018 through another irregular process, not only resulted in the death of 25 Venezuelans; it also changed the lives of many more. This included hundreds of activists forced to go into hiding without a second thought. For months, they remained isolated from family and friends, considering escape routes through land borders, while the Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, the country’s main airport, became a hotspot for arbitrary detentions.
Some data reflect the magnitude of this human exodus. Juntos se Puede, an organization that has assisted Venezuelan migrants in Colombia since 2019, reported over 500 individuals arriving in the neighboring country for political reasons between August 1 and October 30, 2024, an unprecedented figure compared to previous years when the numbers barely exceeded twenty.
For this story, Armando.Info interviewed over 40 politically displaced individuals after the elections of July 28, 2024, in Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Bolivia, Spain, Argentina, Chile, and the United States. Additionally, a total of 408 cases were documented. The profiles were diverse: witnesses, table members, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, political leaders, volunteers, and relatives. All faced threats, detentions, disappearances, or persecution against their loved ones.
Many chose immediate concealment upon witnessing the detention of companions or neighbors. Some stayed hidden for weeks or months. Life in concealment involved complete isolation: no contact with family or friends, limited phone use to what’s essential, and social media completely blocked. Anxiety, paranoia, and depression became part of the routine.
“Don’t go back home”
Javier Oropeza, in Carora, was one of the 20 mayors who were disqualified, pursued, or detained in the days following July 28. Three mayors were forced into exile during this context. Among them was Rigoberto Ovallos, mayor of Antonio Rómulo Costa municipality in Táchira state, who has had an arrest warrant against him since June 2024 for charges of embezzlement and evasion of bidding. It took him four days to cross through the mountain from Venezuela to neighboring Colombia. “Those were heartbreaking, dangerous, and painful days, where I felt fear, received threats from guerrillas, walked barefoot, and swam through rivers where I didn’t feel safe,” he describes.
The governor of Táchira, Freddy Bernal, from the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), stated in an August 2024 press conference—days after Ovallos crossed the border—that he had been informed that the fugitive mayor was in Bogotá. “It has nothing to do with the political side; his issue is corruption,” Bernal assured at the time.
Táchira was another opposition stronghold overwhelmed by repression during those days. However, there, harassment and intimidation took on their own forms. For instance, those who participated in the July 28 elections—as activists, table members, polling witnesses, or political leaders—saw their faces posted on various social media pages of armed groups active across the border, such as Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) and grassroots groups loyal to the regime. Top Chavista figures, including Freddy Bernal himself or Interior Minister and second-in-command of the regime, Diosdado Cabello, in their weekly TV program, Con el mazo dando, disclosed their names to label them in front of the ruling Chavistas’ followers.
In 14 municipalities of Táchira, episodes of persecution against 51 activists of Vente Venezuela, the party led by opposition leader María Corina Machado, were confirmed. The victims held positions such as executive secretary, organizational coordinators, youth leaders, municipal activists, and ordinary members of the organization. Persecution also extended to 15 of their family members, according to interviews conducted by Armando.info with the regional team of the political organization. All remain in exile, and most prefer not to disclose their locations for fear of reprisals.
Among them is Pedro Delgado, 21, an activist from Junín municipality and a member of the organization Táchira de Verdad, which focuses on social work in vulnerable communities. His family migrated in 2018.
From a young age, Delgado felt discontent with the country’s situation; as he recalls: the insecurity, the lack of services, and the repression forced his loved ones to leave. In 2022, he joined Vente Venezuela to support the primary process. “My hope was that my whole family would return home,” he says from his current exile in Mexico. “I remember going door-to-door, the high receptivity of the people. We were over 50 people walking through the municipality. People joined us willingly.”
On June 30, 2024, Delgado received his first threat. After leaving a soccer match, two motorcycle riders approached him and hit him in the face. “That’s for continuing with María Corina,” they warned. He was only spared further beating due to neighbors shouting for help.
From that June 30 on, he began taking safety measures. Like him, hundreds of Venezuelans involved in activism, journalism, politics, or human rights defense adopted a lifestyle that Human Rights of Venezuela in Motion describes as semi-clandestine. This involves constantly rotating places to stay, using different phone networks, and connecting only to deemed secure wifi networks. “I slept in over 20 different places, stopped playing soccer, had insomnia throughout that month, and closed my social media accounts,” Delgado recalls.
On July 24, 2024, the day of the campaign’s closure, he and a group of about 80 people were surrounded outside a house. “I was wearing a Vente shirt. I was in a storage room when I received a call: ‘Don’t go back home; everyone has been ordered to evacuate.’ The officers, without identification, said there was a capture order against me,” he recalls. The next day, he decided to leave Venezuela. His house was raided. “There’s a [Toyota] Hilux truck without identification surrounding your house,” a cousin warned him. However, true to the commitment that had driven him in 2022, Pedro chose to return. He evaded security forces at the Delicias border crossing, and on July 28, he came back to vote, disguised to avoid detention en route to his polling station. “I had glasses, a mask, and a cap to cover my identity,” he recounts.
That July 28, the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) checkpoints were active. Near eight in the evening, Las Américas Avenue filled with motorcycles. “It was known we had won,” he says. It was then that the collectives began to take the streets: more than fifty motorcycles and trucks, all black, driven by hooded men.
In the following days, various photos of Delgado circulated through different WhatsApp groups under the label “Wanted.” This practice had already become prevalent in those days, used to identify and publicly expose activists and opponents. “A Chavista aunt calls me and tells me that my picture is everywhere. She says, ‘You should leave’,” he remembers. Delgado managed to escape with the help of his “trusted motorcycle guy,” crossing over to Cúcuta, the capital of the Colombian department of Norte de Santander. Since then, he has not returned to Venezuela.
It took him a month and a half to traverse the Darién jungle, from Colombia to Panama, finally reaching Mexico. One of the scenes he remembers most occurred in the La Bandera sector during his journey through the Darién, where migrants planted their national flags as testimonies. Delgado left his there on September 17, 2024, writing: “Venezuela libre.” He arrived in Mexico a few days later.
But exile did not bring him the peace he hoped for. Threats against him and his loved ones continued. On January 9, 2025, the day Nicolás Maduro swore in as president again, the ELN posted photos of various activists from Vente in Junín on Facebook, including his.
Exile, for him and many others, has not been synonymous with protection. It also hasn’t been for their families or the properties they left behind.
Jumping into the Shadows
Julio Velazco, father of Marcos Velazco, Deputy National Liaison for Organization in Vente Venezuela, who had to flee the country in August 2024, has been arbitrarily detained for more than 100 days at the headquarters of the Directorate of Strategic and Tactical Actions (DAET), in La Quebradita, Caracas, after being forcibly taken while trying to take a taxi when leaving his house on September 2 of this year in Caracas.
His son, Marcos Velazco, started in politics while studying Political Science at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). In 2019, he joined Vente Venezuela, where he has held various positions, including National Coordinator of Universities and Youth Coordinator for Caracas. At 23, following pressure against the party’s board during the opposition’s primary elections held in October 2023, he took on his current role to cover for the directors who had to seek refuge in the Argentine embassy in Caracas, and 14 months later, managed to escape abroad. By then, Marcos Velazco had already received a warning of the risks he would face: Henry Alviárez, head of the National Organization Coordination of Vente, the second-in-command in that party and Velazco’s direct boss, was detained on March 20, 2024, and remains to this date in El Helicoide, the infamous prison and torture center in Caracas.
From the National Directorate, Velazco also supported the called Plan 600K, aimed at coordinating 600,000 people to safeguard the voting records confirming González Urrutia’s victory in the July 28 elections, which are currently stored in Panama.
Both Velazco and dozens of other leaders in Vente Venezuela went into hiding following the massive mobilization on July 30, 2024, in Caracas, where María Corina Machado herself appeared for minutes and faced threats. In that mobilization, Machado appeared disguised, in a black sweater, standing on the roof of a bus; she had to leave abruptly. The motorcycle drivers who transported her that day were threatened, and some were detained. “You love this cause and this country. Please don’t continue with me in the caravan,” Velazco remembers María Corina Machado telling him and Carlos Fernández, National Coordinator of Vente Joven and Liaison of Operations and Youth of Comando Con Vzla on that July 30.
“It was a team decision as we watched the regime move forward with kidnappings, disappearances, and detentions. The most complicated part was that the operational trust circle practically vanished,” Velazco comments on the decision to go clandestine.
Subsequently, María Corina Machado had to do likewise, protecting herself through a concealment she just recently left to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway; candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, for his part, ended up as an elected president in exile, after a fleeting refuge in the Spanish embassy in Caracas. Throughout this year and a half, despite the prominence of both figures, they could not prevent the fate of their companions: their relatives, just like the members of their closest teams, were pursued and threatened. The political son of González, Rafael Tudares Bracho, was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by the Venezuelan Constitution.
Like all exiles, Velazco keeps the details of his last day in the country etched in his memory. He recalls the people in the streets of Caracas and, in the background, the song Aquí no se pide nada by Franco de Vita. That day he also said goodbye to his friend and colleague, Carlos Fernández. Each took a different motorcycle to go to a hideout and then leave the country. “Each of us had our bag, with little clothing, and that’s it.”
They were the first members of Comando Con Venezuela to escape from the Chavista encirclement in August. “There’s always the anxiety of those more than 26 hours on the road, evading checkpoints. I saw many armed paramilitaries. Then I took a raft across a river until I found myself on Colombian soil, and I started to cry. The first thing I felt was that I was fleeing the country like a criminal, when those who should be fleeing are them.” From Colombia, Velazco moved to the United States. A year before his father’s detention— in September 2024—masked and unidentified officials broke into and ransacked their home. His 72-year-old grandfather was there. “They asked my grandfather for his ID and photographed him with it on his chest. They took his cellphone, everything. No one in my family knows how I made it out or anything. The hardest part is having to maintain minimal communication with them to ensure some safety, even knowing that nothing is guaranteed.”
Velazco was also mentioned by Diosdado Cabello in El Mazo Dando. “I still keep my exact location secret from anyone. We have felt monitored both in Colombia and the United States. Yet, now I understand that exile is not a defeat. It’s a way to outsmart the regime’s repression and show that they are inadequate, vulnerable, and penetrable. We are in a historical moment that is just beginning to unfold, and Venezuelan civil society has shown strength and discipline during this year and a half. It’s admirable.”
The attacks on reputation and exposure to public mockery—and potential aggression—spread from other armed groups. Xiomara Sierra, one of the founders of Vente Venezuela and the political secretary of that movement in Miranda state, was also forced into hiding after July 30 when armed collectives from Caracas disseminated her photos on social networks, accusing her of being a terrorist. Unlike Marcos and Carlos, Sierra remained hidden for almost five months, during which her family was also threatened by security forces.
Before the elections, her role had involved swearing in over 200 small commandos in eastern Caracas’ traditional Chavista strongholds like La Dolorita, Filas de Mariche, and Petare. The members of those commandos were also pursued.
For almost four months, Sierra couldn’t sleep. The usual sounds of the capital, like the chirping of a cricket, the steps of a rabipelado, or the sound of a motorcycle, became alarm signals. “That’s the only thing that crosses your mind: that you are going to be caught,” she says from her exile in Spain. “I heard any sound and told myself, ‘They’ve arrived.’”
The Crime of Participating
The dismantling of Vente Venezuela was written in chalk on a blackboard in El Helicoide. Literally: a now exiled Venezuelan, who was subjected to enforced disappearance for more than 12 hours and asked to keep their identity confidential to testify to Armando.info, saw the names of all party members lined up, with dates of arrest and places of detention at that prison and police headquarters. Before being released, he was forced to record a video showing his ID in the office of the former Sebin headquarters in Los Chaguaramos, Caracas. In that recording, he appeared to assure that he was well, both physically and mentally.
“We’ll see you in two weeks,” the Sebin officials told him upon handing him back to his family, to a house where only his uncle was found: “They told me I had to be left with a relative.” A day and a half later, he was already in Bogotá, then in Panama.
Although Vente Venezuela was particularly affected by the crackdown, other opposition political organizations also suffered its blows. The Primero Justicia party, for instance, confirmed to Armando.Info that 90 of its leaders left the country after July 28.
One of them, Samuel Díaz, communications director of Primero Justicia and national coordinator of the youth movement Toma el Control, aimed at promoting young voting, shares from his exile in Bolivia that this year has taken him months to process the migratory grief and overcome the paranoia and anxiety he lived through in the months after the elections. Before the electoral day, he helped register and update the data for 300 young people in Caracas with the National Electoral Council (CNE). His exile began in January of this year. “We cannot minimize these feelings. Exile is very lonely. We are victims, even if it’s hard to admit it. The regime forced us to emigrate.” In June 2025, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that 116 people had left Venezuela fearing political persecution following the July 28 elections. According to the organization, “since July 29, 2024, at least 75 men and 41 women, including human rights defenders, journalists, union leaders, and opposition party members, felt compelled to leave the country or hide for fear of persecution. These individuals reported reprisals such as intimidation against their families in Venezuela.”
Still, the organization acknowledged that the number of political and social leaders who have left the country forcibly is challenging to quantify. “People do not publicly recognize their exile for a combination of political, social, and emotional reasons that are worth breaking down, as their silence does not imply an absence of persecution nor invalidate their exiled status.” One reason for caution is to avoid jeopardizing the family left behind in Venezuela. The document further explains that “socially, exile can generate stigmas of abandonment or cowardice, along with a loss of status and credibility, and many individuals opt to preserve their privacy in delicate personal situations. Emotionally, exile implies unresolved grief, feelings of guilt and uprooting, as well as a transit identity that complicates publicly assuming the experience, as acknowledging it entails facing losses, pain, and a disconnection from both the home country and the host.”
Press and Activism Silenced
Yendri Velásquez listened for over nine hours to the music of Operation Tun Tun, the campaign that the Military Counterintelligence Directorate (Dgcim) deployed after July 28 to seek and arrest opposition supporters while intimidating the public.
In Velásquez’s case, his “Tun Tun” happened on August 3, 2024, at the Simón Bolívar International Airport serving Caracas. That day, he was to fly to Switzerland to participate in a United Nations evaluation session on how Venezuela guaranteed rights related to racial, indigenous, gender, and LGBTIQ+ discrimination, or whether, instead, it had stopped doing so. But, while passing through immigration, an official detained him and informed him that his passport was canceled. They immediately confiscated his cell phone.
From a young age, 32-year-old Yendri Velásquez became involved in LGBTIQ+ rights activism. In 2011, he was part of the team of the first trans woman candidate for the National Assembly, Tamara Adrián. A decade later, in 2021, he co-founded the Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence.
Leading up to the July 28, 2024 elections, Velásquez focused his work on promoting citizen participation: sharing positive stories about the electoral processes, encouraging young voting, and highlighting the need for the CNE to establish protocols against discrimination during the electoral day.
“We want to implement norms that guarantee a voting process free of discrimination and stereotypes,” he asserted back then. His participation, he clarifies now from Bogotá, was from an activist, not partisan perspective. “I wanted civil society to drive an electoral process with a greater focus on gender and diversity.” Between 2020 and October 2025, at least 69 human rights defenders have been forced to migrate due to a progressive and sustained repression environment, according to the organization Human Rights of Venezuela in Motion. Among them, 43 exiles occurred between January 2024 and October 2025, representing 62% of the total. These included defenders of freedom of expression, access to information, anti-corruption advocates, and LGBTIQ+ rights defenders.
Velásquez was taken from the small room and escorted out of the airport via a back door. While waiting on the curb beside the officials, he saw a Dgcim patrol arrive with four hooded men. According to him, they put handcuffs on him, blindfolded him, and shoved him into the vehicle to transfer him to the Dgcim headquarters in Boleíta Norte, an industrial and commercial area in Caracas. As soon as he sat down, the music of Operation Tun Tun blared at full volume.
During the “interview” at the Dgcim headquarters, one of the officials told him: “We don’t want to mess with you. But if you don’t cooperate and are linked to María Corina Machado, we’ll send you to El Helicoide. You know what they do to people like you.” He claims they attempted to link him to the commandos of the opposition campaign, trying to get him to admit that he participated in political or partisan activities. “They said they had my parents’ address, could access my WhatsApp groups, that no one loved me, and that no one would do anything for me. Although you know it’s manipulation, it affects you. You feel guilt, thinking they’ll go after your family.”
After nine hours of interrogation, constant threats, blindfolded, hooded, and under the torment of the Tun Tun music blaring non-stop, they finally decided to release him. “They made me sign a commitment document,” he recounts.
“One of the officials told me: you’re going to get out of the car and walk without looking back.” Instead of letting him go, Velásquez thought at that moment they were going to kill him. “I started to cry and walked toward the Farmatodo in Los Dos Caminos [a residential and commercial area in northeastern Caracas]. That’s why I assumed I was always in Boleíta [near Los Dos Caminos].”
Since that August 3, 2024, his life has never been the same. “I spent that first night with my parents. The next day began my two months of hiding. I had no contact with anyone. No one knew where I was. I felt like I was going to go crazy. One time, I woke up and peeked out the window 17 times because the noises from motorcycles scared me. I felt like they were coming to get me.” Worn out physically and mentally, many defenders, journalists, political leaders, or activists, hiding in secrecy, reach a point where they realize the situation has overwhelmed them and is unsustainable. That’s when they decide to flee the country. The exit is often unconventional, through irregular paths, without farewells, often with just a bag of clothes, and some, like Yendri Velásquez, without identification, as his passport was taken during his detention.
“They robbed me of my peace. Staying in Venezuela meant risking my family and friends. Since then, a process of depression started. I left with what I was wearing. You question how you will restart your life, and you feel that everything you built has been put on pause. For those of us who have been disappeared, every day is that day again; in my case, that August 3. The terror, the guilt. This changed my life. Exile takes you to places where you question what you could have done differently. You have to work on mental strength; otherwise, you live in nostalgia,” he explains.
In May 2025, almost a year after his departure, Velásquez learned about the detention of his best friend, Carlos Marcano, in Venezuela. “I wonder why I could leave and he could not. Why is he there? Sometimes my mind doesn’t even process that I don’t live in my house. I never saw myself outside Venezuela; I always wanted to stay there, doing my work and supporting the LGBTIQ+ community. Here, like everyone else, we just survive amid precariousness.” “It’s a feeling in my body that I relive daily, and many things trigger fear in me. Light, sounds. I can’t listen to the song Tun Tun because I cry. Every day reminds you that you are not free,” he continues.
On top of that, Velásquez was recently targeted in a shooting attack in Bogotá, an incident that Colombian authorities have provided no update on, but whose features easily suggest it was a political assassination attempt. In the incident, another Venezuelan activist, Luis Peche, was also injured.
Exile for the Monitors
In the structural and systematic pattern of post-electoral repression orchestrated by the state, the neutralization of independent civil society organizations was planned through strategies that legally and economically suffocate both NGOs and media.
On August 15, 2024, the unconstitutional National Assembly, controlled by Chavismo, passed a law that international organizations classify as “regressive,” reinforcing state control over non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Commonly known as the anti-NGO law, the Law on Inspection, Regulation, Action, and Financing of Non-Governmental Organizations and Non-Profit Social Organizations requires NGOs to obtain government authorization to operate. The law empowers authorities to deny that permission based on available information about their sources of funding, political criteria, or a supposed perception of a terrorist threat. Furthermore, it imposes restrictive requirements for registration and periodic obligations that undermine the freedom of association.
The impact was immediate. The new legislation pushed executives and members of organizations that had worked in Venezuela for over two decades, such as Transparency Venezuela, an organization dedicated to investigating cases of corruption, into exile. After multiple efforts to remain in the country, its director, Mercedes de Freitas, realized that the risk to her and her team was too high and announced the office’s closure last November. “Our main goal, which is to highlight the fight against corruption, could not be achieved from within Venezuela. My team was already overwhelmed with fear and surveillance,” she stated from her exile in Spain, where she continues to perform her work.
The persecution against two of her colleagues influenced her decision as well: Rocío San Miguel, director of the organization Control Ciudadano, has been arbitrarily detained in El Helicoide for almost two years, and Carlos Correa, director of Espacio Público and Crónica.Uno, who was a victim of enforced disappearance for over ten days in January of this year.
From his exile in Mexico, Rafael Uzcátegui, who was general coordinator of the NGO Provea for over ten years and has dedicated much of his professional life to human rights defense—even before Chavismo—explains that exile and concealment are part of a state strategy of reprression and indirect expulsion to deactivate the internal critical fabric. “By forcing out those with greater recognition, internal and external legitimacy, and the capacity to activate oversight networks, resistance, and resilience, it empties the internal space of leaderships and dissenting voices, weakening the ties of cohesion and dynamics of resistance and democratic freedoms,” he adds.
While nearly a hundred human rights defenders fled the country after July 28, others remain under the newly coined condition of semi-clandestinity. Their only way to operate involves strict security protocols: reducing the public visibility of their spokespersons, closing physical offices, communicating through secure digital platforms, and quietly documenting.
“I already memorize the cars outside my house,” says a senior member of an NGO in Venezuela, whose name remains undisclosed at their request for security reasons. Yet, they assure that there are always ways to evade censorship. To continue their work, these organizations conduct workshops and gatherings for civil society at informal meetings—like a birthday party—to avoid being criminalized or persecuted.
Those remaining in the country are forced to assume inhibition and self-censorship, moderating their denunciations as a legitimate practice. For human rights defenders, forced exile has become a clear and effective formula for the Chavista regime to ensure its continued hold on power. “They reduce internal pressure, increase control over those who remain, and sustain a repressive dynamic that is legitimized through emptying the democratic fabric,” concludes Uzcátegui.
The repression also reached journalism. According to the Institute for Press and Society of Venezuela (IPYS Venezuela), following the July 28, 2024 elections, the criminalization of journalistic work and the use of the judicial system as an intimidation tool reached unprecedented levels: 14 journalists were detained, and 22 were forced to flee the country for their safety and freedom. Most independent media in the country today operate with their executives in exile.
Moreover, before and after the electoral day, the few radio stations still operational in the country faced multiple attacks. IPYS documented that, during 2024, aggressions against the press and freedom of expression affected 110 media outlets. Just that year, 20 radio stations were closed, marking a 33.33% increase compared to the previous year.
This crackdown and censorship have limited the profession’s practice in the country. An independent journalist with a long history in various media in Venezuela, who requested anonymity before speaking, reported that before the elections, she already felt fear. The feeling grew after July 28 when she began hearing about colleagues whose passports had been annulled, or who suffered threats and detentions. The IACHR documented at least 40 cases of human rights defenders, journalists, and their relatives affected by the abrupt and arbitrary annulment of their passports. “They mentioned independent media in all official broadcasts,” emphasizes the journalist. In October 2024, she decided to temporarily leave for two months. “The greatest fear is always crossing the border and encountering any authority. It’s a process filled with tension, thinking that something could go wrong. You never know if you will be checked or not. If you are on a list or not. The most complicated thing this last year is that there is no pattern, and that limits one from designing a protection mechanism,” she said. Before taking on this risk, she spent several weeks away from her home, rotating between different hiding places, isolated from her family and loved ones.
But what was meant to be a temporary exit extended. Today, she remains in uncertainty, resolving her legal status in the host country, as well as her work and economic situation. “The panorama hasn’t just stayed the same; it’s become more complicated,” she states. A sign of that setback was Nicolás Maduro’s swearing-in as president in January 2025; the fraud had been completed, and the journalist no longer viewed returning to the country as a near horizon. “The hardest part is not knowing how long this could last, although I keep my job and functions outside Venezuela for various platforms. However, one has to find other ways to live. You no longer have your house, your insurance, your doctor. You have nothing. And the income as a journalist is not enough.”
Journalism in exile has become increasingly common, and Venezuela tops the list in the region with 477 journalists in this condition. The University of Costa Rica documented 913 cases of exiled journalists from 15 Latin American countries in its report, Voices Displaced: A Diagnosis of Journalistic Exile in Latin America 2018-2024.
Danger Follows You
Exile does not necessarily bring peace of mind or complete physical safety. After spending days, weeks, or months hidden and isolated in Venezuela, all exiles interviewed for this story reported feeling disoriented upon arriving in a new country. Because it was a forced and unplanned exit, many lack support networks and economic resources to sustain this condition, even in the short term. Moreover, migratory regularization for Venezuelans has become increasingly complex both in the region and in other countries worldwide, complicating protection measures and imposing severe precarious conditions, limiting access to employment, healthcare, and security.
This sense of vulnerability repeats among many exiles settled in Colombia. In border cities like Cúcuta, exiles interviewed for this story expressed feeling watched while organizing mobilizations related to the electoral fraud. “We saw how two or three very covered individuals took photos and left. I didn’t feel safe,” stated an activist who now resides in Bogotá, whose name remains undisclosed to protect his safety.
Farther north, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Barranquilla also didn’t provide a safe space for Javier Oropeza, the former mayor of Carora. He recounts being intercepted twice in that city with his family.
The first incident occurred days after his departure, on August 14 of last year. A black pickup truck followed him while he was in a friend’s vehicle with his wife until someone with a black cap got out, knocked on the window, and walked away.
Then, on April 28 this year, he was once again intercepted by someone on a motorcycle who photographed him while dropping his daughters off at school. From that moment on, he decided to leave Colombia and move to Spain. He reported both incidents to the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office, but so far, he has received no response regarding any investigation the agency may have conducted.
Exile, rather than being a destination point, becomes an extension of fear: the territory changes, but the persecution, uncertainty, and violence do not go away. For most, life unfolds in migratory and economic limbo, emotional crises, and under constant threat. The migratory grief brigs uprooting: impacting identity, bringing about nostalgia, feelings of injustice, and the difficulty in individual and professional reconstruction.
