Introduction³

The migration of over seven million people from Venezuela to Latin America and the Caribbean in the last five years ^{(United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2021)} was a total social fact, in the words of ^{Mauss (2009)}. This is because there are multiple political, social, legal, and economic causes and forces involved, as well as scientific narratives that shape it. On the one hand, there are legal frameworks and government measures that restrict or contain Venezuelan mobility in the Latin American continent, and that have left their mark on the life trajectories of these migrants due to the impossibility of regularizing their immigration status and obtaining work contracts that allow them to access social protection. On the other hand, there are political discourses that criminalize Venezuelan migration and, lacking empirical basis, blame it for the increase in crime rates in cities such as Bogotá, Lima, and Santiago ^{(Perilla, 2020)}.

There are also economic and political factors inherent to the context of departure and arrival, which influenced the decision to emigrate. Among the factors that triggered the crisis of the extractive model during the Maduro administration, one can count the decline in oil production ^{(Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC], 2019)}, the international sanctions that prevented the Venezuelan State from accessing its assets abroad (gold, dollars, and oil refineries) and selling oil on the international market, as well as the abrupt plummeting in oil prices, which at the end of 2016 were priced at USD 35.15 per barrel ^{(Reuters, 2016)}.

In the case of Chile, the entry of Venezuelans through unauthorized crossing points motivated the militarization of the Chilean border, which caused diplomatic tensions with Peru and Bolivia. There were also xenophobic attacks such as those recorded in the city of Iquique during 2021, where a group of protesters burned the tents that Venezuelans used to spend the night in squares and beaches. This hostile climate towards Venezuelan migration was reflected in the Cadem survey, where 77% of participants considered the arrival of immigrants to Chile as bad for the country ^{(García, 2023)}.

Therefore, studying Venezuelan migration in Chile from a forced migration approach seeks, on the one hand, to raise awareness in the Chilean State about the need to guarantee the human rights of more than 440 000 Venezuelans who had migrated to that country by August 2023 ^{(Plataforma de Coordinación Interregional para Migrantes y Refugiados, 2023)}. On the other hand, it also aims to make visible the responsibility of the Venezuelan State in the violation of human rights of its citizens, by not being able to guarantee the ways of life or the dignity of people in a context where the Maduro government insists on classifying the Venezuelan diaspora as an economic migration, attributed exclusively to the international sanctions imposed on its administration ^{(EFE, 2023)}. Hence the importance of examining, from a socio-historical perspective, the structural and conjunctural factors that shaped the socio-political crisis under said president.

This research is qualitative, and aims at examining the impact of the collapse of oil extractivism on the life trajectories of Venezuelans who emigrated to Santiago de Chile between 2017 and 2020. The article is structured in five sections. In the first, the concept of forced migration is used to distinguish the two migration flows from Venezuela of the last 20 years. The second section defines the conceptual categories employed in the construction of the object of study. The third section is the methodological section of the research, defining the perspective, as well as the techniques made use of for collecting and analyzing information. The fourth section analyzes the results of the research, while the fifth and final section presents the conclusions drawn from the results, and their relationship with the objective and the conceptual categories used to construct the object of study.

The concept of forced migration

If we accept the premise that Venezuelan migration is a total social fact in full development, then we must also accept that the use of conceptual categories to construct the object of study must be geolocated and limited in time. This implies recognizing the fact that in the last 20 years two migratory groups have taken shape in Venezuela. The first originated in the cycle of oil price booms experienced during the time of Chávez, and corresponds to a profile of a professional middle class that emigrated motivated by insecurity, social polarization, political discrimination, and a rejection of the Chavista political project ^{(Dekocker, 2017)}.

Unlike the first, the second migration flow was configured under Nicolás Maduro, and its sociodemographic profile and motivations are more diverse, since it includes an impoverished middle class ^{(Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 2019)}, individuals from vulnerable sectors, and young people who due to the crisis did not start or did not complete their university studies ^{(Yajure, 2022)}. The difference between both flows can be clearly seen in Table 1.

When taking into account the motivations that triggered the decision to emigrate, the sociodemographic profiles, and the routes of Venezuelan emigration in the time of Nicolás Maduro, forced migration can be defined as an external or internal movement of people generated by coercion, including threats to life and subsistence, whether due to natural or human causes. That is, this migration implies a coercion that forces subjects to flee a scenario where their lives and assets are threatened ^{(Alcalá et al., 2007)}. This external coercion would reduce the field of options when making the decision to stay in or leave their usual place of residence. Thus, factors such as lack of citizen safety, poverty, and inequality threaten people’s ways of life and dignity ^{(Betts, 2013)}. Forced migration is therefore the expression of human vulnerability in a context of economic precarization and violation of human rights ^{(Delgado et al., 2009)}.

Based on this argument, the concept of forced migration ^{(Castles, 2003}; ^{Gzesh, 2008)} or survival migration ^{(Betts, 2013}; ^{Lester, 2010)}, used here in a limited and geolocalized way to characterize and analyze the massive migration flow that took place in Venezuela from 2016 onwards, is enlightening to understand how individuals, from subjectivity, transform and give meaning to their life trajectories. This is based on changes and events that are taking place in the political, institutional, and economic sphere, within specific historical contexts, to reveal the simultaneous violation of political, economic, and social rights by the Venezuelan State, who in the midst of the crisis of the extractivist model ceased guaranteeing the ways of life and dignity of people ^{(Bachelet, 2019}; ^{Gzesh, 2008)}.

Crisis of the extractivist oil model and forced migration in Venezuela under Maduro

From the 1920s on, the Venezuelan economy has been essentially rentier, since the exploitation and sale of oil in international markets do not depend on production factors such as capital or labor. Since it has no productive counterpart, the rentier model relies exclusively on the conditions exercised by the Venezuelan State as the sole owner of the wealth found in the subsoil ^{(Mommer, 2003)}. Hence, “oil rent represents a smokescreen with respect to the lag in industrialization, competitiveness, and even in the production of goods and wages” ^{(Jeannot, 2010, p. 274)}. Among the characteristics of this model, excessive bureaucracy and a lack of equilibrium are highlighted-since the model depends on external factors such as demand, capital, and the price of hydrocarbons on international markets-, as well as an imbalance in power relations that gives the State a dominant role over civil society and the market ^{(Baptista, 2005}; ^{Lander, 2018)}.

To these factors, a scarcely diversified productive apparatus, the export of primary goods with little or no processing, the great weight that oil has in exports, and a more active role of the State in the oil industry should be added ^{(Gudynas, 2017)}.

Unlike other extractivist models in Latin America, the Venezuelan case stands out in the economic sphere due to a greater State regulation of the economic activity, the concentration on a single product (hydrocarbons), and an about 90% export of raw materials ^{(Gudynas, 2017)}. In fact, in Venezuela, oil provides 90% of the foreign currency that enters the country, 50% of tax revenue, and 96% of exports ^{(Carmona, 2010)}.

After the Black Friday event in 1983, which marked the end of the exchange rate of 4.30 Bs. (sovereign bolivars) per USD, inexorably anchored in the myth of Saudi Venezuela, the Caribbean country plunged into a long economic crisis as a result of devaluations, exchange controls, payment of foreign debt, inflation, and increased poverty, which at the end of the 1990s reached to about 75% of the population ^{(Riutort, 1999}; ^{Silva & Schliesser, 1997)}.

The end of the Saudi Venezuela myth was also accompanied by a progressive loss of credibility of the two-party system inherited from the Punto Fijo Pact ^{(Maya, 2005)}, which consisted of an agreement signed in 1958 by the political parties Acción Democrática (AD) (Democratic Action), Unión Republicana Democrática (URD) (Democratic Republican Union), and the Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI) (Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee), to ensure governability after the overthrow of the military government of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.

The compound of political and economic crisis reached its zenith in the social explosion of 1989 known as the Caracazo and the subsequent dismissal by the Supreme Court of Justice of the former president Carlos Andrés Pérez. However, during the first crisis of the extractivist model, the stock of migrants in Venezuela remained stable at just over a million foreigners ^{(Berglund, 2005}; ^{Pellegrino, 2003)}, and there was a small emigration of middle-class Venezuelan professionals, mainly to the United States ^{(Pellegrino, 2003)}.

Although by the 1980s Venezuela had ceased to be an attractive country for international migration, there was no significant increase in human mobility aimed abroad. This occurred basically because the Venezuelan State oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S. A. (PDVSA), adopted a strategy at that time that privileged production volumes over the final price of an oil barrel. Venezuela produced more than three million oil barrels daily ^{(Monaldi, 2007)}. Although this strategy did not allow the State to profit at large from the sale of these products, it was useful in meeting the requirements of the social process in a prolonged cycle of declining hydrocarbon prices in international markets, which lasted for more than 17 years.

However, this period was not free of political instability such as the coup attempts and the social upheaval of 1989, experienced during the second term of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989-1993). All of this was immersed in a long cycle of low hydrocarbon prices (1980-1999) that had diminished the State’s capacity to reduce poverty and refloat the economy.

Once his political project was legitimized through the promulgation of the 1999 Constitution, Hugo Chávez Frías capitalized on a cycle of high oil prices (1999-2013), to implement social programs aimed at co-opting the popular bases through social missions and the direct transfer of resources. According to Elías Jaua (vice president, minister in Chávez’s time), between 1999 and 2012, 62.46% of the national budget was used for social spending, which is equivalent to investing USD 551 639 million in social programs ^{(Jaua, 2015)}.

Only between 2011 and 2012 there was an approximate increase of 45% of the real expenditure of the central government, and a public expenditure of around 52% of the gross domestic product (GDP), with a fiscal deficit close to 15% of the same ^{(Bandler, 2013)}. All of this was fueled by an oil barrel price that reached the USD 103.4 in international markets ^{(Pérez, 2014)}. Under the Chávez government, a competitive authoritarian regime of military origin was also established in Venezuela ^{(Levitsky & Way, 2004)} through the establishment of clientelist networks aimed at gaining the loyalty of social organizations, communal councils, and the army.

Despite the new cycle of oil boom experienced by Venezuela under Chávez, factors such as the lack of citizen safety ^{(Dekocker, 2017)}, political polarization ^{(Clark, 2011)}, rejection of the Chavista political project ^{(De la Vega, 2005)}, and social conflict ^{(Dekocker, 2017)} contributed to shaping a middle-class migration flow similar in its sociodemographic characteristics to that which left Venezuela during the 1980s ^{(Pellegrino, 2003)}, as shown in Figure 1.

Source: Own elaboration.

Figure 1 New Oil Boom and Middle-Class Emigration under Hugo Chávez Frías (1999-2013) 

The opposite happened during the government of Nicolás Maduro, when the combination of structural and circumstantial factors combined to implode the extractivist oil model that has been in force in Venezuela for a century (Figure 2). These structural factors include: the excessive dependence of the Venezuelan economy on oil exports; the growth of luxury consumption and administrative corruption in times of oil boom; a single-product, and thus scarcely diversified economy; and legal frameworks aimed at guaranteeing social benefits and salary levels based not on the productivity and competitiveness of companies, but on the oil revenue distributed by the State ^{(Romero, 1988)}.

Source: Own elaboration.

Figure 2 New Collapse of the Oil-based Extractive Model in the Maduro Era 

Among the conjunctural factors that led to the crisis of the extractivist model, international sanctions against the Venezuelan economy, an abrupt fall in oil production from 3.2 million barrels per day in 1998 to 700 000 barrels per day in 2019, and a new cycle of low oil prices that extended to the war in Ukraine stand out ^{(OPEC, 2019}; ^{Pérez, 2014)}. All of this taking place within a political context marked by the militarization of public administration, by corruption, and by the deinstitutionalization caused by the establishment of a competitive authoritarian regime ^{(Levitsky & Way, 2004)}.

Consequently, the Venezuelan sociopolitical crisis of the 21st century can be explained by the inability of the political establishment of the past and the present to subvert the historical dependence that the State and Venezuelan society have had in relation to oil revenue ^{(Baptista, 2005)}, by the impossibility of said State to manage and regulate its economy in the face of external imbalances, and by the poor management of the extractivist model by the governments of Chávez and Maduro, which was manifested in the increase in government corruption ^{(The Economist, 2020)}, the misuse of public resources to finance electoral campaigns, and the politicization of PDVSA, which caused the firing of more than 18 000 workers. Hence, the drop in hydrocarbon prices from 2014 onwards was simply the catalyst that precipitated the decline of the oil-based rentier model in Venezuela ^{(Rosales, 2018)}.

Faced with the decline in oil revenues, the government of Nicolás Maduro declared an economic emergency in 2016, which gave him full power to reorganize public finances, prevent tax evasion, increase production, and speed up procedures to import products necessary for consumption ^{(Meza, 2016)}. At the beginning of 2017, the Venezuelan president declared an economic emergency for the second time, so as to counteract the effects of the drop in oil prices in international markets. On that occasion, Maduro warned the Supreme Court of Justice about the unviability of the rentier model, given that during 2008 Venezuela had received USD 48.325 million from crude oil exports, while in 2016 only USD 5.291 million were received ^{(El País Uruguay, 2017)}.

This crisis of the extractivist model warned by Maduro was accompanied by an accrued fall of 43.7 in the GDP in the last five years (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2019) and a minimum wage of USD 7 a month, which in 2019 only covered 4.7% of the cost of the basic food basket ^{(Bachelet, 2019)}. This deterioration of the material conditions of living, together with the implementation of a competitive authoritarian regime ^{(Levitsky & Way, 2004)}, caused a forced displacement of people during the Maduro administration ^{(Freitez, 2019)}, as shown in Figure 3.

Source: Own elaboration based on interviews.

Figure 3 Relationship Between the New Collapse of the Oil Extractivist Model under Maduro and Forced Migration 

Therefore, forced migration, the current socio-political crisis, and their relationship with the extractivist model serve as an argument to understand how in Venezuela under Maduro, more than seven million people ^{(UNHCR, 2021)} made the decision to emigrate “within the constrictive framework of a set of structural factors that offer people only a restricted range of options for their personal and family survival” ^{(Parella, 2022, p. 42)}.

Research methodology

This research is qualitative, using the semi-structured interview as the information collection technique. The semi-structured interview was chosen as a technique for collecting information not only because it enables to understand how social reality is constructed through a set of rules, values, and symbolic distinctions that allow to navigate one’s daily lives ^{(Bauman, 2007)}, but also because it contributes “to developing the informational potential of conversation to the fullest, as an object of research” (Canales, 2000, p. 36).

The nineteen interviews that make up this research were conducted between June and December 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The following devices were used to collect information: cell phones, digital recorders, and notebooks for taking notes (Table 2).

Snowball sampling was used to select the sample, which consists of asking informants to recommend possible participants who may be relevant to the study, given their status as individuals who emigrated during the extractivist oil crisis under the government of Nicolás Maduro ^{(Flick, 2015)}. The decision to use this type of sampling was due to the difficulty in finding potential interviewees within a context overall marked by mobility restrictions, derived from the pandemic and the self-care measures implemented by some individuals to protect themselves from possible contagion. As such, the criterion applied to the sampling consisted of the selection of: 1) individuals of legal age; 2) individuals who migrated to Chile between 2017 and 2020, a period in which there was an exponential increase in Venezuelan migration to other countries in the region.

The sample consisted of six males and thirteen females; all of them were living in the city of Santiago, and were between the ages of 25 and 70 years at the time of the interview.

The research made use of thematic analysis ^{(Braun & Clarke, 2006)} to systematize the information obtained from the interviews, and then examine the position of the interviewee as an author, with respect to what he says based on reflections and meta-comments. Finally, the Atlas Ti software was employed to analyze the results. Through this systematization, a total of 19 codes associated with their respective quotes were identified.

New collapse of the extractivist oil model and its impact on Venezuelan migration to Chile

The Decadence and general decline code network was built through the perception that the interviewees had about government management during the term of Nicolás Maduro. This network is extremely relevant to the present research, as it allowed to address, from the concept of forced migration and the extractivist oil model, the structural causes that triggered Venezuelan migration to Chile in the 2017-2020 period, as well as asking oneself how the second collapse of the extractivist model affected people’s lives.

To answer this question, a network was created from 19 codes generated through the ready coding and open coding functions, available in the Atlas Ti 8 menu, as shown in Figure 4.

Source: Own elaboration using the Atlas Ti 8 software.

Figure 4 Collapse of the Oil-based Rentier Model and Difficulty in Managing Daily Life 

According to the testimony of some interviewees, the decadence and general decline of the oil-based extractivist model began with the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, and was perceived as a phenomenon that developed in a short period of time, as evidenced in the following interview excerpt:

Well, yes, the decadence had already begun when he died and Maduro took power, that is, there was already a decline […] the issue was the speed at which everything happened. We fell into decadence, but from one day to the next (Fiorela, personal communication, June 21, 2020).

In light of the question, how the crisis affected your personal, family and work life?, the decadence and general decline code emerged from the interviewees’ imagination, so as to understand the effect that the collapse of the extractivist model had on people’s lives and to weave together, through their stories, the sociopolitical scenario that prompted individuals to make the decision to emigrate. The deterioration of the material conditions of living began to be felt when “things began to become scarce, food, medicines, spare parts, and all that impacted us” (María, personal communication, June 2, 2020).

Closing remarks

The record of the crisis or deterioration of the humanitarian situation promoted by international organizations (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR; United Nations Organization, UN; Organization of American States, OAS) to characterize the situation in Venezuela is useful to describe the effects of this crisis on people’s lives. However, it is insufficient to reveal the relationship between cycles of boom and collapse of oil prices and migration flows within a development model in force since the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935). Therefore, the concept of oil extractivism was useful in this research to define, from a socio-historical perspective, the historical institutional background where Venezuelan emigration was configured in the last five years, and to revitalize the debate on the role of the State in people’s lives, thus revealing the structural condition of the crisis and evidencing the effect of international sanctions on the Venezuelan economy.

Given the single-product nature of the Venezuelan economy, the notion of oil extractivism also proved valuable in relating a set of apparently unrelated phenomena: shortages, hyperinflation, and the collapse of basic services with the intrinsic weaknesses of the development model, which were exacerbated under Nicolás Maduro by the combination of external, structural, and circumstantial factors. Therefore, the current crisis of extractivism in Venezuela has multiple causes that distinguish it from the crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, when a long cycle of decline in oil prices was the main catalyst that led to the end of the Punto Fijo Pact and the arrival of Chávez to power.

This relationship between the external and internal factors that shaped the crisis would be determined, first of all, by the very nature of the extractivist model, which places the State as the sole recipient of oil revenue, the State also making use of public spending to transfer petrodollars to the non-oil economy. Between 1999 and 2018, the governments of Chávez and Maduro increased the monetary base by approximately 2 500 000% as a strategy to sustain public spending ^{(Sutherland, 2018)}. There was also negligence in the management of oil revenues in both governments, since the various funds created to manage the surpluses derived from high oil prices in international markets (National Development Fund, China-Venezuela Joint Fund) were used to exacerbate public spending during electoral campaigns, and to finance military spending without any type of audit ^{(Transparencia Venezuela, 2021)}.

Then, the scarce industrial fabric and the excessive dependence on oil revenues by the State have to be taken into account. It will suffice to remember that oil represents 96% of exports and 90% of the foreign currency that enters the country. Thirdly, the inability of the State to regulate its economy in the face of external imbalances must be considered, such as international sanctions and the decrease in oil prices.

Thus, the intrinsic weaknesses of oil extractivism and the circumstantial factors that caused the decline serve as a reference to examine and evaluate how the Maduro government managed the crisis of the model by applying six strategies: devaluing, dollarizing, making exchange controls more flexible, raising the price of gasoline, lifting price controls, and printing inorganic money. As evidenced in the accounts of the interviewees, the implementation of these measures generated a hyperinflationary process that had a considerable impact on the life trajectories of people, who reported that their salary and pensions were barely enough to buy a carton of eggs or a bag of flour.

The collapse of basic services, reflected in the accounts of those interviewed, was one of the main causes that triggered the decision to emigrate. Faced with this problem, the State also played a crucial role, since in Venezuela the basic services (water, electricity, telephone, internet, gas) are in the hands of the State. This State ownership was reinforced during the Chávez government through a process of nationalizations. However, these services have not been managed efficiently under Maduro, due to lack of investment and maintenance, and because of corruption ^{(Altez, 2019)}.

Under this argument, the collapse of extractivism during the government of Nicolás Maduro not only dramatically affected people’s ways of life, but also caused the Venezuelan State to violate the social and economic rights set forth in the 1999 Constitution, as reflected by some interviewees, who claim that the scarcity of medicines and food violated their right to health and their right to life.

Thanks to the stories collected, hidden phenomena were revealed in the scientific narratives on Venezuelan migration, such as institutional deterioration, whose most evident consequences are the lack of independence of public powers, institutional distrust, and corruption. Therefore, the accounts not only show the deterioration of the democratic fabric, a product of the establishment of a competitive authoritarian regime, but also reveal the situation of extreme vulnerability and the social, economic, and political pressures to which individuals were subjected before making the decision to emigrate.

From this perspective, the way of survival of the interviewees represents, on the one hand, the strategies they deploy to manage daily life and try to meet basic needs through barter, support networks, and rationing, and on the other hand, it describes the obstacles and shortcomings that individuals had to face in Venezuela. This was also manifested in the subjects as a state of mind that drove them to emigrate in the face of an external coercion that threatened or put their way of life at risk. It is from there that understanding Venezuelan emigration under the umbrella of forced migration aims at consolidating a new scientific narrative that allows to demonstrate, through facts, that the mobility of Venezuelans abroad during the government of Nicolás Maduro was of a forced, involuntary nature, and motivated by humanitarian reasons. It would thus be possible for the signatory countries of the Cartagena Declaration to grant Venezuelan migrants refugee status, and do everything possible to guarantee their human rights.