Venezuela: 254 migrants return from Peru with Nicolás Maduro’s government plan

A total of 254 migrants from Venezuela They returned to their country from Peru this Thursday, through the government program known as “Plan return to the homeland,” the Foreign Ministry reported.

“We are sending 254 compatriots of our own free will to Venezuela, where they are going to reconnect with their country, with their families,” said the Venezuelan ambassador to Peru, Alexander Yánez, from the Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima, quoted in a press release. .

He also said that there are people who returned with some “special situation” or health problems, which he did not detail.

The Foreign Ministry pointed out that the flight arrived in the Caribbean country at 3:44 a.m. local time (7:44 a.m. GMT), where the returnees were received by a medical team to do the PCR tests to rule out covid-19, and a vaccination day.

Luis Rafael Martínez, a journalist who had lived in Peru for three years, said — quoted by the statement — that the Peruvian media “promote xenophobia, causing some Peruvians to adopt this behavior.”

On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry reported that, since the creation of the “Plan to return to the homeland”, in September 2018, a total of 28,020 citizens have returned, compared to the 6,041,690 people who have left the Caribbean country in the face of the crisis of recent years, according to the Regional Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V).

Said platform estimates that, of this total number of migrants, 4,992,215 live in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On February 3, the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, promised that from March the flights of the government plan would be tripled.

“For the months of March onwards, we are going to have a new phase of the Plan Vuelta a la Patria, we are going to triple the number of flights to bring Venezuelans who are already enrolled in the plan,” he said in an act broadcast by the Venezuelan state television channel (VTV).

Maduro assured 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”.

However, opponents of the Caribbean country warned Tuesday that the migration of Venezuelans will not stop as long as Maduro remains in power.

“Until we get out of the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, we cannot guarantee that this very high migration returns to Venezuela and, therefore, we must work hard with the receiving countries, specifically, in Europe, on the guarantees and respect for the status law and the rights of nationals as migrants,” said former anti-Chavista deputy Ramón López.