A cloud of un­cer­tain­ty still looms over the heads of many Venezue­lan mi­grants in this coun­try as the Gov­ern­ment gets ready to com­mence its mi­grant reg­is­tra­tion pol­i­cy on Fri­day.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art has en­cour­aged Venezue­lans liv­ing here, legal­ly and il­le­gal­ly, to reg­is­ter dur­ing a two-week amnesty win­dow to be grant­ed the ap­proval to live and work for up to one year.

There will be three reg­is­tra­tion cen­tres: at the Queen’s Park Oval, Port-of-Spain; Achie­vor’s Ban­quet Hall, San Fer­nan­do; and Car­o­line Build­ing, Wil­son Road, Scar­bor­ough, To­ba­go.

But while this process is set to get un­der­way, one Venezue­lan ac­tivist, Sofia Figueroa, is of the view that many of her coun­try­men/women are still scep­ti­cal.

She said, “Some are elat­ed, oth­ers are weary and some are ter­ri­fied.”

She ex­plained that the con­cern for some comes from be­ing pre­vi­ous­ly im­pris­oned here even though they had UN­HCR refugee cards, while oth­ers are scared that a list, sim­i­lar to a Tas­con list, would be cre­at­ed and their sig­na­tures would be used against them.

Re­search shows that A Tas­con list is a doc­u­ment which was re­leased by for Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez that con­tained the names of mil­lions of cit­i­zens who signed a pe­ti­tion to have him re­called. It is re­port­ed that peo­ple on the list were dis­crim­i­nat­ed against.

An­oth­er well-known Venezue­lan ac­tivist, Hei­di Diquez ex­pressed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments.

She said the gen­er­al mood among Venezue­lans is a good lev­el of un­cer­tain­ty, “Be­cause of the close re­la­tion­ship with the Nicholas Maduro regime, which we all know is a crim­i­nal type of regime, ca­pa­ble of per­se­cut­ing Venezue­lans even out of their own coun­try.”

Diquez al­so point­ed out that there are some who may have tak­en part in peace­ful protests against the rul­ing regime and fled to Trinidad and To­ba­go fear­ing po­lit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion. She said some of these peo­ple could have crim­i­nal records against their names.

Notwith­stand­ing this, the ac­tivist said that Venezue­lans have been left with no oth­er choice but to com­ply with the reg­is­tra­tion process with the promise of get­ting at least the op­por­tu­ni­ty to work and get emer­gency health care. She said this could re­sult in large num­bers turn­ing out on Fri­day.

“We ex­pect huge num­bers, which by see­ing the gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to re­duce the reg­is­tra­tion sites to on­ly two, I think un­for­tu­nate­ly they may have an out of con­trol sit­u­a­tion.”

She said over the week­end ef­forts were made to en­cour­age peo­ple in­flu­en­tial to the gov­ern­ment to im­ple­ment a bet­ter and or­gan­ised man­ner for peo­ple to reg­is­ter and not all at once.

Diquez said she knows of Venezue­lans who are plan­ning to camp out from an ear­ly as to­mor­row.

Her hope is that the gov­ern­ment will pro­vide bus­es for Venezue­lans liv­ing in rur­al ar­eas who have no mon­ey.

This is why an­oth­er Venezue­lan ac­tivist, Yese­nia Gon­za­les plans to as­sist in trans­port­ing some peo­ple to the reg­is­tra­tion cen­tres. She said since the an­nounce­ment of the amnesty, she has been try­ing dai­ly to con­vince peo­ple to reg­is­ter, but, there is a lot of fear. “There is a lot of sus­pi­cion; peo­ple are wor­ried and afraid be­cause some of them don’t have pass­ports, Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards or birth cer­tifi­cates. They are al­so wor­ried what the Venezue­lan em­bassy would do with the in­for­ma­tion once they reg­is­ter.”

Last week Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young sent a mes­sage to Venezue­lan na­tion­als in Trinidad and To­ba­go, telling them “do not to lis­ten” to those telling them to stay away from the reg­is­tra­tion process.

Min­is­ter Young said that it is in their own in­ter­est, be­cause when the reg­is­tra­tion process is done, the state will re­vert to en­forc­ing the law of de­port­ing per­sons who are here il­le­gal­ly.

The reg­is­tra­tion process takes place from May 31 to June 14.

Di­rec­tor of the Liv­ing wa­ters Com­mu­ni­ty Rhon­da Main­got said her or­gan­i­sa­tion will con­tin­ue to work along with UN­HCR to reg­is­ter those who are seek­ing refugee sta­tus in Trinidad and To­ba­go.