Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

Re­lief! Ex­cit­ed mi­grants ea­ger to re­turn to Venezuela

Venezue­lans liv­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go yes­ter­day ex­pressed a mix­ture of joy, re­lief, and ap­pre­hen­sion fol­low­ing the ar­rest of the coun­try’s Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro by Unit­ed States forces.

For Rose and many of her fel­low coun­try­men, the news — which broke in the ear­ly hours of the morn­ing — was a long-await­ed mo­ment of hope af­ter years of what they called op­pres­sion and un­cer­tain­ty.

Rose, who has lived in Trinidad for over 20 years, said, “I got up prob­a­bly one o’clock, two o’clock in the morn­ing, and my phone was ring­ing. Fam­i­ly call­ing me from away. I could not be­lieve what was go­ing on. I am very hap­py — but fright­ened too, be­cause I don’t know what will come out of all of this.”

Rose, 50, who has not re­turned home for sev­en years - even for her fa­ther’s fu­ner­al - wants to see a new gov­ern­ment in­stalled in Venezuela.

“I wish they could hold all of them and get rid of all of them. An en­tire new gov­ern­ment will be nice,” she said.

Apart from be­ing fear­ful of reprisals from Maduro sup­port­ers, she said her fam­i­ly in Venezuela was al­so con­cerned that they could not reach a rel­a­tive who lived near where one of the sites was bombed. Oth­ers, like mi­grant Jack­e­lin Re­que­na, who has been away from Venezuela for six years, shared her hopes of re­turn­ing home. “It is the dream of every Venezue­lan liv­ing out­side to be able to re­turn,” she said.

Venezue­lan mi­grants Mar­cus Men­doza and his friend Car­lo Sal­ga­do, who have been liv­ing in Trinidad for the past three years, were al­so cel­e­brat­ing. “Me hap­py. Plen­ty hap­py,” said Men­doza, who ad­mit­ted he was ex­cit­ed by the prospect of re­turn­ing home.

Mean­while, Ang­ie Ram­nar­ine of the La Ro­maine Mi­grant Sup­port Group said she be­gan re­ceiv­ing calls and mes­sages from peo­ple liv­ing in Venezuela since 2 am yes­ter­day. “Ba­si­cal­ly, say­ing it was a lit­tle ter­ri­fy­ing. They know that Maduro is be­ing tak­en out, but with all the noise and chaos, they’re not get­ting the news them­selves. So, they have to de­pend on peo­ple like us to let them know what is go­ing on be­cause in many places there is no elec­tric­i­ty, in­ter­net is down.”

“At this point in time, they are still a peo­ple afraid that re­pres­sive mea­sures can be used against them once they are seen to be sid­ing with the en­e­my, in this case, the US and Trump,” Ram­nar­ine said. She added that Cuban mi­grants were al­so reach­ing out to her, and were hop­ing the US would take sim­i­lar ac­tion in their home­land.