Heymerling Drownosky said when Venezuelan incumbent President Nicolás Maduro announced his victory overnight Monday, migrants around her broke down in tears at the shelter in the West Loop.
She could hear people crying all around from her cot.
“They left us without a soul. Without a soul,” Drownosky, 27, told the Tribune on Monday morning. “We are bodies with bones, but we don’t have souls.”
Her children, Liang, 6, and Ashlyng, 4, watched their mother stand outside the brick warehouse they’ve lived in since April. Her eyes welled up with tears.
“We think about our kids,” she said. “We want them to have a childhood like the one we had. This is no way of life for them.”
For Drownosky and the thousands of families like hers who have settled in Chicago after fleeing economic ruin or political persecution in Venezuela, the possible reelection of authoritarian President Maduro brought feelings of disbelief and disappointment.
The country’s National Electoral Council, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, declared him the winner of the country’s contested election Monday, a day after both he and the opposition candidate, retired diplomat Edmundo González, claimed victory. But the council didn’t release the tallies from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering the ability to verify the results.
The delay in announcing results — six hours after polls were supposed to close — indicated a deep debate inside the government about how to proceed after Maduro’s opponents came out early in the evening all but claiming victory.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. has “serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people,” speaking in Tokyo. Several other countries across the world also denounced the results of the election.
Under Maduro’s leadership, Venezuela has become the source of one of the largest migrant crises in the world. Following his rise to presidency, more than 7.7 million Venezuelans since 2013 have left their homes for opportunities abroad. More than 45,000 of them have arrived in the Chicago area since August 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants from the state’s border to sanctuary cities as a way to protest federal immigration policies.
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Migrants and immigration experts say the renewed victory for Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela could further the exodus of Venezuelans to the United States and deter those who’ve left the country from returning.
“The results will only drive more people to this country as long as we continue getting support from (President Joe) Biden,” said Elias Herrera, 35, of Caracas, Venezuela, as he joined nearly 500 other Venezuelans Sunday in Humboldt Park to show support for the opposition and for a “change in Venezuela.”
The migrants waved their country’s flags in celebration of solidarity and community, with cars adorned with yellow, blue and red balloons — the colors of the country’s flag — and the words “Venezuela libre,” or “Free Venezuela,” written on windshields. The crowds and cars shut down traffic around the park for several hours.
“I have some friends who are already on the way to the border and then to Chicago,” said Herrera, who arrived in Chicago in November 2022 and now lives in Joliet. “We knew Maduro was going to win again, that is what dictators do.”
The migrants said they hoped that Maduro would finally step out and that González would take over, which could offer them hope that might return home someday.
But Ricardo Villasmil, a senior researcher at the Harvard University’s Growth Lab, said institutional decay in Venezuela is so rampant that it was unlikely many of the migrants would ever return, even in the unlikely event of any political change.
It would take decades before migrants go back to the South American country in large numbers, said Villasmil, who lived in Venezuela until 2017 and was involved in economic planning for the opposition party.
“How is it going to look in one to three years? What are the opportunities there?” he asked.
On Monday morning, migrants in shelters across Chicago were skeptical that Gonzalez — a stand-in for popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who was barred from running earlier this year — had in fact, lost the election.
Anibal Gonzalez, 55, stood outside a shelter where he was staying in Streeterville with his son-in-law Julio Reyes, 35, and watched videos of unrest in his home city of Caracas. He had heard from relatives about election practices rife with fraud. People were protesting at voting centers.
“We’ve talked with relatives there about shootings, terrible things the government has done,” he said. “They’ve taken away our opportunity to vote fairly. … The people have no power to do anything.”
Reyes said his country used to be a haven for migrants. Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy. But it entered into a free fall after Maduro took the helm. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led first to social unrest and then mass emigration.
For years, the U.S. has opposed Maduro’s leadership. Officials have used sanctions, which restrict Venezuela’s ability to sell oil internationally, as leverage. Most recently, the U.S. used sanctions to pressure Venezuela into holding the election, according to economic experts.
Lilia Fernandez, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who specializes in the history of Latinos in the mid-to-late 20th century in the U.S., said that under Maduro, sanctions would most likely continue, making it even harder to live in Venezuela.
“Our foreign policy has had an enormous influence on the country, their economy and the exodus of its citizens,” Fernandez said.
Outside the West Loop shelter, Keila Rodriguez, 43, said survival in Venezuela was already impossible. She came to Chicago with her daughter and grandson because they had no other option.
Rodriguez said her 80-year-old father still lives in Caracas but doesn’t have enough money to buy food. She was worried about what another Maduro presidency would mean for his livelihood. She said she would go back to her home country to be with him if she could.
“We’ve seen many, many families separated because of the same reasons,” she said.
Rodriguez’s daughter Marian Castro, 24, got her 5-year-old Thiago Gonzalez an orange juice from a vendor outside the shelter and hugged him. She said she was grateful to the U.S. for opening its doors to her, but she missed her home country.
“It’s like fighting against a current,” she said. “We want our country to be free.”
The Associated Press contributed.
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