Word: venezuela
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After going to Venezuela from Barranquilla, Colombia, in 2003, Villanueva, 55, found steady work with decent pay at an aluminum factory, a job that came with a free house and other benefits. "There's a health clinic over there," he says, pointing down a dusty road lined with haphazardly constructed brick houses. "The Cuban modules are nearby too," he adds, referring to the free clinics, started by Chávez, that use Cuban doctors in poor neighborhoods. "They give me free pills for my hypertension...
...estimates that some 200,000 Colombians are indeed in neighboring Venezuela as war refugees. But as many as 75% of the more than 3 million to 4 million Colombians living there moved for economic reasons. Juan Carlos Tanus, president of the Association of Colombians in Venezuela, says Venezuela's advantages include jobs and subsidized food and health, which has been provided for the past 10 years by Chávez's socialist government. In fact, Tanus notes, from 2002 to 2008 - even as Colombia got safer thanks to Uribe's offensive against leftist guerrillas - the number of Colombians emigrating...
That's a potential embarrassment for Uribe, whose success against the rebels has been an economic boon for Colombia. Economic growth from 2002 to 2008 averaged an impressive 5.3% annually. But the number of working-class Colombians bolting for Venezuela hints that Uribe has yet to make that new wealth trickle down - a failing that could simply continue the kind of inequality that has fueled civil wars in Colombia for centuries. "The economic growth statistics published in the media are one thing," says Patricia Yañez, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas who studies...
...Still, Venezuela's own migratory numbers suggest a different story than the one Chávez's "21st century socialism" promotes. While tens of thousands of poor Colombians might be flocking to Venezuela, just as many middle-class Venezuelans are leaving. A report by the Latin American & Caribbean Economic System, a multi-lateral organization based in Caracas, finds that from 1990 to 2007, Venezuelan emigration to developed countries rose 216%. Erick Castro, a Caracas-born engineer, left for Canada last month thanks in large part to the Venezuelan capital's out-of-control violent crime, 30% annual inflation and what...
...offered an exorbitant interest rate, set largely by the government, because of his economic status. "I came out with the impression that they give priority to the lower strata," he says. It's admirable to boost the poor, who before Chávez were largely ignored by Venezuela's élite. But Flerida Rengifo, a demographics analyst at the Central University, says stories of the Venezuelan middle-class brain drain are getting more common. "There's no support for private industry," she says, "so people feel unsupported by the state in terms of their ability to invest in the country...