Congress is moving forward with a bill imposing sanctions on officials in the government of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. This is largely the work of a small but vocal group of expats in Florida whose political influence is steadily growing.
Anti-government protesters in Caracas in March.
Tomas Bravo / Reuters
DORAL, Florida – El Arepazo is where Venezuelans in Miami huddle to gossip, drink, and occasionally conspire. The restaurant, an airy cafeteria in the back of a gas station, has an ample back yard with a small statue of Simon Bolívar overseeing the parking lot.
A few steps behind Bolivar, the yard is scattered with white crosses strung with black ribbon, a memorial to the students who have died in the wave of chaotic street protests that have swept Venezuela since February, and which have only recently begun to simmer down.
Since the protests began, there has been an unprecedented amount of political attention on the type of people who gather at El Arepazo. They are an energetic group of Venezuelans in the U.S., most of them in South Florida, who have been lobbying stateside for action against the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. So far they have been successful: A bill imposing sanctions on associates of Maduro's has passed foreign affairs committees in both the House and Senate, and is due to hit the House floor this week.
The Venezuelans' growing clout is reminiscent of an older Miami disapora: the Cuban exile community, which over the last five decades has left an indelible mark on American politics. It's no coincidence that most of the lawmakers who have championed the sanctions belong to a powerful cadre of Cuban-American politicians from Florida, including Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Rep. Mario Diaz Balart. A number of Venezuelan expat leaders have strong ties to veterans of the Cuban exile, and there is a clear and strong affinity between the two groups, beginning with their sense of outrage at having been displaced by what they decry as authoritarian leftist regimes.
This growing influence was in evidence on Saturday night at El Arepazo, when some 70 Venezuelans gathered at El Arepazo for a vigil in support of the protesting students. The meeting had been called by José Antonio Colina, a former lieutenant of the Venezuelan national guard who fled the country after the government of Hugo Chávez accused him of bombing two embassies in Caracas. (Colina has consistently denied the charges, and calls them politically motivated.)
Colina was only one of several prominent Venezuelan expats to address the crowd. After a string of impassioned speeches that, in Spanish, condemned Maduro's regime, speeches replete with words like "nefarious" and "tyrannical," a man stepped up to address the crowd, unexpectedly, in English. He introduced himself as Joe Kaufman, candidate for U.S. Congress. "Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been ignoring this situation," Kaufman said to great applause. "I call on the administration to do something about this. Stop making excuses!"
Kaufman is running to represent a district that includes Weston, a tony suburb with one of the largest Venezuelan communities in the country. But this only partly explains his presence at a niche event for expats, outside his district, where no more than a handful of those present were likely to be voting citizens. Kaufman, a Tea Party affiliate whose website features a prominent video endorsement from Herman Cain, was only the latest in a line of politicians
"We have senators calling us for meetings," José Hernandez, the leader of the U.S. branch of Venezuela's coalition of opposition parties, said in Spanish. "That didn't used to happen. We have representatives coming to El Arepazo to get their picture taken with us. That didn't used to happen."
As Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who introduced the sanctions bill in the House, put it: "The Venezuelan-American community has already made an impact on politics in South Florida, and that's an impact that will only grow stronger as time goes on."
Venezuelans in Doral celebrate the death of Hugo Chavez in March, 2013
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
There were about 250,000 Venezuelans living in the United States in 2012, according to census data, of which almost 65,000 are American citizens. But what defines the population is not its size but its political cohesion: the vast majority of Venezuelan immigrants have arrived in one way or another as a consequence of the rise to power of Hugo Chávez, whose regime was marked by aggressive wealth redistribution, expropriations of private enterprise and other measures that negatively impacted the wealthier sectors of Venezuelan society.
"Compared to, say, Mexicans or Dominicans or other Latino populations, these are almost exclusively people from the middle class and upper middle class," said David Smilde, a senior fellow and Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America and a professor at the University of Georgia. "This is a diaspora of people who are very anti-Chávez and now anti-Maduro, whose interests have been touched upon, who fear the rise of a dictatorship, or who have been victims of some kind of political persecution."
The largest proportion of Venezuelans settled in South Florida, mostly in the cities of Doral and Weston. Doral, like many of Miami's outer rings, is a sprawling, semi-industrial suburb of car dealerships, shipping warehouses and the occasional field of grazing cattle. The city was named after a golf resort, now owned by Donald Trump, that existed decades before the city incorporated in 2003. The mayor of Doral, Luigi Boria, is also the first and so far the only Venezuelan-American mayor of a U.S. city.
While Doral was named after a golf course, Weston, some 30 minutes away in Broward County, actually resembles one. The streets are unsettlingly well paved and the lawns well manicured, and the town is dotted with small, man-made lakes spouting water into the air from fountains.
Maria Antonietta Diaz arrived in Weston with her family in 1997, a year before Chávez came to power. They moved after her father was kidnapped for ransom by non-politically motivated criminals, and the family decided Venezuela was too dangerous a place to raise children. At the time there were very few Venezuelans in Florida, but within a few years Diaz witnessed the beginnings of an exodus. She saw it from a uniquely good perch: by then she had started a consulting company that helped Venezuelans form businesses in the U.S.
It started with a wave of former oil executives, who fled to the U.S. after workers from the state oil company staged a massive but ultimately failed strike in 2002 to protest Chávez's tightened grip on the company. Subsequent waves of migrants included people from every major industry: finance and banking, construction and real estate, imports and exports. "It was exodus after exodus," Diaz said in Spanish. "We're talking about industrialists: people who ran businesses with 500,000 or 600,000 employees, and who had run them for 40 years. We're talking about people with money."
Diaz, like nearly every Venezuelan expat, characterized this as a cataclysm for Venezuela: "Chávez effectively eliminated the productive apparatus of Venezuelan society."
This high-powered diaspora supported the Venezuelan opposition from afar, mobilized to vote in Venezuelan elections, and did some lobbying in the U.S. – pushing for the country to buy less Venezuelan oil, for example. But by and large they focused on their stateside ventures, becoming more of a corporate bloc than a political one.
The exception was a small cadre of opposition hardliners, many of whom could not return to Venezuela without fear of imprisonment – the small group, in other words, that could rightfully claim the label "exile." Prominent among them was Colina, the former National Guard lieutenant accused of bombing embassies in Venezuela. Born and raised in a poor Caracas neighborhood, Colina is unlike the characteristic Venezuelan expat. "Why do chavistas hate me? Because I meet every condition to be a chavista myself," Colina said. "I'm black – I'm a minority. I come from the lower classes. I was a military official. But I never supported Chávez."
Colina fled to Miami through Colombia with the help of right-wing paramilitary groups. In Miami, he founded VEPPEX, or Politically Persecuted Venezuelans in Exile, and started agitating for regime change in his home country.
For a long time the work was thankless. "What we're seeing today is the result of many years of work," Colina said. "For a long time we have talked about the presence of drug traffickers in Venezuela, the presence of the Irani regime, the presence of extremist groups. We were like a scratched record, and we presented plenty of proof, but these were things the international community did not want to look at closely. Now they are looking at it closely."
Colina attributes the shift to the death of Chávez and the coming to power of Nicolás Maduro: Chávez was a charismatic leader and had strong control over the military and police, whereas Maduro is weak and has allowed the violent repression of the student protesters to get out of control. "He has zero charisma," Colina said. "He's not even a leader. He's a stooge of the Castro brothers. So now we see a much more anarchic society, a more resistant people, and we also see more repression that probably wouldn't have happened under Chávez."
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