The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, affirmed this Wednesday that 12 million migrants live in the Caribbean country, including Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Colombians, Ecuadorians and Syrians, who have been part of the nation’s economic recovery.
“We have 12 million migrants here in Venezuela (…) a country that receives migration, and the more we recover our homeland, the more social happiness for our people”, said the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in a televised act.
Maduro indicated that it is necessary to “multiply, diversify, grow” in different productive sectors of the economy to meet the needs and living conditions of all the country’s inhabitants.
“There is still a lot to do, of course, but we are going to do it, rest assured that what remains to be done, we are going to do it together, Venezuelans and the entire migrant population from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Syria , from Lebanon, the 6,000,000 Colombians who live in Venezuela and never think of leaving, the 600,000 Ecuadorians, the 600,000 Peruvians”, added the ruler.
Last September, the national director of the Association of Colombians and Colombians in Venezuela, Juan Carlos Tanus, assured EFE that around 4.5 million people from the Andean country live in the Caribbean nation.
Besides, 7.1 million Venezuelans have left Venezuela in recent years, According to data published in December by the Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V) -a mechanism co-led by the UN Refugee Agency (Acnur) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
On January 14, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Yván Gil, dismissed this figure while saying that the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the sThe migration service of the Caribbean country must handle a “much lower figure”which he did not specify.
In addition, he said that more than 300,000 people who had emigrated returned by air and land since 2020, without specifying the nations of origin, of which 30,900 did so through the Plan Vuelta a la Patria promoted by the Maduro government.