The celebration in Santiago was WILD. Cheers, tears, strangers embracing in the street. It looked like liberation day. JAVIER TORRES/AFP via Getty Images captured the raw, explosive joy of Venezuelans in Chile the moment the news broke that the U.S. had seized Nicolás Maduro. They were dreaming of going home.
But DON’T be fooled by the party. The reality is a ticking time bomb. “They’ve captured Maduro, but the regime hasn’t fallen,” warns diaspora leader Mary Montesinos. This machine was built over 25 years. It will NOT disappear overnight.
LOOK at the numbers. The UN says nearly a QUARTER of Venezuela’s population has fled. Over 660,000 are now in Chile—the country’s LARGEST foreign group—and a staggering 334,000 of them are there ILLEGALLY. This is the powder keg Chile is sitting on.
Enter Chile’s new far-right president, José Antonio Kast. He WON by promising to CRUSH illegal migration. He’s threatened walls, ditches, and mass deportations. He CHEERED the U.S. strike. The outgoing leftist president Gabriel Boric gave a chilling warning: “Today it’s Venezuela, tomorrow it could be any other [country].”
The media fuels the fire. Crimes are reported with the perpetrator’s nationality ONLY if they are foreign, painting a target on the back of every migrant. The celebration photos hide a brutal truth: these people are caught between a collapsed homeland and a host nation that increasingly wants them GONE.
They dream of rebuilding Venezuela. But for now, they are trapped in a dangerous limbo, their joy just a brief distraction from the coming storm.
The party is over. The reckoning has just begun.
Author: Kayitsi.com
