Venezuela’s SAIME identification and migrant services office announced on Thursday that Venezuelans who requested passports in consulates recently closed by socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro must now go to Caracas to pick them up — an impossible task for many.
The socialist regime’s new measure further complicates the already difficult legal situation of some 2.4 million affected Venezuelans and potentially leaves them without a valid identity document in the short term. In most cases, Venezuelans with expired passports — not valid for international travel — are unable to travel to Caracas to retrieve a new one.
The measure also causes further migration-related woes at a continental level, as countries have to implement special measures to address migrants entering with expired passports or those who will have no valid documentation at all once their current passports expire.
“Venezuelans who are outside the country and have processed their passports through the consulates that are closed, may go to our main headquarters in Caracas to pick up their travel documents,” SAIME announced on social media.
The Maduro regime closed all of its consulates across seven Latin American countries – Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay – in late July. Maduro cut diplomatic ties with those countries in response to their respective governments questioning the socialist dictator’s fraudulent “victory” in the July 28 sham presidential election.
Maduro, and the Venezuelan authorities subservient to him, continue to insist Maduro “won” — even at the United Nations General Assembly — but refuse to publish vote tallies that can corroborate the claimed results.
According to estimates from U.N.-managed platforms, 2.4 million Venezuelans out of the nearly 8 million who have fled from socialism reside in those seven Latin American countries.
The Maduro regime’s brutal crackdown against dissidents following the sham July election, which left 27 deaths and more than 2,400 detained, also included the arbitrary annulment of the passports of Venezuelan journalists and activists, some of whom are abroad in countries such as Peru or Argentina.
The new SAIME measure is the latest on a lengthy list spanning more than ten years of actions committed by the socialist Maduro regime that have turned obtaining identity cards, passports, and other public office documents into an uphill endeavor for Venezuelans — especially passports for those who have fled the country following the collapse of socialism in Venezuela over the past years.
The Venezuelan passport ranks as one of the most expensive in the world, with a new one costing the equivalent of roughly $200 in local currency, the Venezuelan bolivar. The hefty cost of a new Venezuelan passport is prohibitively expensive for the majority of impoverished Venezuelans, who earn the official monthly minimum wage of roughly $4 per month — making the passport cost the equivalent of roughly four years’ worth of minimum wage.
In addition to its cost, obtaining a passport appointment is an uphill endeavor due to the frequent platform downtimes caused by infrastructure failures in power and internet connectivity.
The downtimes were further exacerbated in recent years by the Maduro regime switching passport printing provider and other services to Ex-Cle, an Argentine company the administration of former President Donald Trump sanctioned for its role in aiding the Maduro regime’s fraudulent elections. Ex-Cle is believed to hold direct links with Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.
Due to the impossibility of Venezuelans abroad obtaining new passports, countries such as the United States and Argentina have implemented special provisions to recognize Venezuelan passports beyond their printed expiration date. While the measures allow Venezuelans with expired passports to engage with the corresponding countries at a government level, it does not guarantee that banks or other private service providers will recognize them, leading to reported cases of Venezuelan citizens abroad having their salaries withheld, bank accounts disabled, contracts suspended or even losing their jobs for not having a valid passport.
While the Maduro regime has made it difficult for Venezuelans to obtain new passports, it has been accused of selling Venezuelan passports to Iranians, Syrians, and other Middle Eastern citizens in the past, including members of the Shiite jihadist group Hezbollah.
SAIME’s head, Gustavo Vizcaino Gil, was sanctioned by the United States in 2019 for selling passports to Venezuelans non-Venezuelan alike for large sums of cash.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
