At least 71 Venezuelans died on migration routes in 2022

At least 71 Venezuelan citizens died in 2022 while trying to cross borders into Latin Americafleeing the crisis in the Caribbean country, assured this Thursday the opponent David Smolanskywho assured that these people perished by drowning, snake bites or attacks by wild animals.

“71 Venezuelans died last year on the migratory routes in the region. Some drowned, others were bitten by a snake (snake) and others were attacked by wild animals,” the former mayor of Caracas said on his Twitter account.

The dictator of Venezuela, Nicola Maduro“realized that one in four Venezuelans is no longer in the country“, he added.

Smolansky’s message comes after the Venezuelan regime denounced the “politicizationfrom the United Nations Agency for Refugees (Acnur) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) concerning the management of human mobility.

The European Union (EU), Canada and the two United Nations agencies have called for a solidarity conference -which began on Thursday and will end this Friday in Brussels- in which they hope to expand global support for migrants and refugees from Venezuela, a community estimated at nearly 7.2 million people.

Maduro’s exec sees the conference as “a hostile eventagainst Venezuela, and as something that “takes the said institutions (Acnur and IOM) away from the mandate granted to them within the UN”.

Considering this, Smolansky argued that what is ‘really hostile’ is the ‘expulsion’ of Venezuelans who crossed the Darien jungle or took a small boat to reach a Caribbean island.

IOM reported last January that at least 321 migrants died or went missing on sea routes across the Caribbean in 2022, and only half of them could be identified, including 25 Venezuelans.

(With information from EFE)

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