As many as seven million Venezuelans will have fled their country by the end of this year if borders with neighboring countries reopen and President Nicolás Maduro remains in power.
This stark warning comes from one of those refugees: David Smolansky, special envoy on Venezuela’s migration crisis at the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS).
To date, he said, 5.4 million people have emigrated since the beginning of Venezuela’s economic crisis in 2014—making it the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history and the second-largest in the world after Syria (6.7 million).
That’s up from two million refugees in September 2018, when OAS Secretary General Luís Almagro appointed Smolansky to head the organization’s working group on this crisis. Those numbers can be found in his office’s Venezuela situation report issued on Dec. 30.