Opinion: The stories Venezuelans tell are both inspiring and chilling

It’s not easy to talk about what is happening in Venezuela, especially when you are not Venezuelan and have neither lived nor worked in the country. But as a journalist, I have spent years listening to Venezuelans tell their stories. While living in Utah, I even shared a house with someone from Barquisimeto, Venezuela’s musical capital. From friends, sources and neighbors, I learned about a country rich in culture and warmth — a place that once was a paradise, but whose complicated and painful history has led to the crisis we see today.

During my first year as a journalist in San Diego, in 2008, I learned a phrase that Venezuelans say with a smile: “Where there are Venezuelans, there will be bulla.” Bulla means noise — laughter, music, life. Two years later, at the Salt Lake City farmers market, I tried tequeños for the first time and fell in love with the crunchy cheese-filled snack that has since become a symbol of home for many in the diaspora.

Those moments may seem small, even joyful. But they contrast sharply with the stories I have heard in recent years.

In 2023, while reporting outside a migrant shelter in Tijuana, I met Robert Connell. He was one of many Venezuelans on the move — first displaced to Peru, then Ecuador, and eventually forced to walk north with a migrant caravan to reach the Mexico-U.S. border. He arrived just in time to request an interview through the now-defunct CBP One app.

As a journalist, I wasn’t allowed inside the shelter, so I spoke with migrants outside. Connell’s story stopped me. He was a little older than me and had worked as an emergency medical technician and first responder for a local government in Venezuela. Ironically, this proximity to power was his only way out: While the regime typically uses document retention to control its employees, his specific status allowed him to bypass the very repression that keeps others trapped. One night, with passports in hand, he escaped with his wife and two kids, including a newborn baby.

What he told me still gives me chills.

He spoke of hunger so widespread it reshaped daily life. Of the impossibility of finding food, medicine or basic supplies. Of why Venezuela was no place to raise a child. He described toddlers climbing trees to pick mangoes because there was nothing else to eat. Children digging through trash. Teenagers willing to trade their bodies for a piece of chicken.

Connell was prepared. He had skills, experience and determination. Even so, his journey was brutal and uncertain. The last time we spoke, he was in Chicago, having successfully entered the United States after his interview at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. I haven’t heard from him since.

But I thought of him — and of the many Venezuelans I’ve met over the years — when news broke that dictator Nicolás Maduro had been apprehended on Jan. 3. I also thought of those who never made it out, those who died as a result of a brutal and inhumane regime.

What worries me now is what comes next.

Instead of extending a meaningful lifeline to people who are still resisting inside Venezuela — or those who were forced to flee — we are once again hearing rhetoric about mass deportations. A Trump administration eager to remove Venezuelan migrants ignores the reality that many of them are not economic opportunists but survivors.

Venezuelans did not leave their country lightly. They left because staying meant hunger, violence and hopelessness. If there is anything I have learned from years of listening, it is this: Where there are Venezuelans, there is bulla — but also resilience. The question is whether we are willing to listen to their stories, or whether we will choose to silence them by sending them back.

Navarro is community opinion editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune. She is a transfronteriza who lives on both sides of the border.