Washington Uses Venezuelan Migration as a Political Weapon: Truth Mission
Migrants in a U.S. detention center. Photo: EFE
April 3, 2025 Hour: 2:41 pm
The promotion of migration flows is a form of unconventional warfare to pressure Latin American sovereign governments.
This week, the Truth Mission Research and Analysis Group published a report showing that Venezuelan migration, a phenomenon that has captured international headlines in recent years, cannot be understood as a mere population displacement driven by economic factors.
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Authored by Diego Sequera, the report “Notes on Migration, Diaspora, and Trains” highlights that Venezuelan migration is part of a U.S. destabilization strategy orchestrated against the Bolivarian Revolution. Sequera unravels the threads connecting U.S. foreign policy to the Venezuelan migration phenomenon, offering a critical perspective on a topic often oversimplified in international media.
Sequera supports his research with the studies of Professor Kelly Greenhill, an expert in international security and a faculty member at Tufts University, who coined the concept of “weaponized migration.” In her book “Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy,” Greenhill documents how certain state and non-state actors use human displacement as a tool of political coercion.
“What Greenhill proposes is essential to understanding the Venezuelan case. The deliberate promotion of migration flows can be used as a form of unconventional warfare to pressure adversarial governments and create crises in target countries,” Sequera said.
The Venezuelan analyst emphasizes that migration continues to be instrumentalized as part of the repertoire of U.S. sanctions, which have severely impacted the Venezuelan economy since 2014. He establishes a direct correlation between the intensification of U.S. sanctions and peaks in Venezuelan migration.
“It is no coincidence that the largest migration flows coincide with periods of heightened coercive measures,” Sequera points out.
Citing data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Sequera argues that sanctions were responsible for at least 40,000 deaths in Venezuela between 2017 and 2018, when financial and trade restrictions against the country intensified.
“Sanctions have not only devastated the economy but have also created the ideal conditions to encourage migration. That is precisely the objective: to generate internal pressure against the Venezuelan government by making the population suffer.”
Biased Narratives About the ‘Humanitarian Crisis’
The Truth Mission report also analyzes how media narratives construct the idea of a “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela, which has served to justify foreign interventions while systematically omitting the role of U.S. sanctions in generating the crisis.
“Most mainstream analyses of Venezuelan migration start from a misleading premise: they attribute the phenomenon exclusively to the ‘mismanagement’ of the Bolivarian government, deliberately ignoring the impact of unilateral coercive measures,” Sequera points out.
The researcher highlights how Greenhill identifies this pattern in numerous historical cases where hegemonic powers have used migration as a destabilization tool. “What we see in Venezuela is a textbook example of how to create conditions that drive mass exodus and then use it politically,” he states.
The Aragua Train, Another Narrative Instrument of Washington
Sequera also reveals how the Trump administration has instrumentalized the criminal group the Aragua Train to serve its geopolitical objectives.
“After a phase of headline maturation and conveniently placed narratives, once again, the reports follow. In the case of the Aragua Train, the United States and the second Trump administration rely on what could be considered a guiding document: the report published by the Heritage Foundation on December 5, 2024, ‘Derailing the Aragua Train,’” he pointed out.
Authored by Joseph Humire, the Heritage Foundation— a think tank that has provided policy guidelines for both Trump administrations— deliberately exaggerates the reach of the Aragua Train, transforming assumptions into “irrefutable confirmations” and speculation into “categorical truths,” Sequera explains.
The document establishes three fundamental premises that Sequera identifies as part of the anti-Venezuelan narrative promoted since 2015: the Aragua Train as a product of Venezuelan government policies that merge the state with criminal networks; its alleged goal of territorial control and the imposition of criminal economies; and the call for a hemispheric joint action against this network.
“The report claims that prisons function as ‘power centers for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s geopolitical objectives,’” Sequera cites, adding that Humire describes the Aragua Train as “the perfect proxy and an asymmetric warfare tool to destabilize democratic countries while maintaining a high degree of plausible deniability.”
Double Standards in U.S. Migration Policy
In his report, Sequera exposes the blatant double standard in U.S. migration policy, emphasizing that “While Washington promotes conditions that force Venezuelans to migrate, it simultaneously criminalizes the migrants who arrive at its border.”
This contradiction reveals the political instrumentalization of the migration phenomenon since “They are not interested in the well-being of Venezuelans. Migration is simply another tool in their arsenal to pressure the Bolivarian government.”
In response to this strategy, Sequera highlights the efforts of the Venezuelan government to counteract these effects, including programs such as “Return to the Homeland,” which facilitates the return of migrants, as well as economic measures to stabilize the economy despite international restrictions.
“What is at stake is not simply a migration phenomenon, but the sovereignty of a nation in the face of hybrid warfare tactics,” concludes the Venezuelan analyst.
teleSUR/ JF
Source: Mision Verdad
