For Older Venezuelans, Fleeing Crisis Means ‘Starting From Zero,’ Even at 90<br />“You work toward your golden years, you save,” she said, “and then everything goes toward survival.”<br />There was no alternative, she said, but to leave: “To stay is to die.”<br />In October, Carmen María González de Álvarez reversed her parents’ journey from Europe.<br />“We want to live in tranquillity,” Ms. Reyes said in the couple’s homey four-bedroom house in the rolling hills<br />of Los Teques, a suburban area south of the capital where they have lived since they were married 50 years ago.<br />“I feel like a foreigner in Venezuela now; it’s not the Venezuela I know,” Ms. Mata said in an interview at a bakery in Caracas near her home.<br />“But at the moment it’s impossible.”<br />In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans — by some estimates as many as two million — have migrated abroad,<br />with the tendency accelerating in the past several years during the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Nicolás Maduro.<br />“Very hard, very intense,” said Fernando Galíndez, 75, who left Venezuela with his wife and a son several years ago and resettled in South Florida.<br />Who’s going to give me work?”<br />The family also had to tear themselves from the close-knit cocoon of their extended family<br />and their community in the Caracas municipality of El Hatillo, where Mr. Álvarez was a civic leader.<br />“All our life is here, we have our roots, our house, we’ve lived nicely, we have our family,” Ms. Reyes paused.
