Caracas.- More than 913,000 Venezuelan migrants returned to their country with the government plan Return to the Homeland since its creation in 2018, among them, the 190 deportees from the United States who arrived on Monday on two flights to the Caribbean nation, reported this Wednesday the Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello, without specifying the figure.
With these two recent operations, the official said, the "first Venezuelans" returned from the "new stage" of this repatriation program that became a Great Mission last year and is carried out through the state airline Conviasa.
"The first step was taken, there was no new development, fortunately, and I hope that this process continues and that the Venezuelan model, the model of the Vuelta a la Patria plan that President Nicolás Maduro has put into practice since 2018, becomes a model," he said in his weekly television program broadcast by the state channel VTV.
In his opinion, Migrants from the Caribbean country have been "victims" of a "huge media campaign" and "unprecedented" which was intended to "demolish the self-esteem of Venezuelans" and which - he said - "was paid for" with money from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
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The Chavista administration also points to the "criminal sanctions" against the South American country as one of the main causes of the migration, according to its calculations, of "almost 2,500,000" Venezuelans, of whom, it claims, "1,250,000 have returned."
For its part, the Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V), led by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), indicates that some 7.89 million people left this country.
