What happens when a half-million people abandon their city

Maracaibo: It was once a thriving metropolis in the heart of oil country in Venezuela.

That city, Maracaibo, no longer exists.

Today, the city is rife with abandoned houses, some of which look like bombs were dropped on them, because homeowners tore windows and roofs off to sell for scrap before they took off on journeys to Colombia, Chile and the United States. Middle-class neighborhoods are filled with for-sale signs and overgrown yards.

Fewer cars drive down the streets, and fewer criminals are around to steal them. Christmas dinners, once packed with noisy relatives, are lonely affairs aided by webcams.

Nearly 8 million people -- more than one-fourth of the population -- have fled Venezuela in recent years, driven out by economic misery and political repression.

Nowhere is that exodus more staggeringly acute than in Maracaibo, which has been hollowed out by the loss of about a half-million of its 2.2 million inhabitants -- many of them adults in their late teens to middle age. (The population figure is based on surveys, since the government has not conducted an official census in more than a decade.)

"The first blow you sense is the loneliness," said Maracaibo Mayor Rafael Ramírez. "It's devastating, and affects you emotionally."

Maracaibo, which is in western Venezuela and remains the country's second-largest city, has been battered by a collapsed economy, routine blackouts, and persistent shortages of gasoline and water.

Many working adults searching for jobs elsewhere have left their children home until they can establish a firmer footing, leaving grandparents to fill the breach.

"Right now, this is a country of old people," Antonio Sierra, 72, said as he sat in his living room lounge chair and looked through a window at a block where many of the houses are empty.

All three of Sierra's adult children are gone. One of his sons left behind a baby, Rafael, who is now 7. Last year, even the boy's teachers left. Sierra and some other grandparents took up a collection to pay a replacement $2 a week to teach first grade.

Maracaibo is bracing for another wave of departures in the coming months given the country's plunge into instability after a national election in July that the autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed to win even though vote tallies showed he lost decisively.

His government has unleashed a brutal campaign against anyone challenging the electoral results, and with the United States among the many countries that have rejected Maduro's claim to victory, the U.S. sanctions that have deepened Venezuela's economic woes are not likely be eased anytime soon.

A mass departure of the country's dwindling numbers of doctors, nurses, sanitation workers and bus drivers would be even more brutal in Maracaibo, where so many who filled those jobs are already gone.

Ramírez longs for the days when companies held conferences in Maracaibo and when the state oil company produced so much petroleum at a nearby lake that its workers enjoyed a comfortable standard of living.

"This was an oil city, a city that had designed a convention center so that all industries, people, the oil industry, would come here," Ramírez said. "That city is not going to come back, but it has to be reinvented."

The sharp increase in migration from Maracaibo, Ramírez said, began about a decade ago. It followed the collapse of the state oil company, which was caused by corruption, a lack of investment and political purges of skilled employees -- and exacerbated by US sanctions.

An enormous nationwide power outage in 2019 triggered days of looting in Maracaibo and tipped the scales. The state of Zulia, which includes Maracaibo, borders Colombia, making leaving on foot easier for people who could not afford airfare. (The power went out again Friday, when a major blackout cut electricity nationwide.)

A recent survey commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce in Zulia showed that nearly 70% of the families interviewed had an immediate family member outside the country.

At least half of the people questioned for another survey commissioned by Maracaibo's mayor said they were considering leaving, a number considerably higher than the overall national rate of 30% of survey respondents who expressed a desire to go, said Efraín Rincón, a political consultant who conducted the surveys.

"Faced with this reality, we see that the portion of the elderly is growing, but not organically -- not because there are more older people," Rincón said. "It's because there are fewer young people."

Much was riding on the election July 28, when Maduro faced off against Edmundo González, a retired diplomat who took the place of a more popular opposition candidate barred by the government from running.

Polling-machine tallies collected by electoral observers showed that González won easily. The government says otherwise, but more than a month after the race, officials have yet to provide precinct-level election results.

Many people, even longtime supporters of Maduro's mentor, former President Hugo Chávez, had counted on an opposition triumph to start reversing the country's fortunes and lure their loved ones back home.

María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who was prevented from running, made that a cornerstone of González's campaign.

Instead, the government quickly cracked down on demonstrations in the days after the election -- arresting about 2,000 protesters, activists, journalists and politicians.

With the Maduro government showing no inclination to negotiate a solution to the electoral crisis, migration levels later this year are "going to be dramatic," said Mirla Pérez, a professor and social science researcher at the University of Central Venezuela. "Right now, people are strategizing how to leave."

Pérez said migrants typically first leave their children behind and then send for them later, once they are financially situated. Eventually, they send for their parents, too.

A recent trip to the airport in Maracaibo found a number of people, including several older adults, leaving for good to join their adult children in Spain and Argentina. Taxi drivers who frequently make the three-hour trip to the Colombian border reported long lines of Venezuelans leaving on foot.

In Maracaibo, hundreds of thousands of older people earn around $3 a month in retirement benefits, according to a nonprofit, Convite.

Although most people receive some money from relatives abroad, Rincón's surveys showed that the average amount was less than $25 a month.

The Maduro administration, in an apparent acknowledgment of the problem, created a Ministry for Older Adults to guarantee access to health care, food and public services.

Sierra's wife, Marlenis Miranda, 68, said she managed the household around the schedule of when power and water were available.

Electricity comes on maybe once a week, sometimes every other week. When the water turns on every week or so, she fills four huge barrels to use the rest of the week, and reuses bathwater to flush the toilets.

Their son, a former police officer, is driving for Uber in Texas, while their daughter is working at a nursery school in Vermont.

Another son, who in 2013 was the first in the family to leave, is a graphic designer in Barcelona, Spain.

"Sometimes, you look outside on a Saturday and say, 'Oh, how this looks so alone,'" Miranda said. "So alone."

After two of Edith Luzardo's children left Maracaibo for the United States, Luzardo, stayed behind raising her two grandchildren. When The New York Times visited her in July, she lamented how only five people were left in a house where 24 people once lived.

She debated whether to wait to be approved for entry into the United States under a special Biden administration migration program, but in August, it was briefly suspended.

Two days after the suspension announcement, Luzardo decided to take the treacherous route many Venezuelans have followed, through the Darién Gap, a jungle path connecting Central and South America.

"I'm not afraid," said Luzardo, 66. "I'm strong."

Low on money, Luzardo, one of her sons and the two grandchildren she had been raising were stranded for a few days in Costa Rica before finally making it to Mexico, according to her son.

Xiomara Ortega, 68, said so many people planned to leave if Maduro won that she expected to be the only one left in her Maracaibo neighborhood. Two of her daughters are in Colombia, and Ortega is raising six grandchildren.

On most days, she has no water -- or even money to buy any. She sweeps neighbors patios for extra cash and steals electricity from a nearby utility pole. She looked around at the sparse low-income settlement and counted three empty houses.

"There's no one left," Ortega said. "I will stay."