Abstract
In this article we analyze how refugee policy was managed and used as an ideological tool in the fight against “communism” by the far-right government in Brazil (2019-2022). Focusing on refugee flow data in 2019 and 2020, we discerned a pattern of preference for Venezuelan refugees, which respectively also meant the virtual elimination of refugee status for Haitians, or what we call a “cutting operation.” We also examined recent policies related to refugees, some of them linked to the COVID-19 crisis, to indicate the essentially ideological (and non-humanitarian) use of the category of refugee in the markedly xenophobic context of general government policies.
Nesse artigo analisamos como o refúgio foi gerenciado e também usado como uma ferramenta ideológica de luta contra o “comunismo” pelo governo de extrema direita no Brasil (2019-2022). Com foco em dados do fluxo de refugiados em 2019 e 2020, estabelecemos uma análise do padrão de preferência pelos refugiados venezuelanos, o que respectivamente significa também uma virtual eliminação do refúgio aos haitianos, no que chamamos de uma “operação de corte”. Por outro lado examinamos políticas recentes relacionadas ao refúgio, algumas delas ligadas à crise do COVID-19, para indicar o uso essencialmente ideológico (e não humanitário) da categoria de refúgio num contexto marcadamente xenófobo das políticas gerais do governo.
Since the beginning of the last decade, Brazil has undergone intense political changes. After the onset of the economic crisis of global capitalism between 2007 and 2008, and which was indicative of a systemic crisis of global neoliberalism (Kotz, 2009), the country, which went relatively unscathed at the time, witnessed an increasing escalation of political and economic instability, and the growth of far-right conservative political movements. Since the beginning of the century, we have seen an association between the Workers' Party (PT), the largest left-wing party in the country, and unpopular moral agendas, such as the decriminalization of abortion and the defense of the rights of LGBTQIA+ populations (Fontes, 2012; Romancini, 2018). Furthermore, we also saw, especially on social media, a link between left-wing militants, drug trafficking (Moura Brasil, 2016), Hezbollah (C. V. de Azevedo, 2018), and Iran (Farah, 2009), reproducing theories published by the United States Department of Justice, U.S. think-tanks, and the United Nations (Humire 2020) about left-wing activists, parties, and governments in South America, especially the Venezuelan government (MacLeod, 2018; Ramsey and Smilde, 2020).
Simultaneously, Venezuela became the target of economic embargoes from the United States as of December 2014, following the approval of the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act (Law No. 113-278). The Venezuelan government has often been described as dictatorial, averse to democracy and human rights, in addition to being described as a narco-state associated with organized crime. In March 2015, President Barack Obama declared the Venezuelan regime a threat to U.S. national security (Mason and Rampton, 2015). Between then and 2020, the number of Venezuelans in Brazil jumped from around a thousand to more than 260,000 (Peduzzi, 2021).
We defend the idea that refuge operates as a cut-off category that occupies the discursive scenario relating to human displacement in the country, to the detriment of the category of “migration” (Machado 2021; Branco-Pereira 2021). This process implies a series of political, economic, and social consequences. Only one of these will be highlighted here: the fact that state control of refugee regulation can shape migratory phenomena to its own political will, if not in the “practical space” of the world, that is, in controlling the flow of desirables versus undesirables, at least in terms of the production of speech and action, as well as propaganda, in which the state appears to be in control of the process. This appearance of “being in control” has varied impacts that we will quickly analyze here, specifically by connecting the most recent policies linked to migration and refugee policy in Brazil—within the far-right government that took power between 2019 and 2022—to political discourses of systematic discrimination against the left as a whole.
This article is divided into three sections. First, we analyze the ideological processes that intertwined moralistic anti-left and anti-communist discourses in Brazil. Next, we present a socio-demographic contextualization of Venezuelan and Haitian migration, analyzed in more detail in this article. Finally, we examine the effects of these ideological processes on recent Brazilian migration policy, and the effects of an anti-communist orientation and anti-leftist stance on state eligibility and asylum-granting mechanisms in Brazil. We draw comparisons between Venezuelan and Haitian migration, two main migratory flows in the country during the period under study, and analyze the effects of state control regimes and legal categorization of types of migration.
The New “Old Anti-Communism” And Anti-Leftism in Brazil
Anti-communism and anti-leftism justified the implementation of several dictatorships and exceptional regimes in South America. In Brazil, the phenomenon is labeled anti-petismo, 1 or a rejection of the Workers' Party (PT) that governed the country between 2003 and 2016 (and was again victorious in the 2022 elections). This narrative, as formulated by the far right resembles the historical phenomenon of anti-communism.
The development of systematic anti-petismo was a social phenomenon of stereotyping and “transference,” adopting here an Adornian perspective on the development of the authoritarian personality (Adorno, 2019). That is, transference in Freudian terms, as the author argues when trying to explain the formation of authoritarian personalities in sociological contexts, since the traditional object of Brazilian racism could be transformed into an apparently political and deracialized prejudice (as well as one that is de-classified, in the sense without social classes). Anti-petismo was fostered by the Brazilian media and generated a market for conservative intellectuals and their anti-PT books (Davis and Straubhaar, 2020). These gradually dominated the political scene and became a focus for the transfer of various prejudices, such as those based on race, class, and gender. An entire conservative arsenal was stimulated with the development of anti-petismo as a political tool to delegitimize PT governments.
This diffuse and dispersed anti-PT hatred generated by conservative forces against individuals and practices linked to the left, such as racial equality policies, combating LGBTQ-phobia, and social inequality, was also the fuel for the rise of the Brazilian extreme right (Fuks, Ribeiro, and Borba, 2021). By shifting from anti-communism to anti-petismo, and then back to anti-communism, this political trend created the possibility of widespread rejection of anything that appeared “left-wing” (Bohoslavsky, Motta, and Boisard, 2019). If this anti-communism, despite its historically ingrained roots in Brazilian society (Motta, 2002), seems somewhat out of place at this time, it is not possible to deny the impact it has had on a form of politics based on opposition to positions associated with the left, which ultimately allows everyone who is not in the extreme right to be classified as left-wing.
Anti-communism became neutral outlet for prejudice and persecution, that is, without it being considered political intolerance. Politicians could openly speak of “communists” as the enemies to be persecuted, including in proposals to outlaw parties, agendas, demonstrations, and symbols considered to be left-wing. Indeed, this became a state position, typical of the nature of institutional functioning. The ideologues of this political current organized their discourses around a communism that had to be fought, just as conservative religious leaders referred to communists as “evil forces.” Every symbolic investment of the far-right government was in criminalizing communism and leftism, creating a conspiratorial world of communists who controlled “culture,” “power,” and the “economy” in general (Iamamoto, Mano, and Summa, 2021; Levy and Sarmento, 2020). As an example, on his Twitter account, Olavo de Carvalho, a prominent ideologue of the Brazilian far-right movement, stated that “the expansion of the communoglobalist [communalism combined with globalism] force in Brazil reaches terrifying dimensions.” 2 We cannot deny here the similarity between this process and the constitution of anti-Semitism as a political tool for the political rise of the Nazi party in Germany, as Adorno (2019) reminds us.
With the shift to the left in Brazilian politics at the beginning of this century, the emerging extreme right (Goldstein, 2019) followed the same script of associating left-wing governments with drug trafficking, organized crime, and unpopular moral agendas. In 2016, President Dilma Rousseff (PT) suffered a parliamentary coup due to the intensive use of lawfare (Fortes, 2019) and the support of the military and members of the Brazilian judiciary (G. Ribeiro, 2016). In April 2018, former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva was arrested while leading in the polls for that year's elections (R. Ribeiro, 2018). Jair Bolsonaro, icon of the Brazilian extreme right, was then elected, and judge Sérgio Moro, responsible for the arrest of his main opponent, became his Minister of Justice. Moro was also responsible for migration policy and the National Committee for Refugees, a collegial body responsible for granting or not granting refuge in Brazil. Later, in 2020, the Brazilian supreme court would declare Judge Sérgio Moro as biased, annulling all cases against the former president under his responsibility, including the one that had kept Lula in prison for 580 days (Carvalho and Palma, 2021).
Refugee Policy in the Context of the Extreme Right
The argument we present here, which draws on polysemy and the fantasy of state control over displacement that the category of “refuge” offers, is that refuge is subsumed under the “symbolic core of anti-communism.” In practice, controlling refugee status served to combat communism. The policies for welcoming Venezuelans were a form of expression of anti-communism under the aegis of humanitarian reception. In this sense, they were viewed as exemplary in a government that fought against communism. Recognizing the right of refuge for Venezuelans gained a clear political and ideological connotation (in a similar situation to that of Cuban refugees in the U.S.) (Current, 2008; Masud-Piloto, 1996).
The reasons alleged by the new government for granting refuge collectively to Venezuelans could equally be extended to Haitians. Nevertheless, Haitians are almost always denied refugee status. When this refugee facilitation policy is granted only to Venezuelans, it as part of a strategy that does not, in fact, take the Venezuelan humanitarian situation into consideration, but rather focuses exclusively on the political situation. In this case, policies facilitating access to protection guaranteed by the category of refugee became a powerful symbolic device designed not only to attack the Venezuelan regime, but also to engage and satisfy far-right followers in their opposition to communism.
We will employ two arguments to support our hypothesis. One involves the comparison between the migration/refugee numbers of Haitians and Venezuelans. The other deals specifically with the official justifications for Venezuelans' refugee situation, the legal measures taken regarding this migratory flow, and an analysis of some of the measures related to the far-right government's refugee policy. First, we will look at some numbers on the presence of Venezuelans and Haitians in Brazil.
A Brief Sociodemographic Context of Venezuelan and Haitian Immigrants
Haiti was the first independent country in Latin America. Since the consolidation of its independence process in 1804, the country has experienced dozens of political calamities, foreign interventions, economic crises, and major natural disasters. In this context, Haitian migration has been characterized as a founding and structuring element of that society (Bersani, 2017; Bersani and Joseph, 2017). The arrival of migrants from Haiti in Brazil, which intensified since 2010, is considered part of the fourth migratory flow of Haitians within the American continent. The determining factors for its outbreak were the Brazilian military presence, the actions of Brazilian religious and secular organizations, and the increase in migratory restrictions on Haitians in countries such as France and the United States (Level and Jarochinski Silva, 2020). Between 2000 and 2022, more than 169,000 Haitians received National Migration Registry (RNM) status in Brazil, whether on a temporary or permanent basis (Observatório das Migrações em São Paulo, 2023).
Venezuela, on the other hand, did not experience large migratory flows to other countries until the last decade. The migration of Venezuelans specifically to Brazil was, until then, mostly made up of a relatively small contingent of highly qualified professionals (Domeconi and Baeninger, 2018). After Hugo Chávez's rise to power, the country initially experienced a period of expansion of social policies financed by the rise in the price of oil on the international market, but then suffered from economic instability resulting from the fall in the value of oil. Additional factors were the destabilization actions against the Chávez and Maduro governments, the coup attempts, and the economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union, which initiated a period of political chaos and economic scarcity in the country during the last decade.
According to the UNHCR, by November 2022 more than 7 million Venezuelans had left the country. 3 Thus, the Venezuelan migratory flow to Brazil, the fifth country to receive the most Venezuelans (Sanjurjo, 2023), can be divided into three phases: 1) members of the upper classes, who left Venezuela between 2015 and 2016; 2) members of the middle class, who constituted the majority of those who left the country in 2017 and; 3) lower class and more socially vulnerable groups, both Indigenous and non-indigenous (IPEA, 2021).
Both groups are characterized, on average, by low and intermediate levels of education (Chaves-González and Echeverría-Estrada, 2020; Cavalcanti, Tonhati, Dutra, and Oliveira, 2014). Venezuelans speak Spanish, in addition to Indigenous languages, such as Warao and Pemon. Haitians speak mostly Creole, French, and Spanish, the latter generally derived from previous migrations to the Dominican Republic (Cavalcanti, Tonhati, Dutra, and Oliveira, 2014; Bersani, 2017). Racial and linguistic criteria are not officially taken into consideration when granting refugee status or other categories of migratory status, but they became present in everyday narratives about refugees and have practical consequences on the lives of these people in Brazil (Branco-Pereira 2021; Faustino and Oliveira, 2021).
Regarding migratory status, in Brazil refugee status guarantees permanent residence to its beneficiaries. The granting of refugee status, in this way, differs from the standard of granting residence to migrants in the country. Between 2011 and 2020, approximately 73.1 percent of immigration statuses granted to immigrants in Brazil were temporary, compared to 26.9 percent for permanent residences (Table 1).
Type of Residency Conceded to Immigrants in Brazil
Source: Table prepared by the authors based on data from the International Migration Observatory and SISMIGRA (Federal Police 2024).
Finally, it is necessary to highlight that both Haitians and Venezuelans have entered through land borders in the north of Brazil, which is a recent development. Data from the Federal Police indicate that between January and November, 2019, 13,511 Haitians entered through the border between Brazil and Guyana—namely, in the state of Roraima, the same state of entry for Venezuelans—which represents a dizzying increase in relation to three years prior, when only 1,009 Haitians entered through this border in total (Level and Jarochinski Silva, 2020). The change in Haitians' entry strategy, favoring arrival in a state that currently has a huge, militarized apparatus for welcoming immigrants—including mixed refugee camps (Machado and Vasconcelos, 2021)—may indicate an attempt to benefit from the same mechanism for granting migratory rights to Venezuelans.
Comparisons
CONARE (National Committee for Refugees) approved Normative Resolution No. 29 4 in June 2019, which enabled the use of the Sisconare system as a way of processing asylum requests. Something new was created with this ordinance: the possibility of “establishing accelerated or simplified procedures” (Article V §1º I) and “deciding to waive the interview” (article V §1º II). This instrument served both to speed up asylum granting processes and “also applies to manifestly unfounded requests” (Article V §2). In other words, the ordinance allowed for both the acceleration of acceptance and denial of requests.
This measure—leaving aside the implications of the possibility of accelerating denials—served as the basis for the decision to facilitate and accelerate the acceptance of Venezuelan asylum requests. The Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública (Ministry of Justice and Public Security, MJSP) then released Technical Note No. 3 5 , which outlined a scenario of the existing situation in Venezuela based on international media sources (El País, The Guardian, Exame, Al Jazeera, BBC News, Bloomberg etc.) and from institutions such as UNHCR, Amnesty International, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, UN Human Rights Observatory, Human Rights Watch, and other Venezuelan sources (research groups, universities and media). The country’s situation was described as one of “widespread violence and massive violation of human rights.” The report concludes with UNHCR's recommendations on the need for collective acceptance of Venezuelan refugees, highlighting that it considered the situation to be one that generates refugees under the terms of the Cartagena Declaration. The MJSP's guidance was to comply with the recommendations of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and adopt simplified procedures for recognizing the refugee status of Venezuelans. Based on the report, the processes of accelerating the granting of refugee status for Venezuelans began to occur. In 2020 alone, there were 24,880 Venezuelans accepted (Silva et al., 2021: 22), while another 20,902 were accepted in 2019 (Silva, Cavalcanti, Oliveira, and Macedo, 2020: 20). In other words, in the first two years of the Bolsonaro government, 98.6 percent of the refugee statuses granted in the country were for Venezuelans. And of the total number of asylum requests accepted in Brazil in 2020, 98.1 percent were granted to Venezuelans (Silva et al., 2021: 28). It can be said, therefore, that the far-right government's refugee policy was aimed exclusively at Venezuelans.
The production of Technical Note No. 3 and the consequent actions taken (under pressure from UNHCR and IOM) constituted a novelty in the Brazilian scenario, and we can consider the facilitation of access to refuge for Venezuelans to be a step forward. However, the situation in Haiti was no less desperate, and it could also be considered a country in which there was “generalized violence and systematic violation of human rights.” Data from the 2019 Human Rights Watch report (one of the main sources of the government's technical note on Venezuelans) on Haiti, for example, indicates political instability, systematic problems of human rights violations, humanitarian crisis, widespread protests, resurgence of gang violence, murders involving the Haitian national police, natural disasters, lack of decent housing conditions since the 2010 earthquake, food insecurity, cholera outbreaks, gender-based violence, discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community, and abuse of child labor, among others (BINUH and UNHCHR, 2021).
The military presence of the UN (MINUSTAH) between 2004 and 2017, under the leadership of Brazil and with a mission to “stabilize the country,” is proof of the situation “of widespread violence and systematic violation of human rights.” The UN continued its mission in Haiti with a smaller military force (MINUJUSTH) until October 2019, at which point Technical Note No. 3 had already been produced. After this period, the UN installed BINUH, an administration office to help the country advance in “political stability and promotion of human rights.”
Technical Note No. 3 highlights that the number of Venezuelans leaving the country “is the most striking reflection of the deterioration of human rights and the socioeconomic situation in . . . Venezuela.” The same could be said of Haiti. However, the Table 2 below reveals the positioning of the Brazilian state. The CONARE data tool, 6 which gathers refugee numbers in Brazil between January 2017 and June 2020, presents the following data:
Refugee Applications (June 2017-June 2020)
Source: CONARE.
As we can see, only 0.1 percent of Haitian applications were accepted. For Haitians, the Brazilian state simply denied them refugee status, and, to cope with the flow, created alternative legal categories, such as the humanitarian visa (Fernandes and Faria, 2017), or, currently, the temporary visa for humanitarian purposes. 7 The visas are temporary in nature and account for the largest number of immigration status concessions in Brazil. Even the late renewal of a humanitarian reception ordinance requires the applicant to renounce their right to seek asylum. For all intents and purposes, despite the humanitarian situation in Haiti, Brazil did not recognize Haitians' right to refuge. For Venezuelans, the situation was completely different as absolutely no requests were rejected. The 16.9 percent of closed cases were mainly due to the withdrawal of applicants who probably used Brazil as a transit point before heading to other countries, or because they sought another form of legalization, such as the extension of the Mercosur agreement for border countries.
If we compare the numbers of Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants, we will also see the discretionary effects of the policy choice in favor of Venezuelans. Here we have a dimension of how Venezuelans and Haitians enter. The former are almost equally divided between entering the country requesting asylum or as immigrants covered by the extension of the Mercosur national mobility agreement (extended to all countries bordering Brazil). But Haitians preferentially applied for asylum (66.5 percent), even though practically all requests were denied. This was due to the limited number of visas that were granted during the period of validity of Interministerial Ordinance No. 10 of 2018. 8
Ordinance No. 10, decreed at the beginning of 2018, allowed the entry of Haitians on a residence visa for humanitarian reasons specific to Haitians and stateless people. These included those who requested a visa in Haiti and allowed those who were on already on Brazilian soil by that date to apply in Brazil. However, few visas were issued and Haitians migrated anyway, requesting refuge. This created a backlog of would-be “undocumented” immigrants as their asylum claims were denied. Ordinance No. 12 of 2019, issued by the Bolsonaro government, repeats the 2018 ordinance, again allowing those on Brazilian soil to apply for authorization, provided they entered the country before its publication. From January 2020 until the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis later that year, the granting of visas was undoubtedly more efficient. In practice, these ordinances were mini amnesties, which highlight a form of management aimed at hindering the entry of Haitians, and not facilitating it, as in the case of Venezuelans. The state produced stocks of undocumented immigrants and decided on a specific basis how to deal with them, rather than create a lasting solution.
As seen in Table 3, as of January 2020, the entry of Haitians began to take place mainly in the “migration” category, which is governed by Ordinance No. 12 of 2019. Thus, for Venezuelans, two regularization options were readily available. For Haitians, only by the end of 2019 was a new ordinance created, and, even then, it included a form of mandatory withdrawal of asylum requests made previously by Haitian applicants. It is likely that the granting of visas will be greater precisely due to the impossibility of those who received them to request refugee status. The government evidently decided to reserve the refugee category mainly for Venezuelans with a clear exclusion of Haitians from this category. The “migration” category was aimed to solve an unavoidable problem: what to do with the thousands of Haitians who would, sooner or later, be left without documents in the country?
Comparison of Venezuelans and Haitians - Entries in Brazil (Jan 2019 – June 2020)
Source: Observatório das Migrações Internacionais (Observatory of International Migration, OBMigra) 9
Refugee Policy as Anti-Communism in Brazil
One of the first measures taken by the far-right government upon taking office in 2019 was to withdraw Brazil from the Global Pact on Migration. A few months later, in June 2019, CONARE revoked the refugee status granted in 2003 of three Paraguayan citizens who had been arrested and tortured by the police of that country; they were initially granted asylum on the grounds of well-founded fear of persecution. The CONARE decision stated that “the facts that led to the granting of refuge in 2003 no longer exist, and there are no concrete reasons to conclude that, in Paraguay, given the current stability of its institutions and the vigor of its democracy, the appellants will not have the right to due process and a fair trial, where they face charges for committing a common and non-political crime.” 10 At the time, Sérgio Moro declared that Brazil would no longer be “a refuge for foreigners accused or convicted of common crimes” (Veja, 2019).
This decision was taken following an early 2019 request from Paraguayan President Marcio Abdo, who is ideologically aligned with the far-right government. The principle of non-refoulement, which guides the granting of refugee status, was not upheld and extradition would have been the next step, but the Paraguayans anticipated the decision and left the country to avoid being deported to the country that, 13 years earlier, the Brazilian government acknowledged as having tortured them. The incident demonstrated that, during the Bolsonaro government, the instrument for adjudicating asylum requests was not independent of political considerations.
Subsequently, in July 2019, Minister Sérgio Moro issued Ordinance No. 666/19, 11 which, after severe criticism, was reissued in a mitigated but no less hostile form, under number 770 /19. 12 The ordinance made numerous references to immigrants and refugees who could be considered “dangerous people” that threatened “national security.” It provided for summary judicial deportation proceedings, which, in practice, prevented migrants from requesting refuge upon arriving in Brazil, contravening international treaties on refugees to which the country is a signatory. The notion of “dangerous person,” elastic par excellence, is designed to encompass anyone who may be considered a dissident or undesirable in the context of a state becoming totalitarian and the persecution of specific social and political groups.
Even though the subsequent ordinance (No. 770/19) removed terms such as “summary deportation,” included the mandatory notification of cases of “dangerous” immigrants to the Federal Public Defender’s Office, and increased the defense period granted to immigrants from two to five days on the grounds of guaranteeing “criteria of transparency and full defense,” it still contained several references to “dangerous people.” These may be people with ongoing criminal investigations in their countries of origin, but not yet convicted. In cases of requests for asylum, this wording is problematic: many asylum seekers who arrive in Brazil do so because they suffer persecution of various forms in their countries of origin.
Discriminated Venezuelans and Refuge as a Symbolic Instrument
President Bolsonaro often spoke out against the entry of migrants into Brazil. In 2015, in an early campaign for the presidential election, he said that “if they reduce the number (of the Armed Forces) there will be fewer people on the streets to face the criminals of the MST, Haitians, Senegalese, Bolivians and all the scum of the world that, now, the Syrians are arriving (sic) too. The scum of the world are arriving in Brazil as if we didn’t have enough problems to solve” (R. Azevedo, 2015). Once president, in an interview with the U.S. channel Fox News, he said “the majority of immigrants do not have good intentions,” referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall on the border with Mexico (Resende, 2019).
In the context of these anti-migration measures and positions, however, the reality of the Venezuelan flow demanded responses from the government, which came in the form of anti-communism, xenophobia, and control. In response to the growing influx of Venezuelans, the Brazilian government began Operation Acolhida (Machado and Vasconcelos, 2021; Branco-Pereira, 2021) in 2018; this was carried out by the Brazilian Armed Forces in partnership with myriad national and international organizations, including the UNHCR and the IOM. The operation, despite its civilian partners, was largely militarized and polemical with controversial results 13 based on two main axes: the reception of Venezuelans who crossed the border with Brazil, and their resulting “voluntary” internalization, in which these migrants were sent to other Brazilian states as a way of relieving pressure on the state of Roraima, where they entered.
In early 2020, the Operation took an openly anti-communist stance (Casa Civil, 2020), adopting the motto “socialism excludes, Brazil welcomes.” On January 16 of that year, the elected president, flanked by several ministers, such as Sérgio Moro and Onyx Lorenzoni (then Minister of the Civil House, responsible for coordinating the Operation), stated that Brazil “will continue with its doors open to refugees,” concluding with: “Brazil and Venezuela above all, God above all!” Lorenzoni followed the same line of argument as the president, stating that Brazil, a “free country,” has the obligation to welcome nationals from a nation “torn apart by socialism,” reiterating that “what the left did to Venezuela was what it wanted to do with Brazil.” The press release said that “the Bolsonaro government outlines strategies to continue dealing with the consequences of Bolivarian socialism.”
That same month, 16 days after the announcement made by the federal government, the IOM, a partner in Operation Acolhida, signed a partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This same agency was involved in sending humanitarian aid to Venezuela in 2019. An internal report proved that agency employees were told that the operation should “reinforce the credibility of the provisional government” (Folha de São Paulo, 2021) of Juan Guaidó, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, self-proclaimed president of Venezuela and recognized as such by the U.S. government in 2019. Additionally, around US$76 million was directed to support Venezuelan migrants in Brazil (U.S. Embassy Brazil, 2020).
In the meantime, the Brazilian government began to formally and collectively recognize Venezuelan migrants as refugees. As we saw above, in June 2019, CONARE, the collegiate body responsible for evaluating asylum requests in Brazil, recognized the widespread violation of human rights in Venezuela, thus accelerating the process of granting refuge exclusively to nationals of that country. This criterion was used to concede refugee status to more than 46,000 Venezuelans, making Brazil the leading recipient of Venezuelan refugees in Latin America (Silva et al., 2021; UNHCR/ACNUR, 2020).
But even so, the ambiguity of the government’s immigration policy gained momentum during the pandemic, showing that although refugee policy is used for ideological purposes, a general position of aversion to any immigration persists. In effect, while Venezuelans were “ideologically” welcome, in practice they were as discriminated against (or more so) as other immigrants. At the same time that it produced—and continues to produce (UOL, 2021)—a discourse welcoming Venezuelans and rejecting the theoretically socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro, the Brazilian government suspended the right of Venezuelan nationals to request asylum during the pandemic through Ordinance 120 14 in March 2020. This ordinance closed the land borders with Venezuela, the first to be closed after the pandemic reached Brazil, under the pretext of protecting Brazil's health security in the face of Covid-19.
An example of the far-right government's selective migration control was the March 2021 invasion, by the Federal Police, of a reception center maintained by the Pastoral dos Migrantes, a migrant shelter in Pacaraima, a city on the border with Venezuela. Wielding heavy weapons and anonymized by using hoods, police officers sought to deport 55 women and children hosted by the shelter on the grounds that they had entered the country illegally and were promoting crowding in disregard of health rules at the time. The person responsible for the shelter, Sister Ana Maria, was taken to the police station to give a statement and accused of a crime against public health. After the action, migrant women and children were placed under the supervision of Operação Acolhida (CMD/ABA, 2021).
Subsequently, selective discrimination against Venezuelan nationals would be reissued in at least 30 new ordinances that targeted Venezuelan migrants. (Bernardes Ribeiro and Sena, 2021; Chaves, 2020). The ordinances included exceptions for foreigners with residence permits in Brazil, who could return to the country even in the face of customs restrictions, except for Venezuelan nationals. They could not enter even with a residence permit in the country, as is the case of those whose asylum requests had been granted.
Furthermore, the establishment of refugee status stipulates that those granted asylum cannot return to their countries of origin without authorization from the Brazilian government. These individuals, who received a guarantee of protection from the Brazilian state, could not return to the country that persecuted them and threatened their lives. In the case of Venezuelans, however, it was very common for many of them to return to Venezuela repeatedly (Vasconcelos 2018), particularly during the pandemic. Thus, not only were these refugees unable to return to Brazil due to the selective closure of borders, but they also lost their refugee status upon returning to Venezuela, and were unable to reapply.
These facts demonstrate that the granting of refuge served a symbolic and semiotic purpose of reinforcing the anti-leftist and anti-communist narrative, when, in practice, the Bolsonaro government and the Brazilian state made it difficult for new migrants from that country to enter, and, therefore, for new asylum requests to be made. Furthermore, the government rendered null the very effect of the principle of non-refoulement, a pillar supporting the refugee category as a category of protection against potential human rights violations. Venezuelan migrants who crossed the border during this period and were prevented from requesting asylum were deported in summary proceedings. In 2020, 2901 immigrants were deported following the closure of land borders (Souza and Leite, 2021).
Conclusion
One defining feature of contemporary immigration management in Brazil is the central role played by political considerations—including anti-communism—in determining which groups are designated as privileged beneficiaries. In the case of Venezuelans, with the granting of more than 46,000 refugee statuses by 2020, a clearly selective change can be observed. At the same time, the humanitarian visa included in the new Brazilian migration law was significantly restricted by the law's own regulations (Machado, 2021). Thus, privileges are granted momentarily at the same time that other obstacles are created. This scenario is a puzzle whose result is the specific preference for some immigrants over others. And even “ideal refugees,” such as Venezuelans, can be simultaneously accepted and negatively discriminated against, as measures during the pandemic demonstrate. During the Bolsonaro government, this constellation of Brazilian regulations is clearly marked by anti-communist politicization and racialization: Haitians and African immigrants/refugees were overlooked in the processes of facilitating legalization (Silva Jarochinski and Alves, 2017), while Venezuelans had their access to permanent residence status facilitated through the granting of collective refugee status as a way to “mitigate the deleterious effects of socialism.”
Venezuelans clearly benefitted in relation to others, in a scenario of radical anti-communist political polarization of the new government. This was a political instrument rather than an effectively humanitarian issue, as refuge for Venezuelans is more of a tool for political pressure on the Venezuelan government rather than a humanitarian policy. After all, recognizing the problem of widespread violence and disrespect for human rights in Venezuela and not in Haiti is contradictory. Additional evidence that the policy toward Venezuelan immigration is not derived from humanitarian concerns is the fact that, during the Covid-19 crisis, the Brazilian government restricted Venezuelan migration, including discriminating only against Venezuelans when crossing borders. During the pandemic, the view of immigrants as a “contagion” to be avoided predominated, specifically for Venezuelans who were negatively discriminated against in this ordinance (Branco-Pereira and Teixeira, 2024).
Linked to this process are other security dimensions that were tested in the flow of migrants from Venezuela, such as its management through the military and Operation Acolhida (Machado, 2021). The militarization of this flow, together with the political perspective of the Venezuelan refugee question, added to the militarization of the border with Venezuela. This created an obviously ideological situation, in which the ghosts of far-right anticommunism operated as axes of actions that had practical effects: discrimination against Haitians (and many others), securitization of the flow of Venezuelan migrants, concentration of powers and resources in the military, and the use of the category of refuge as a cut between “good for refuge” and “bad for refuge.”
Venezuela occupied a central place in Brazilian international policy of unconditional approximation to Washington’s positions in its attempts to “restore democracy in Venezuela,” as stated by Bolsonaro during the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the state of Roraima during the military Operation Acolhida, aimed at welcoming Venezuelans (on September 18, 2020). This is further evidence of how the flow of migrants and refugees from Venezuela was a political not a humanitarian issue.
On the same day, on Twitter, the president declared: “The visit of the Secretary of State @SecPompeo to Operação Acolhida, in Boa Vista/RR, in the company of @ItamaratyGovBr (Minister @ernestofaraujo), represents how aligned our countries are in the search for the common good.” Soon after, he posted an image that read: “Operation Acolhida internalized 1,300 Venezuelans who fled the communist regime in August.” 15
This post on the social network reflects an apt summary of what we have argued: the relationship between Venezuelan displacement and the fight against the “communist” regime in Venezuela was made explicit and public, in addition to the clear alignment with U.S. policies designed to destabilize Venezuela.
Footnotes
Notes
Igor José de Renó Machado is an anthropologist and Professor at the Federal University of São Carlos. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7811-2641. Alexandre Branco-Pereira is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Brasília. 
. Sean Purdy is a professor of the history of the Americas at the Universidade de São Paulo.