In August 2018, the international press reported on a massive exodus of Venezuelans fleeing the famine and chavist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro. There were 18,000 to cross the border each day. At the time, the UN predicted that there would be 5.3 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees throughout Latin America by the end of 2019. There was a major crisis.

Alas! These figures were pure propaganda: the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees has just published its official statistics as at December 31, 2018.
– 57% of the world’s refugees came from Syria (6.7 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million) and South Sudan (2.3 million).
– Venezuelan refugees represented only 341,800 people (many of whom have since returned to their country).

The campaign of media disinformation, relayed in all the allied states of the Pentagon, was initiated in preparation for the destabilization operation targetting the Venezuelan State that began in December 2018. It was intended to convince the nationals that they no longer had a future at home and and the people abroad that President Maduro was illegitimate.

This is a clear application of the theory of "migrations as weapons of war" [1].

Read on the same topic : “United States Announces Additional Humanitarian Assistance in Response to Venezuelan Regional Crisis”, Voltaire Network, 4 September 2019.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] “Strategic Engineered Migration as a Weapon of War”, Kelly M. Greenhill, Civil War Journal, Volume 10, Issue 1, July 2008. Understanding the Coercive Power of Mass Migrations,” in Weapons of Mass Migration : Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, Kelly M. Greenhill, Ithaca, 2010. “Migration as a Coercive Weapon : New Evidence from the Middle East”, in Coercion : The Power to Hurt in International Politics, Kelly M. Greenhill, Oxford University Press, 2018.