Criminal Venezuelan Migrants

As if Venezuelan migrants to Peru didn’t face problems enough, Óscar Pérez, the president of an NGO in that country called Unión Venezolana en Perú, suggests that the “rise in criminality” in Peru is part of a plot by Nicolás Maduro to “discredit migrants.”

According to a local Peruvian news portal, Pérez finds the frequency and violence of crimes by Venezuelan “social predators” in Perú suspicious, and sees a “political motivation” behind it:

“We are concerned by how common this is, there is not a single day in the news without a Venezuelan acting in a criminal way (…), this seems something predesigned with the aim of discrediting the exodus and the migrant population refugee in the country, and thus create a problem for the Peruvian state.”

Pérez also asked Peruvians to realize that the “immense majority of Venezuelans here in Peru are good people.”

In July this year, opposition leader María Corina Machado suggested that the Venezuelan “regime has managed to infiltrate some of these groups of migrants with what they call ‘social movements’, individuals whose objective are to destabilize democracies in our region.”