By Lucinda Elliott, Corina Pons and Oliver Griffin
MONTEVIDEO/MADRID/BOGOTA (Reuters) – Venezuelan migrants in South America and Europe say they have struggled to register to vote in their country’s presidential election on Sunday, with only a small fraction able to overcome a range of bureaucratic hurdles.
Though more than half of the nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have emigrated in the last decade are of voting age, official figures from the country’s electoral authority show just under 68,000 are registered to vote abroad.
Voter advocacy groups pointed to problems ranging from closed consulates to requests for varied – and what they said were unnecessary – documents.
The Venezuelan embassies in Buenos Aires, Bogota, Madrid and Montevideo did not respond to requests for comment on voter difficulties. The Venezuelan Ministry of Information did not respond to a request for comment on why overall registration figures were so low.
This vote is seen by much of the Venezuelan diaspora as the country’s last chance of rescuing its economy from acute crisis and their last chance to eventually return home.
A quarter of the population has fled economic turmoil under President Nicolas Maduro, the largest refugee exodus in recent history recorded in the Americas.
Maduro, who is seeking a third term in Sunday’s election, has presided over an 80% collapse in gross domestic product since taking office in 2013, and even former core supporters have been voicing support for the opposition.
The Spanish capital of Madrid is expected to be the largest site of foreign voting by Venezuelans on Sunday.
However, many Venezuelan citizens in Spain have been left out of the process. They were asked by their embassy to show at least 12 months on their Spanish residency permit to be eligible, said several voter advocacy groups.
But people granted residency for humanitarian reasons have their permit renewed annually, making it impossible for them to meet the requirement.
“I only managed because I have Spanish citizenship, the vast majority don’t,” said Eriana Zuleta, 26, who registered in Madrid.
Five Venezuelans Reuters spoke to in Spain also said they were unsure which polling station they had been assigned to.
In total, some 24,772 are expected to vote in Spain, a fraction of the nearly half a million Venezuelan migrants in the country.
“This campaign is different because it is the people who are mobilized, not the political parties,” said Lorena Lima, 28, who said she was unable to register in Madrid and held a five-day hunger strike in protest in March.
In Uruguay, meanwhile, the Venezuelan electoral authority’s registry system required potential voters to upload a valid five-year residency permit.
But initial residency permits are only granted for three years, said Gustavo Becerra, who helps migrants with the registry process in Montevideo. Fewer than 500 of the 33,000-strong Venezuelan community in Uruguay had managed to sign up, he added.
In southern Brazil, voters said they faced a different challenge – getting to the Venezuelan embassy polling station, some 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) away in the Brazilian capital.
“I’d like to vote, I always did in Venezuela,” said Hector Lopez, 47, who lives in Porto Alegre and had registered. “But it is too far and I don’t have the money to travel to Brasilia.”
‘BRING THEM HOME’
By far the largest number of Venezuelans who have left their country have settled in neighboring Colombia – roughly 2.8 million.
But only 7,000 of those have been able to register to vote, according to figures from the country’s electoral authority.
Juan Carlos Viloria, a Venezuelan doctor who helps run a migrant advocacy group in the Colombian port city of Barranquilla, said he did “everything possible,” including gathering documents and going in person to his local consulate, but was denied registration. He said he did not know the motive behind the rejection.
In Argentina, the Venezuelan embassy was closed due to technical problems for two weeks of the one-month period in which citizens were supposed to register, opposition campaigners said.
Mariana Pinero, who lives in Buenos Aires, was unable to register because the registration had closed. But she was undeterred.
“I couldn’t register, so I booked my ticket to Venezuela,” said the 45-year-old.
The opposition boycotted the 2018 contest where Maduro won what the United States and others say was a fraudulent reelection, but this time the opposition coalition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez has encouraged supporters to cast ballots.
Gonzalez, who has attracted significant support, has tapped into voter desire to reunite families splintered by migration, saying migrants may return if change comes and touting “we’ll bring them home” as a slogan.
Carmen Chourio left Venezuela three years ago, and now lives in Porto Alegre, working as a cleaner. She cried as she recalled the hardship that made her leave her home.
“Thirty years of bad government made life impossible,” she said.
She does not have the right documents to vote, even if she could make it to Brasilia.
(Reporting by Corina Pons in Madrid, Oliver Griffin in Bogota and Lucinda Elliott in Montevideo, additional reporting by Candelaria Grimberg in Buenos Aires, Vivian Sequera in Caracas and Diego Vara in Porto Alegre; Editing by Julia Symmes Cobb and Rosalba O’Brien)
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