Venezuelan Emigres Find Common Ground in Anger

Since 2004, 3,778 Venezuelans have applied for asylum in the United States, and nearly half their cases have been approved, according to U.S. immigration officials. In the three years before Chavez took office, there were 328 applications, and fewer than 20 percent were approved.

An estimated 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants, students, refugees and their families live in the United States.

"Some of them have been persecuted directly, and others are fleeing the system that makes them less free," said Elio Aponte, a former Venezuelan scientist and software company official. He lives in Miami and heads an exile organization that helps new arrivals apply for asylum, usually after landing at Miami International Airport. Most Venezuelans arrive there on tourist visas. "We are helping 80 to 100 people every month, and more are coming every day," Apontesaid.

Miami is also a longtime nerve center of Cuban exile politics, and Venezuela's problems have resonated sharply within its Cuban community. U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican and Cuban emigre, has asked the Bush administration to offer Venezuelan refugees the same fast-track rights to asylum that Cubans have received for years.

There is no indication that such a legal change will be made, however, and relations between Caracas and Washington, though strained, are more complex than the entrenched hostility between the United States and Fidel Castro's Cuba. For one thing, the United States is a major consumer of Venezuelan oil, the country's major resource.

Moreover, human rights groups in the United States, although strongly critical of the media crackdown and other steps by Chavez, have stopped short of labeling him a dictator. They describe his regime as systematically politicizing state institutions and weakening the rule of law but not as using official violence to quash dissent.

"People in Venezuela do not get killed or disappeared like in Colombia or put in prison for exercising free speech like in Cuba," said José Miguel Vivanco, a Washington-based official of the group Human Rights Watch. He said that the Chavez government had used the court system to harass opponents and that the TV shutdown was "a very serious setback," but that there was still room for opposition groups to function. "We should not jump to the stereotype that this is a one-party or totalitarian system," he said.

But from the viewpoint of exiled officials such as Luis Giusti, the former head of Venezuela's national oil company who lives in Washington, the Chavez revolution has destroyed his country's institutions and is well on the way to snuffing out its democratic traditions.

"It is a national tragedy," Giusti said in his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And for students such as Carla Bustillos, 27, who is studying law at American University, the recent shutdown of Radio Caracas Television was a shocking act that propelled her into action.

"I grew up in a democracy, and so did my parents," she said while picketing outside the Venezuelan Embassy on June 1. "We grew up watching RCTV. Then on Sunday night, the screen suddenly switched to an imposed socialist channel. That's why we are protesting. If we lose the freedom of speech, everyone, including Chavez supporters, will lose it, too."