Producing immobility in Venezuela’s context of large outmigration

Guest post by Erick Moreno Superlano. Erick is a DPhil researcher in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford. His work lies at the intersection of political geography, migration studies, and social theory. 

Political actors in Venezuela construct narratives about the past, and make promises about the future, to manufacture a moral world in which emigrating is felt as betrayal to the nation. These moral worlds produce borders that operate through self-regulation rather than coercion. In 2023, I explored the impact of those moral worlds, through remote interviews conducted with members of Venezuela's socialist communes. The communes are participatory organisations where community members – known in Spanish as comuneros – govern their territory with the support of the state. They were established by former president Hugo Chávez in 2007 with the promise of granting political and material power to the poor, and they offer a unique case study for the relationship between state subject-making and containment efforts – the control over people’s mobility. 

The commune promises a socialist future of justice and political agency to people who have been politically and spatially marginalised in the past. That promise hinges on all supporters remaining in their territories to govern the land that once belonged to a socioeconomic elite, and was expropriated and distributed among 4500 communes to manage across the country. Comuneros see this reconfiguration of power relations as a spatial and temporal dispute with the bourgeois elite that – in the government’s narrative – ruled the country before the Chávez’s socialist revolution. When commune members emigrate, the collective advancement toward the promised socialist future supposedly stalls. I explore these dynamics in detail in a recently published article in Migration Studies.

Framing departure as ‘betrayal’

During my fieldwork, André, a comunero, described how he became aware of the power of discourse in his government-supported commune in a rural town of Venezuela. He confessed, slightly embarrassed, that in communal assemblies and everyday interactions, he had been replicating a popular line among government supporters: “those who leave Venezuela do it because they do not love their country”. Eventually, he said he realised he was inflicting pain on his fellow commune members, including his own family, as he had been labelling as unpatriotic people who were forced to emigrate by the economic crisis. He said he saw how his words had divided people and caused suffering, and has since changed his speech. Words do not merely describe an independent social world – they (re)produce it. In André’s commune, political and social discourses are devised to influence the emotions and actions of its members to keep them from emigrating.

André realised that he had been an unwitting instrument of border-making, labelling fellow commune members as traitors for leaving and making people feel that the decision to emigrate was a moral failure. His experience captures how governments can produce immobility without physical coercion, through the education of consent. Venezuela has lost a third of its population to emigration since 2014. The government has not built a wall to stop its supporters from leaving – despite the negative impacts emigration has on state legitimacy and capacity to govern and advance its illiberal political agenda. Instead, the government has constructed a moral world in which departure is framed as betrayal and staying as political duty.

Tomás, another government supporter, told me how his commune took over garbage collection in the municipality after the private company doing it charged high prices and did a poor job. The government provided them with a truck, and each family contributed one dollar a month. When the commune started receiving tonnes of plastic it could not process, Tomás and his fellow comuneros presented a project to the Ministry of Communes, which provided them with recycling machinery. They needed a warehouse to put the machines in but could not afford one. They found an idle warehouse that belonged to a businessman who had left the country. Tomás called him a “rent leech” – someone who does not work but owns land and extracts his tenants’ labour. They occupied the warehouse without permission and put it into production. For Tomás, the most effective strategy to prevent comuneros from emigrating is to generate employment in the commune. These occupations are understood by comuneros as acts of social justice that accelerate the arrival of the socialist future. They produce spaces where people feel synchronised with a collective temporal project led by the state, and bound by a moral duty to build socialism and propagate its values among the community. Martín, who joined his commune at seventeen, said he works there “not for the financial remuneration but for love”. He feels a profound responsibility to stay in the country and build the socialist future. This is his way of resisting what he calls the “damned current” of capitalism so that the next generations can have a post-capitalist future.

‘Better’ to suffer at home than abroad

Comuneros also position themselves as projects of international significance. “So many people have reached out to us from the North, Asia, Europe, and many parts of the world because they see in the commune an alternative for the world,” Tomás told me. Comuneros narrate the commune through the language of anti-capitalist and decolonial movements, perceiving themselves as international political actors who play a fundamental historical role for the global left. This cosmopolitan discourse provides the sense of being members of a global community without the need to move from their remote towns in Venezuela. However, the implication is that whoever leaves the commune forfeits that global membership. Their political and historical agency dissipates abroad as they are absorbed into the international labour market as cheap labour. As President Maduro famously warned on national television, whoever emigrates ends up “cleaning toilets in Miami”. The border here is constituted by the paradoxical conviction that the commune is the only place from which one can be a full political member of the world, fixing comuneros in their commune.

Fear plays a central role in the immobilisation of government supporters. Harold, another comunero, told me that there is a prevalent discourse in his commune: “Instead of suffering hardships abroad, alone, it is better to do it in your country, with your family, and in your house.” Similarly, Gladys explained me how her sister went to Colombia with her daughter but returned because it was too hard for them. “The offer outside of Venezuela that they make to us is not as good as it seems. There is a lot of trafficking of women, xenophobia, labour exploitation,” she said. By echoing her sister's bad experience abroad, Gladys amplifies fear of emigration in her genuine effort to protect her fellow comuneros from leaving. In doing so, she moves the physical border deeply into the everyday space of the commune and establishes an internal border – an affective border – that discourages departure before anyone attempts to cross it. 

Doris, a teacher in her commune, put it starkly: “They sell us the American dream to exploit us and turn us into cheap labour. In other countries, you are worthless. Rights don't count for you. That's why it's better to stay here to develop the country.” The border is no longer where Venezuela ends. Doris has internalised a moral border that regulates how she feels about mobility. The experiences of commune members who emigrated, circulated as discourses of losing political agency and fears of exploitation, xenophobia, precarity, and violence abroad, have inscribed the boundaries of the nation into the bodies of those who stayed. At the end of our interview, I asked Tomás if there was anything he would like to add. He told me I should research the xenophobia suffered by Venezuelans abroad. “It's an invisible issue. People suffer in silence abroad. Those pains are ours too,” he said, his voice breaking. “Because our family, our brothers and sisters, are suffering.”

During my fieldwork, I interviewed seven comuneros remotely across several communes, as well as a former Minister for Communes and a Venezuelan researcher with extensive knowledge of the communes' political significance. This was before Venezuela's political landscape was radically disrupted. In July 2024, Maduro committed electoral fraud to retain power, which triggered political persecution against his opponents and a new wave of emigration. In January 2025, the captured, accusing him of narcoterrorism. His vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, widely believed to have facilitated the capture, now heads a transitional government collaborating with Trump’s administration  the resources and direction of the nation to the main ally of the bourgeoisie surrendered the resources and direction of the nation to the main ally of what they see as the country’s bourgeoisie.

The comuneros I interviewed stayed rooted to the land because they believed fixity preserved their political and historical agency in a class struggle over the national future. They (re)produced immobility through internalising the government discourse about patriotic attachment and moral duty to build the socialist future, even as they painfully watched family members leave the country. Now that the government have surrendered that future, this configuration may be recalibrated among comuneros and turned against the government that authored it.

For a fuller account of how the state temporalises space as a governance technology in Venezuela's communes, read Erick Moreno Superlano’s recently published article in Migration Studies.

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