O Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport was the immigration control post with the largest number of departures (1,545 people), followed by the Atanasio Girardot International Bridge, in the city of Cúcuta, in the department of Norte de Santander, with 852 people.
The Venezuelan government announced that it would close land borders from Friday, causing an unexpected interruption in the flow of people at the border between the two neighboring countries.
In Colombia, where more than 2.8 million Venezuelans are registered, only 7,012 are registered to vote on Sunday due to difficulties registering at consulates.
Given the impossibility of voting for millions of Venezuelans in Colombia, the opposition issued an appeal in Bogotá for anyone who can travel to their country of origin to participate in the election.
Despite the airspace remaining open, several international representatives, including former Venezuelan presidents, were unable to travel from Panama, and a delegation of MEPs from the European People’s Party (EPP), including Sebastião Bugalho, and Spanish MPs from the Popular Party (PP, right, opposition) were also held back.
On Friday, Angélica Lozano, a senator from the Green Party, and the former mayor of Bogotá also denounced the ban on entry into Venezuela.
Venezuela, a Latin American country rich in oil but struggling with an unprecedented economic and social crisis, is holding presidential elections on Sunday, after a tense electoral campaign marked by a feeling of uncertainty about the future.
Around 21 of the 30 million Venezuelans are called to the polls to choose between 10 candidates, but the presidential race will be between two names: the current President Nicolás Maduro (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), heir to former leader Hugo Chávez and who is seeking to win a third consecutive six-year term, and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia (United Democratic Platform), a retired diplomat who replaced in the electoral race the charismatic opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, declared ineligible by the authorities in Caracas.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Maduro considered that an opposition victory could lead to a “bloodbath”, while the opposition coalition promised to fight “until the end”.
Polls show the opposition is ahead in voting intentions, but some observers believe the fight between Maduro, 61, and Gonzalez Urrutia, 74, is much closer than estimates suggest.
Plunged into an unprecedented economic crisis, seven million Venezuelans have fled the country, which has a significant community of Portuguese and Portuguese descendants.
The majority of the country’s population lives on a few dollars a month and the health and education systems are completely degraded.
Read Also: Opposition denounces “wave of repression” in several Venezuelan states
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2605845/mais-de-5200-venezuelanos-regressaram-a-partir-da-colombia-na-ultima-semana
