After coming to Venezuela from Barranquilla, Colombia, in 2003, Villanueva, 55, found steady work with decent pay at an aluminum factory, a job that came with a free house and other benefits. "There's a health clinic over there," he says, pointing down a dusty road lined with haphazardly constructed brick houses. "The Cuban modules are nearby too," he adds, referring to the free clinics, started by Chávez, that use Cuban doctors in poor neighborhoods. "They give me free pills for my hypertension."
The U.N. estimates some 200,000 Colombians are indeed in neighboring Venezuela as war refugees. But as many as 75% of the more than 3 million to 4 million Colombians living there have come for economic reasons. Juan Carlos Tanus, president of the Association of Colombians in Venezuela, says that Venezuela's advantages include jobs and subsidized food and health provided in the past 10 years by Chavez's socialist government. In fact, Tanus notes, from 2002 to 2008 — even as Colombia got safer thanks to President Alvaro Uribe's offensive against leftist guerrillas — the number of Colombians emigrating to Venezuela each year rose from 21,200 to 93,000.
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