Accused of socialism and communism, Venezuelan-Americans say supporting Biden carries stigma
On their way to join a Mar-a-Lago-bound “Caravan for Racial Justice” event in June, the Vivas family decided to document their West Palm Beach outing with a selfie. The photo shows Jose ‘Cucho’ Vivas in a car with his wife and their two children. The family is seen smiling for the camera, holding up signs that read “Venezolanos con Biden 2020” — Venezolanos with Biden 2020.
Vivas, a retired IT specialist based in Lake Worth, moved from Venezuela to the U.S. over 40 years ago, and supports Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president.
“We took that photo because we were proud to be participating in the caravan, and showing our kids that you can’t take democracy for granted,” he said.
But the snapshot from the family’s day of protest now triggers bittersweet emotions: When the photo was uploaded online — courtesy of a tweet from Vivas’ niece — criticism and abuse from fellow Venezuelans poured in.
“We are talking about thousands and thousands of tweets, including death threats, and accusations that my family and I are pedophiles,” said Vivas.
Critics called the Vivases socialists, communists, and chavistas — all labels the family strongly rejects — and inveighed against Biden’s “pro-Maduro agenda.”
“Why don’t they go back to Venezuela to enjoy their beloved socialism?” asked a Twitter user. “Trump should deport them,” said another. “They are spitting in the face of the people suffering in their home country by supporting an unabashed leftist like Biden.” And even: “Why doesn’t someone kill them?”
The abuse soon migrated to other social media platforms.
On Instagram, the meme account Venezueladice, which boasts over 2.5 million followers, posted the Vivas family selfie with the caption: “Exporting socialist misery to the rest of the world.” On TikTok, a Miami-based user wearing a Trump shirt uploaded a video that begins by flashing the Vivases’ photo.
“Venezuelans with Biden? You bring shame to your country,” the TikToker goes on to say. “You disgust me.… What Democrats want is the continuation of the [Maduro] dictatorship.”
The video has racked up more than 46,000 views so far.
THE STIGMA OF BEING VENEZUELAN AND PRO-BIDEN
Although Vivas was surprised and unsettled by the scale of the online backlash, he says attacks against Biden supporters have been gradually spreading within South Florida’s Venezuelan community in the lead-up to November’s presidential election.
With polling data suggesting a commanding Trump lead among the state’s estimated 55,000 eligible Venezuelan voters — and with virulent right-wing, Spanish-language misinformation campaigns fanning the flames of polarization among Latinos — Venezuelan Democrats say their minority status carries significant social stigma.
“That’s the way things are. People are afraid to say something pro-Biden,” Vivas said. “This is a close-knit community. Almost everyone knows one another ... You say you are pro-Biden and automatically you get branded a traitor to our country, because there’s this notion that only Trump can save Venezuela.”
Adelys Ferro agrees. The Venezuelan-American homemaker first moved to the U.S. nearly 15 years ago. She now lives in Weston, the Broward County city dubbed “Westonzuela” for its large Venezuelan community.
“The situation has gotten to a point where if I wear a Biden T-shirt to go to the supermarket, people look at me with such aggression that I almost feel afraid,” she said. “There’s a visceral hatred out there.”
Openly displaying or voicing support for the Democratic ticket incurs the risk of being shunned.
“There’s fear of not being accepted, of being unfriended online, of no longer being invited to things. There’s fear of being seen as someone who supports socialism,” Ferro said. “We’ve reached such levels of fanaticism and cult-like behavior that if you step away from that cult, you get condemned. And that terrifies people.”
The silver lining, according to pro-Biden Venezuelans, is that the social dynamics currently at play in their community could translate into higher levels of Venezuelan support for Biden come Election Day than is currently being registered by pollsters, much like “hidden” Trump voters helped give the president an upset win in 2016.
“There’s pro-Biden people that are in the closet. It’s a very curious thing, but also very understandable,” said Ferro. “We are still not the majority, but there are more of us than it might seem. I know of people who will vote for Biden, but no one will ever find out.”
COUNTERING THE ‘SOCIALISM’ LABEL
Among the most recurring frustrations cited by pro-Biden Venezuelans is the need to dispel, in conversations with compatriots, the nearly omnipresent myth that Joe Biden is either a socialist or a vessel for a socialist agenda, despite the former vice president’s extensive political track record as a moderate.
That widespread mislabeling is the result of a long-running effort by the Trump campaign to brand Democrats as socialists, a message that has received particular prominence in the president’s Latino voter outreach.
Spanish-language news sites and Facebook groups are banging that same drum.
There has been an onslaught of fake stories on social media claiming that Biden is receiving support from Nicolás Maduro’s socialist party in Venezuela, as well as from U.S. communist leaders. Also in heavy rotation online are photos of Biden and Maduro smiling warmly at each other during former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s 2015 swearing-in ceremony.
“Republicans insist and insist and insist, under the premise that a lie repeated 1,000 times becomes the truth, that Joe Biden is socialist,” said Ferro. “But that’s just not the case.”
Misleading as they may be, invocations of socialism can be effective in Florida races. In 2018, both Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott leaned on relentless anti-socialism rhetoric to eke out wins in their respective campaigns for governor and senator.
Samuel Vilchez Santiago recognizes that. The 23-year-old Biden supporter moved with his family from Venezuela to the Orlando area 10 years ago as asylum seekers. He currently works as the Florida campaign manager for All Voting is Local, a nonprofit that watches for voter suppression.
“This message that Democrats are socialists is based on a lie … but we know that it works in Florida. It helps close the margins,” said Vilchez Santiago. “And that doesn’t surprise me. Our community brings a lot of collective suffering from our home country, and it’s difficult to disassociate yourself from the reality of what’s happening in Venezuela and the role that socialism played helping bring about that reality.”
Claims that a Biden administration would represent a shift toward Venezuelan-style socialism are more likely to be believed, Vilchez Santiago explained, by more recent immigrants who have both a more rudimentary understanding of the American political system as well as more first-hand experiences with the agony of day-to-day life in Maduro’s Venezuela.
“When we came here in 2010, the situation was already difficult. But it’s a different context from the people who had to live through Maduro’s government. The suffering is different. I think the Venezuelans who made their way here more recently have suffered more than we did; they see things differently,” he said.
“The reality is I haven’t been in Venezuela for 10 years. Maybe if I were to go back it would impact me in such a way as to make me distrustful of certain candidates here based on their political ideology. Maybe that’s why Trump’s message is getting to people.”
A MISINFORMATION ECOSYSTEM THAT ‘TAKES YOUR BREATH AWAY’
The vilification of Biden and other prominent Democratic figures in widely propagated Spanish-language conspiracy theories has become a much-discussed phenomenon, and one that experts say could influence the outcome of Florida’s election.
The claims are so incendiary — pedophilia is a recurring theme — and the rhetoric so charged that pro-Biden Venezuelans report being frequent targets of online harassment, because others find their political identification abhorrent.
According to Ferro, toxic misinformation isn’t limited to digital media: the Weston-resident says she often hears conspiracy theories on South Florida’s Spanish-language radio airwaves.
Earlier this month, Carines Moncada, a Venezuelan news anchor on Miami-based Actualidad Radio, accused a Black Lives Matter co-founder of practicing witchcraft, and said racial justice protesters are “vibrating with the devil.”
“Anyone who votes for Biden would unfortunately be supporting that,” she added. “They are voting for anarchy, they are voting for violence.”
Also this month, Actualidad Radio’s competitor, Radio Caracol, apologized for airing 16 minutes of paid programming that contained Biden attacks laced with anti-Black and anti-Semitic language.
“Audio clips of those comments on the radio end up on lots of WhatsApp groups, don’t ask me how. From there people take out phrases that then become memes on Facebook,” said Ferro. “You could write a book about this stuff. And my respect to them, because it’s really well done. It takes your breath away. It’s fake news on top of fake news on top of fake news. And if you try to respond, they attack you viciously.”
“That’s what’s fomented by all the misinformation,” she added. “There’s no space for debate. It’s aggression. It’s ‘Let me see how I can destroy you in any way possible.’”
Although Vilchez Santiago recognizes that the onslaught of conspiracy theories is an issue that affects every single Latino community, he says there is likely “a higher incidence of fake news in the Venezuelan community.”
Vilchez Santiago’s theory is that, having grown accustomed to state-run news sources and censorship under Hugo Chavez and Maduro, Venezuelan immigrants come to the U.S. with little to no media literacy, along with an inherent mistrust of traditional publications.
“If you think about what the information ecosystem is like in Venezuela, the situation we’re in at the moment here in the U.S. makes sense,” he said. “In Venezuela, what you hear on TV or on the radio is regulated by the government, so people get their news through digital media sites, many of which don’t have actual journalism. So then you come to this country and you’re primed to turn to alternative news sources, as opposed to traditional outlets. And that’s how you end up spreading misinformation, and sharing things that aren’t based in reality.”
But the way Venezuelan-Americans in Florida consume and share content might also depend on which part of the state they choose to settle down — and whether their adopted hometowns have the potential of becoming misinformation echo chambers.
“I think the situation is different in Orlando than in Miami,” Vilchez Santiago, an Orlando resident, said. “In Orlando we don’t have a neighborhood that’s like Doralzuela, where an overwhelming majority of the population is Venezuelan. We live alongside other communities, and that gives us access to different types of information.”
SHATTERED UNITY
When Alexander Diaz-Rivera, a Caracas-native now living in Fort Lauderdale, first learned Trump was getting into the 2016 presidential race, he welcomed the news of a businessman running for office. But that enthusiasm didn’t last long. Diaz-Rivera soon started to perceive what he described as similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and Chavez’s polarizing brand of populism. He’s backing Biden for president in November.
“When I see President Trump speak, I hear Hugo Chavez,” he said. “He promotes hatred and division … It’s the same rhetoric that Chavez was known for.”
On the many Facebook groups Diaz-Rivera is part of — including “Venezuelans in Florida” and “Venezeluans in the U.S.” — pro-Trump political posts have come to dominate the discourse.
“And as soon as I leave a comment on these posts, I start getting attacked pretty viciously,” he said. “They call me socialist, they call me communist … It’s exhausting.”
It’s not just individual people getting caught up in the discord.
On Sep. 10, Kamala Harris’ visit to Miami included an unannounced stop at Amaize, a fast-casual Venezuelan restaurant located in a Doral strip mall. The visit by Biden’s running mate was short — Harris got her arepa order to-go — but it spawned immediate controversy, as hundreds of comments poured in on social media calling the restaurant “chavista” and threatening boycotts.
“Down with communism, down with the left. I’ll never step foot in this restaurant again,” reads a comment on Amaize’s Instagram page, below a photo of grilled meat and corn.
“I’m never coming into your restaurant again,” reads another. “You disgust me. To support Biden is to support communism.”
In response to the backlash, Andres Garcia, an Amaize executive, announced just one day after Harris’ visit that had he been made aware of the senator’s plan to buy food at the restaurant, he would have said no.
According to Vivas and Ferro, both of whom have long been active in pro-democracy Venezuela activism in the U.S., the fissures in the Venezuelan community that the 2020 election is laying bare belie the years of unity that had until now been the norm.
“The unity that we used to feel was incredible. We used to be a monolithic entity, despite all of our different political affiliations,” said Ferro.
Starting in 2014, Ferro got involved in a project that helped provide medical supplies and gas masks to the protesters taking part in Venezuela’s then-nascent wave of political demonstrations and civic insurrection.
Miffed about her Biden support, some of the people Ferro collaborated with on that effort have now taken to harassing her online, including sending messages saying they hope for her to be raped and killed.
“The only thing Trump has achieved for Venezuela is to destroy what unity we had left,” she said. “It’s incredible.”
Although she doesn’t see the community’s polarization dissipating anytime soon regardless of what happens in the election, Ferro says that a Biden win — and an ensuing show of strong leadership from his administration helping bring about regime change in Venezuela — could alleviate tensions.
“Hopefully at that point most of the fighting will go away, and everyone will be able to keep enjoying the fruits of American capitalism,” she said. “At least that’s what I hope will happen.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
