Violence and Migration. The Role of Police Killings in the Venezuelan Diaspora

During the 2010s, Venezuela underwent the worst and deepest crisis of any nonwar- ridden country in modern history. The failure of the socialist utopia, the economic crisis, the increasing lack of primary resources, and the dictatorial turn have caused the third, most dramatic, and complex Venezuelan out-migration wave in the past decade. Drawing on exclusive and georeferenced survey data collected in Venezuela and providing information on 21,382 individuals, this paper investigates the role of the police force militarization in the Venezuelan migration crisis of 2018. We find that the higher is the level of authoritative violence - proxied by the share of homicides committed by the security forces - the higher is the likelihood for an individual to migrate. The effect is significant only among males with a lower level of education. Estimates which rely on the travel time from the capital to each state’s most populated city as an instrumental variable, are robust to the inclusion of several households, environmental and sociodemographic characteristics, including the overall level of violence represented by the number of violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.