The dream of returning had grown distant for millions of Venezuelans who had fled their government’s crushing of dissent and an economy in free fall.
“If I speak from my heart, I had utterly lost hope,” said Jorge Colmenares, 50, who left seven years ago. For him, selling caramel candy at red lights on the streets of a Colombian border city was a step up from living out of cardboard boxes on the streets of his own homeland with his wife and young children.
But even if he knew the road to returning remained uncertain after an American attack deposed Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro — whom he called “the head of the gang of our torturers” — Mr. Colmenares wept Saturday night. So did many other Venezuelans in exile. Their tears were brought on both by hope that going home might be close at hand and by the pain from the years of privation and tragedy that had befallen them.
“When I think of my land, the beaches,” Mr. Colmenares said, before he broke down in sobs as he spoke in Cúcuta, along Colombia’s border with Venezuela. “My parents who died and I couldn’t see them, my brothers and my son who crossed the Darién.”
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have crossed the Darién Gap, a treacherous, roadless zone between Colombia and Panama, on their way north to Central America and the United States. One of Mr. Colmenares’s sons is in detention in the United States, he said.
Three million Venezuelans have settled in Colombia over the past decade. Nearly five million more have scattered across South America.
Since the U.S. attack on Saturday, few have returned. The border crossing in Cúcuta, which accounts for 70 percent of traffic between the two countries, was quiet over the weekend, except for the presence of three armored vehicles belonging to the Colombian military.
