CARACAS, Venezuela — María Abad Cruz, 90, sits on the cusp of her fourth migration, and it may be the hardest one.
Within a few months, if her children’s plan works out, she will move to Spain, the country of her birth, leaving behind Venezuela, the country where she has lived most of her long life and has loved like no other, even if that love these days has been painfully unrequited.
Venezuela is where she met her husband, raised three children and suffered a sorrow so great that she fled to Spain, only to return some years later because Venezuela, after all, was the place she felt most at home.
But amid the worsening economic and political crises, life has become too difficult and, with reluctance, she is coming to the realization that she might be better off leaving.
“Venezuela, for me, is the greatest there is,” Ms. Abad said. “But at the moment it’s impossible.”
In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans — by some estimates as many as two million — have migrated abroad, with the tendency accelerating in the past several years during the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Nicolás Maduro.
