In Weston, where Venezuelans have transformed the community, concerns remain about post-Maduro future

When there’s major news involving Venezuela, TV cameras reflexively rush to Doral, hoping to document the reactions of expatriates living in Florida. Politicians, courting their support, aren’t far behind.

It played out precisely according to script last weekend as word spread of the military incursion in which the U.S. captured and removed Venezuela’s dictatorial president, Nicolás Maduro.

A half hour north of Doral, in parts of Broward County — where Weston has one of the largest concentrations of Venezuelans in the United States — Maduro’s ouster produced just as much joy, and in the days after just as much concern, even though it didn’t attract the same volume of news cameras.

“The whole community, the whole Venezuelan community I would say is happy. The people are just happy,” said Alexander Rueda, a native of Venezuela who is now a U.S. citizen and Weston resident. I don’t know even one person who is not against Maduro.”

Rueda, 55, and his family are among the immigrants from Venezuela who have transformed the economy, culture and politics of Weston — and, more recently, pockets of other nearby communities in Southwest Broward.

Weston is home to so many Venezuelans who are now U.S. citizens, people who have been legally allowed to live and work in the country, and their American-born citizen children that the city is often called Westonzuela.

Rueda estimated that two of every three people in his neighborhood are from Venezuela. His two youngest children attend Cypress Bay High School, where an estimated 65% of the students are Hispanic. (School district data doesn’t break down background by nationality.) Rueda’s two older children are graduates of Florida International University.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has lived in Weston for 28 years, said in an interview most of the neighbors on her block are Venezuelan, and many of her now-adult children’s friends when they were in school there were Venezuelan.

And, she said, Venezuelans and non-Venezuelans aren’t isolated in separate enclaves the way different ethnic groups are in some places.

The numbers

A Neilsberg Research analysis in October of the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey data found Broward has 58,811 Venezuelan residents.

Previous research estimated the county’s Venezuelan population was 25,073 in 2012, up significantly from 8,807 in 2000.

And the biggest concentration is in Weston, where the estimated 10,215 Venezuelans make up 15% of the city’s population. Venezuelans are 3% of the countywide population.

Pembroke Pines, Sunrise, Miramar, Hollywood, Coral Springs and Davie also have sizable, though smaller Venezuelan populations. Pembroke Pines has the largest number outside Weston, at 8,391, an estimated 5% of the city’s population. In Sunrise the estimated 5,734 are 6% of the city’s population.

Palm Beach County, by contrast, has an estimated countywide Venezuelan population of 14,385 — less than 1% of the county’s residents. Orange County’s 40,906 residents are 2.8% of the county’s total population.

Miami-Dade County’s 124,087 Venezuelans are 4.6% of its residents. Doral, home to an estimated 31,361 Venezuelans, or 41%, has the largest Venezuelan population in the country.

Impact

Food is a visible way the Venezuelan diaspora has had an impact, said Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor at Florida International University, and founder of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at FIU’s School of International and Public Affairs.

“I see the influence in the restaurants that have opened up there, especially in the Weston area and in parts of western Broward,” he said. “More than anything else they have improved our culinary experience.”

Thriving businesses are a result, Gamarra said.

Adelys Ferro, a Weston resident and executive director of the political advocacy organization Venezuelan American Caucus, said there are food truck owners, entrepreneurs, nurses, restaurateurs, teachers and delivery people, along with many other business and professional people.

“We have become a very important asset of Weston and of Broward,” Ferro said. “I think it’s a critical community, a really very important community. We are part of not only the cultural fabric of the community, but also the economic fabric of the community.”

And there are large businesses that started small in Weston. Rueda is CEO of Panna Group, a food company which in many ways illustrates the growth and economic importance of the Venezuelan community in Weston.

Panna started selling Venezuelan food — tequeños (fried dough-wrapped cheese sticks), empanadas (dough with a filling), and cachitos (ham-filled rolls) — at a gas station in Weston in 2000. It still does.

The company, which Rueda joined in 2014, now has five restaurants and coffee shops in Weston, Doral and Orlando.

Panna today has more than 200 employees, and the company produces and distributes its products to retailers, including Walmart, in 40 states. It had $45 million in revenue in its most recent year of business, Rueda said.

The now larger company’s products serve a wider range of tastes, including Argentinian empanadas, which use wheat as the main ingredient and are baked; Colombian empanadas, which have a yellow-corn base and are fried; and Venezuelan empanadas, which have a white corn base and also are fried, he said.

Why Weston

There are varied, complex and often interrelated reasons why so many Venezuelans have made Westonzuela their home.

Venezuelans have been coming to the U.S. for decades in waves, sometimes motivated more by economics, sometimes motivated by political turmoil and repression.

Weston has long been a prime destination. Wasserman Schultz said it is home to people who have lived in the community for decades along with newer arrivals.

Decades ago, some wealthier Venezuelans began splitting their time between South Florida and their home country, gradually spending more and more time. Some people with the financial ability moved their families to the area and, for a time, returned to Venezuela to conduct business.

Later, Venezuelans fled economic chaos and lawlessness under the repressive regimes of Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Upheavals, repression and economic turmoil under those leaders sometimes produced large influxes of new arrivals.

(President Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted, without offering evidence, that Maduro emptied prisons and mental institutions and sent millions of violent criminals to the United States.)

Attracted by the city’s reputation for having stellar schools and one of the lowest crime rates in Florida, many immigrants from Venezuela settled in Weston. Crime statistics show the city continues to have one of the lowest crime rates in the state and nation.

Rueda, who moved to the U.S. in 2006 as his career advanced with a Fortune 500 company, recalls that real estate companies had sales offices in Venezuela.

Fabio Andrade, who is Colombian, said that years ago developers building in the planned city of Weston advertised to potential buyers in Venezuela and Colombia. Old news coverage about Arvida, the company that planned and developed Weston, reported that developers advertised in those countries in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“That is how both the Colombian and the Venezuelan communities started coming to Broward,” Andrade said.

Elected to the Weston City Commission in 2024, Andrade founded the Americas Community Center decades ago, and the organization still runs programs helping Hispanic immigrants with assistance in jobs and networking in Broward County.

Given his corporate career that brought him to the U.S., Rueda said he’s different from many Venezuelan immigrants. He’s similar, though, in that schools attracted him to Weston, in 2016. “Weston became a very attractive place because of the education,” he said. “The Venezuelan people value education.”

Ramón Peraza, 70, said he arrived in Weston 22 years ago with his wife and four children, then between 9 and 18 years old. The family has grown; he now has four grandchildren.

A few years after arriving, they bought Café Canela on the Weston-Sunrise border, where he said most of his customers were, and remain, Venezuelan.

He was an electrical engineer, who came to the U.S. for better opportunities, having previously vacationed here. Peraza said he left Venezuela, because it was impossible to work there. And he’s now a citizen of the U.S., which he called “a great nation, the best nation in the world.”

Gamarra said earlier phases of Venezuelan migration featured people with more money and more education, who were better able to afford to buy in Weston. Many of the more recent arrivals didn’t have financial resources to buy homes in an upscale community and are more disbursed.

U.S. politics

There aren’t any Venezuelan Americans in elected office in Broward, Ferro said. But the community enjoys some political clout even though it is not a large voting block.

Amassing influence and getting people elected takes time. Some immigrants were concentrating on making a living. It also takes time to gain citizenship, which allows people to vote.

And some immigrants had a bad feeling about politics in general, after fleeing a country where disagreeing with the regime could lead to harsh treatment. “Many of the people fled from Venezuela because they don’t want to continue living a life where politics has to be the main thing in your life,” Rueda said.

Still, political leaders in both parties are responsive to the Venezuelan community.

Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat, has long been an outspoken critic of the Chavez and Maduro governments — and has often advocated more hawkish U.S. policy toward the country’s dictatorial leaders than other Democrats. In 2019, she visited the Colombian-Venezuelan border and met with refugees.

Gamarra said the congresswoman is reflecting her constituency “probably better than any other Democrat that I know of. … She certainly wasn’t doing the progressive agenda with them. The rest of the Democratic candidates were never able to do what she did.”

Andrade, who was the founding president of Republican Amigos, a Broward political club, also said the Democratic congresswoman has been responsive to the Venezuelan and Colombian communities.

For many years, Gamarra said, Venezuelans who had become citizens tended to lean Democratic, something he said changed with the rise of Trump in 2016.

As to how Venezuelan Americans vote in 2026 and beyond, that’s unclear. “How the Venezuelan vote plays out is going to greatly depend on how the next few months goes,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Anxious, optimistic

Many in the Venezuelan community praised Trump’s actions that removed Maduro. “We are very, very happy what the United States is doing about liberty for Venezuela,” Peraza said.

Others are concerned about what comes next in the country and whether the administration’s efforts to end temporary protected status, known as TPS, will result in mass deportations of Venezuelans.

The Trump administration is terminating TPS, a humanitarian program, which allows people who’ve fled turmoil in their home countries and can’t return home to legally live and work in the U.S. The administration is working to end TPS for people from multiple troubled countries.

If large numbers of Venezuelans are forced to leave, Gamarra said the effects would be significant. “It’ll be big. I don’t think we fully understand that yet.”

Republican Andrade and Democrat Ferro said the end of TPS is a major concern.

On Friday, Wasserman Schultz and U.S. Rep. Darren Soto of Orlando, led 70 Democrats in writing to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding they immediately restore TPS for Venezuelans.

Questions remain about the nature of the government the Trump administration is allowing to run the country, with many Maduro allies in positions of power, including his vice president. And people in the country may be unable to obtain basic goods and services, something that was already difficult under the crumbling Maduro-led economy.

Wasserman Schultz called the capture and removal of Maduro “welcome news.”

“The real concern that exists right now among Venezuelans in our community in Broward is that they’ve cut off the head of a snake and swapped it for another head on top of the same snake’s body,” Wasserman Schultz said. “So while there’s excitement and hope, probably still cautious optimism, there’s real concern.”

Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.