Last month we looked at a pair of Cuban actors who defected during a layover in Miami and after they starred in a film on immigrating to the U.S. In the latest case of life imitating art, a man has been stuck in a Venezuelan airport similar to the protagonist played by Tom Hanks in “The Terminal.”
Members of the Argentine rock band Los Pericos found a Sri Lankan man who claimed to have been living in Maiquetia International Airport for the past four months. As seen in the following video via the YouTube page of Los Pericos, the man has been unable to return to his homeland due to Sri Lanka’s armed conflict and he has been unable to receive a visa from Venezuelan authorities:
The man alleged that he originally traveled to Mexico six months ago but was subsequently deported to Venezuela. He has reportedly received help from airline workers and from “ a human rights NGO” such as a bed for him to rest in.
“Someone made a mistake,” said an anonymous source at Maiquetia to the EFE news agency. The source also claimed “the man has been looked out for…by Venezuelan immigration officials.”
In 2008, Japanese traveler Hiroshi Nohara spent over one hundred days living in Mexico City’s Benito Juarez airport. Unlike the unnamed Sri Lankan man in Venezuela, however, Nohara did have a visa and he eventually used it to leave the airport.
Video Source – YouTube via pericoswebtv
Online Sources – The Latin Americanist, IMDb, Panorama, ABC Color
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