Residency Through Marriage to a Venezuelan

A commercial legal aggregator holding text-layer PDFs of Venezuelan instruments, each headed with the Gaceta Oficial number and date it reproduces. It is used here for one document that no government host would give us: the joint resolution of December 1999 that defines every class of Venezuelan visa, complete, articles 1 to 49.

Standing: Reports, establishes nothing

Cannot be cited for: Its archive is frozen in the early 2000s and it tracks no amendments, so it must never be cited as evidence that a text is current: its Código Orgánico Tributario is the 2001 Code repealed in 2020 and its income tax law is the 2001 one, both superseded several times over. It introduces its own errors as well - its 1998 traffic regulation prints the wrong gazette date and renders 'tres (3) años' as 'tres (93) años' - so a figure taken from here needs a second reading before it is published. It must not be cited where a government source exists; the one record resting on it says in its own data that the source is an aggregator.

We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source

The foreign ministry, which runs the consular network that issues every Venezuelan visa. Its services pages list the thirteen visa classes it issues and give, for each, a description, the documents required and the validity and permitted stay. It is the only current statement of what a Venezuelan consulate will actually ask for, and it is a required counterweight to the 1999 resolution: between them they show where the practice has moved.

Standing: Applies the rule

Cannot be cited for: Not the instrument, and it must never be quoted as one. Its pages paraphrase the 1999 joint resolution and in several places depart from it: the business visa is given ninety days where the resolution gives one hundred and eighty, and is called the tourist visa while doing so; the entrepreneur visa's terms are introduced as the rentista's; the family visa accepts a marriage celebrated in Venezuela, which the resolution does not; and it lists one visa class, the Transeúnte Familiar Migrante Permanente, that is in no article of the resolution. It publishes no fee - every page says the consular tariff must be asked of the particular mission - and no list of visa-exempt nationalities. The embassy and consulate sites under embajada.gob.ve and consulado.gob.ve are run from the same platform and must not be cited at all for visa descriptions: several of them still carry Lorem ipsum placeholder text where the description should be.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

The migration service, under the interior ministry. It decides everything that happens after arrival: the extension of a stay, the renewal of a transient visa, the change to Resident status, the foreigner's identity card and the migration record. Its extranjería pages are the only published statement of what an in-country renewal requires, and they are quoted here for the renewal conditions that no instrument states.

Standing: Applies the rule

Cannot be cited for: It applies the rules and does not make them, and its pages add conditions the instrument does not contain. Its extranjería page is a JavaScript accordion: the capture separates headings from their lists and at least one heading is paired with the wrong requirements, so a line from it may be quoted for itself but must not be attributed to a heading without a second reading. The Extranjería tile on its own home page links to an address the site answers with its own not-found page. It publishes no fee amounts and no visa-exempt nationality list.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

The OAS legal portal republishes the constitutions and some statutes of member states. It carries the Constitution of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines as Chapter 2 of the Laws of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Revised Edition 1990, printing United Kingdom S.I. 1979 No. 916 as amended by Act 21 of 1986 and Act 15 of 1988 - the only copy of the Vincentian Constitution with a text layer that we could reach, the House of Assembly's own copy being an imageless scan.

Standing: Reports, establishes nothing

Cannot be cited for: It is a republisher and must never be cited for currency: the file is the 1990 edition, while Saint Vincent's own Acts now cite the Revised Edition 2009, in which chapter numbers have moved. The PDF is a two-up optical recognition of a printed book and its text layer carries recognition errors, so every quotation taken from it must be declared as a recognition and must be left with its errors intact. It must not be cited for any instrument other than the one it reproduces.

We re-read it every 365 days. More about this source

Venezuela's supreme court. Its historical site carries a legislation section with the full text of the Constitution as reprinted in Gaceta Oficial Extraordinaria N° 5.453 of 24 March 2000, and the texts of the laws governing the judiciary. It is used here to corroborate the constitutional articles quoted from the OAS copy, which is the only clean text layer we could reach.

Standing: Decides what it means

Cannot be cited for: Its legislation section holds only judiciary-related statutes and the Constitution; there is no migration, tax or customs law there, and the directory itself answers 403 while leaves.shtml is a 404. Its server sends an incomplete certificate chain and is unreachable without supplying the missing GoDaddy intermediate. It cannot carry a long quotation: the extraction service renders the page with a literal line-break tag every few words, and a direct fetch mis-decodes its ISO-8859-1 encoding and destroys every accent, which is exactly the failure the quote check exists to catch. Quote short fragments that fall between breaks, or quote elsewhere and corroborate here.

We re-read it every 365 days. More about this source