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By Noah Merrin
Economic disaster, electoral fraud, rampant looting of the public purse, poverty, and violent oppression of dissent; the situation in Venezuela has become sadly familiar. Since 2015, over five million Venezuelans have fled from the cocktail of instability that Nicolás Maduro has inflicted upon the nation. But the spread of coronavirus through Latin America, has destroyed the hope of many to create a new life outside of Venezuela. The political battle being fought within Venezuela has become the subject of international attention and diplomatic feuding. As a result, the thousands of Venezuelans now trying to return home are at the centre of a geopolitical quagmire, facing rejection by all sides. In the process, the requirements for refugee populations during the pandemic, outlined by Amnesty International, are not being met.
According to the Platform of Coordination for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela, as of 5 June 2020, 5.08 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees had been reported by recipient countries. That is roughly 16% of Venezuela’s population as recorded in 2015. Most of these migrants have remained in South America, with neighbouring Colombia reporting by far the highest numbers, whilst Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Brazil all report numbers in the hundreds of thousands. It is difficult to visualise the scale of this exodus. But the numbers of refugees and migrants from Venezuela are similar to those received in Europe by the end of 2016 (5.2 million) at the height of the refugee crisis. In proportional terms, this number would be equivalent to the populations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all fleeing the United Kingdom over a five-year period.
The Covid-19 epidemic in South America has exacerbated the structural issues facing the Venezuelan diaspora. 2.63 million residency and regular living permits had been granted by host countries to Venezuelans by 5 June 2020. But it is unknown how many of these permits are still in force. Many of the permits included in these numbers may have now expired, or simply be renewals of the same permit.
However, going by these figures we do know that at the least, close to half of all reported Venezuelan migrants and refugees are not protected by the same rights as those accorded to the natural-born citizens of their host countries. The result is a high proportion of migrants and refugees engaging in undocumented labour, subject to the whim or circumstances of their employer (BBC Mundo has reported on examples of this around the continent).
Domestic workers and kitchen staff, already living on the breadline, are fired with no recourse to legal action or state aid – and no way to continue supporting themselves outside Venezuela. In these circumstances, some Venezuelans have been forced to rely on money sent by their relatives still residing in Venezuela – an inverse situation to the one that they envisioned when they departed their homeland, a country with a poverty rate of around 90%. Under the strain of losing their jobs and being unable to contend with basic living costs, tens of thousands of migrants have decided to make the journey back to Venezuela where they will at least have a place to live, with family.
However, most returnees face the obstacle of crossing the Colombia-Venezuela border. Usually a porous frontier of economic exchange upon which local business relies, the pre-existing structural and local challenges facing migrants have intensified due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown on both sides. A briefing published by the International Crisis Group has outlined that, after taking into account resources for insured Colombian citizens, healthcare providers along the border face a situation that inevitably hurts and divides marginal groups: distributing the few remaining resources between uninsured Colombians and displaced Venezuelans. The Group notes that Venezuelan women in the border region are at ‘extreme risk’ of sexual and gender-based violence, but that attempts to record and raise the profile of violence are being severely impeded by restrictions on the movement of aid workers, due to quarantine measures.
Moreover, leaders of both countries have enacted measures to reduce border crossings, leaving returning migrants in the highly vulnerable position of being penniless and stuck in a region of rampant organised crime. On 14 March, Colombian President Iván Duque closed seven official crossings and sent in 5,000 officers to police the trochas, illegal crossing points run by criminal gangs. Since then, Venezuela has also committed to stopping migrants returning via illegal routes, but it is imposing a two-week quarantine on Venezuelans crossing through the official border points.
Venezuela’s decision to quarantine returnees is to stop them bringing coronavirus into the country and putting pressure on the Venezuelan healthcare system, already woefully unequipped to deal with existing cases. However, following reports of unsanitary accommodation and a lack of food and water, questions have been raised about the conditions in the facilities used to quarantine returnees, which are still in use after approximately 72,000 Venezuelans have returned in recent months. The political and economic crises within Venezuela have made a transnational agreement to ensure the security and health of the returning Venezuelan diaspora incredibly difficult. Following the 2018 presidential election in Venezuela, widely considered to have been fraudulently won by Nicolás Maduro, foreign governments, including the United States and Colombia, rushed to support opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s claims on the presidency. It was hoped that such support would trigger a popular revolt within Venezuela, which has not transpired. Bogotá is now in a difficult position, trying to negotiate an agreement with a Venezuelan regime that has little interest in doing business with Colombia until the Colombian government grants that regime official recognition.
In relation to Venezuelan migrants and refugees in South America, governments around the continent are not fulfilling the priorities laid out by Amnesty International: workers’ rights; social security; healthcare for all; and a gender-focused response to the pandemic. Displaced Venezuelans attempting to cross the border into their homeland have become a thorn in the side of both Venezuela and Colombia, with their presence posing a public health, security, and economic problem for each country.
As a result, the marginalisation and neglect Venezuelan migrants and refugees suffered before the pandemic has only been increased by their position within a larger transnational diplomatic row, and an even larger geopolitical crisis. The most immediate way for the international community to ameliorate the situation for those returning would be to help make border crossings safer by assisting bilateral talks between Colombia and Venezuela. But practical assistance in an amicable direction from Colombia’s most powerful regional ally, the USA, is unlikely to be forthcoming under the Trump administration.
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