When, in September 2018, Eduardo Stein –former vice-president of Guatemala- – was appointed as special representative of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) for Venezuelan refugees and migrants in Latin America, these two agencies estimated that as of 2014, 2.4 million Venezuelans had left their country and 90% of them had arrived in Latin America.
Only a year later the official figure almost doubles: 4.6 million people. The migratory flow of Venezuelans has not stopped. The numbers continue to move upward in the official UNHCR charts. According to Stein himself, between 4,000 and 5,000 Venezuelans leave their country every day.
The movement will continue, evidently, in his opinion, “as long as there is no stable internal political solution in Venezuela.” At this rate, Stein has predicted in recent interviews —the last one from Bogotá with El País’ Santiago Torrado— that Venezuelan migrants and refugees will be 6.4 million by the end of 2020.
Syria reappears in the comparisons: the Venezuelan migratory movement will be then, in Stein’s opinion, superior to the one from Syria, 5.6 million people, a country with an ongoing destruction because of the war. There are, however, differences with Venezuela, Stein notes in the interview with Torrado–. “People are leaving a country that is not at war and a country that has the largest proven oil reserves in the world.”
According to recent records, more than 80% of Venezuelan migrants and refugees have moved to Latin America. “The largest forced migratory flow in its [Latin America’s] history,” Stein says.
“Neither in periods of wars of independence, nor in tragedies of natural disasters, have we faced a phenomenon of this size,” Stein continues. “The governments began to react in the first place with enormous generosity, welcoming the Venezuelan population that came out and continues to come out, but they are already reaching saturation levels where their national budgets and institutional capacities are exhausted,” he adds.
The countries with the most pressure by Venezuelans migration flow are, according to official UNHCR figures – updated as of November 5, 2019 – Colombia, with 1,488,373 Venezuelans; Peru, with 863,613; Ecuador, with 385,042; and Brazil, with 224,102.
These figures and the global figures only register Venezuelan refugees and migrants with documents and they follow reports of host countries governments. But UNHCR itself acknowledges the numbers can be higher if they count those who do not have a legal status.
When Eduardo Stein spoke to El País, he was in Bogotá for the launch of a joint regional plan between IOM and UNHCR that seeks to address this phenomenon.
This is the Regional Plan of Response to Refugees and Migrants 2020, which 137 organizations in the region prepared, together with IOM and UNHCR, after extensive consultation with host country governments and civil society organizations, according to a UNHCR’s press release.
The plan targets “nine key sectors: health, education, food security, integration, protection, nutrition, shelter, relief items and humanitarian transport, and water, hygiene and sanitation”, aiming to benefit some 4 million people: not just Venezuelan refugees and migrants, but also the host communities.
The plan needs $1.35 billion to be implemented, which doubles what was spent this year to address the same problem. Stein told Karen Sanchez of Voice of America that this is not only because the number of Venezuelan migrants and displaced persons continues to rise, but also because “the precariousness of the people who leave have greater protection requirements.”
Besides, the fact that the host governments impose more entry requirements for Venezuelans has led, according to Stein, to a multiplication of “illegal routes, through which the population, in any case, continues to leave and continues to travel along diverse routes to countries as distant as Chile and Argentina.”
This regional plan is then an instrument of joint coordination of the host countries and the 137 organizations also to raise funds to implement it in its entirety. Because, as Colombian Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo pointed out, the 2019 response plan had only met 51.9% by November 1st this year.
This time, according to the UNHCR official press release, in addition to responding to the emergency, the regional plan aims to “facilitate the social and economic inclusion of Venezuelan refugees and migrants.”
“Despite many efforts and other initiatives, the scale of the problem is larger than the current response capacity,” Stein says, as quoted in the press release. “The international community needs to double its efforts and contributions to help countries and international organizations that are responding to the crisis. More support is needed for governments, with an emphasis on development issues, in addition to immediate humanitarian needs.”
This is why he insists on a joint, “coordinated and harmonized” approach in the region to address the crisis that, he says, is changing it, and so to implement the plan.
“We are facing a phenomenon of profound transformations throughout the region. Latin America will never be the same again after what we are experiencing,” Stein told Santiago Torrado.