Thursday20 February 2020 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES 7

F T B I G R E A D. LATIN AMERICA

Colombia is footing the bill for a huge influx of Venezuelans fleeing economic chaos in their country. But

with the most vulnerable now trying to leave, the demands on governments in the region will only intensify.

By Michael Stott and Gideon Long

The Colombian government is trying

to legalise as many of the new arrivals as

possible, giving them permission to

work, plus full access tomedical and

educational services.

The strategy worked well in the first

years of the exodus but is becoming

more difficult to sustain.

“The profile of the Venezuelans enter-

ing is more and more vulnerable every

day,” says the UNHCR’s Mr Sersale.

“They are more elderly, they have more

disabilities and suffer from more

chronic diseases. Their possible integra-

tion is limited.”

Gabriel Lugo, 32, is one of the esti-

mated 328,000 Venezuelansliving in

the Colombian capital Bogotá. He sells

chocolate bars on the buses for a small

profit. In a 15-hour day, he tries to make

30,000 pesos ($9) to cover the cost of a

hostel for himself, his younger sister and

his two young daughters.

“There are bad people in Colombia

but that’s the same everywhere,” he says

of the attitudes he has encountered.

“Sometimes people insult you... but

nothing too bad has happened to me

personally. Sometimes people give us

food even if we don’t ask for it.”

N o o n e k n o w s h o w l o n g t h e

country’ssocial fabric can hold as the

Venezuelans continue to arrive in their

thousands. “Colombia has survived civil

wars, paramilitaries, drug trafficking,

massive migration flows and it keeps

going,” says Mr Selee from the Migration

Policy Institute. “I don’t think this is

what will blow up Colombia but it is

another element in what is already an

unstable mix.”

However, the enezuelan exodus mayV

have a more permanent effect on a

continent which has long been a source

of northward migration to the US and

Europe but has experienced relatively

little movement between countries.

“Latin America is changing pro-

foundly as a result of this migration

crisis,” says the UNHCR’s Mr Stein.

The first migrants who left Venezuela

in the early 2000s when Hugo Chávez,

Mr Maduro’s predecessor, was preach-

ing revolution have built new lives in

their adopted countries.

That trend is personified by people

like Liliana López, 50, who left Vene-

zuela in 2007 and settled six years later

in Chile, where she bought a flat and

started a business sellingsnack foods to

offices.

“It’s going to take years for Venezuela

to recover and at my age, I don’t think

I’m going to see the changes thatwould

convince me to return,” she says. “We

need a total clean-up of the country and

I don’t see that happening any time

soon.”

T

h e c h a o s s p r e a d i n g

intoColombia rom Vene-f

zuela is unmistakable on

the crowded highway that

spans the countrie s’

2,200km border. On the Venezuelan

side pick-up trucks crammed with

entire families ostle for position asj cars

try to weave through thetraffic. Motor-

cycle riders line up in the heat waiting

for passengers. Roadside vendors hawk

plastic ottles filled with contrabandb

gasoline.Litter is strewn everywhere.

“If there were a hell on earth, it would

look like Paraguachón,” says an aid

worker, gesturing towards the heaving

mass of people and vehicles streaming

across the border.

Long popular with smugglers, Para-

guachón is now one of the main exits

forVenezuelans fleeing hunger, disease

and repression. The scale of the exodus

has far exceeded initial expectations,

propelled by President Nicolás

Maduro’s mismanaged socialist revolu-

tion which has seen theoil-based

economy collapseinto hyperinflation.

Now Colombia is struggling to cope

with the influx.

“Two years ago the worry was that the

Maduro regime would stay in place, the

economy would tank even more,

healthcare would collapse and more and

more Venezuelans would leave,” says

Shannon K O’Neil, vice-president at the

Council for Foreign Relations in

New York. “The worst-case scenario has

happened.”

Nearly 5mVenezuelans have left

since 2015 — about 15 per cent of the

population — and another million are

expected to depart this year. That could

make the crisis theworld’s biggest refu-

gee emergency, surpassingSyria. Unlike

other humanitarian crises, it is a disas-

ter caused not by war or natural disaster

but by misrule on a grand scale.

It is “the world’s largest forced migra-

tion crisis you have never heard of”, says

Andrew Selee, president of the Migra-

tion Policy Institute in Washing-

ton,highlighting the relative lack of

attention Venezuela has received.

In the first four years of the crisis,

Venezuelan refugees received less than

a 12th of thefunding iven to Syriansg

escaping their conflictover the same

time period, ccording to the Brookingsa

Institution.

The shape of the crisis is changing.

Wealthier and better-educated Vene-

zuelans were the first to leave, many

heading for the US or Spain. Then

middle-class professionals departed for

nearby Latin American nations with

good employment prospects. Now, aid

workers say, the refugees are poorer,

older, sicker and more vulnerable.

“We didn’t want to leave Venezuela,”

says Nellyisa Lopez Fuenmayor, 50, who

was sheltering with her family at a

UNHCR camp in the Maicao area. “But

what we earned there was not enough to

feed our children. Here we can eat three

times a day. There we could only afford

breakfast.”

‘One of the most chaotic borders’

More than 1.6m Venezuelans are now

living in Colombia — more than 3 per

cent of its population — and the number

is rising by around 3,000 a day, accord-

ing to the UN High Commissioner for

Refugees. The UNHCR figures and those

ofthe Colombian authorities are

thought to underestimate the problem

because of the scale of illegal migration.

This influx adds afresh source of ten-

sion in Colombia, a country grappling

with a long-running drug trafficking

problem, paramilitary groups and the

recent demobilisation ofthousands of

Marxist guerrillas ho laid down theirw

arms after decades of insurgency.

Further south, Peru has over 860,

Venezuelan refugees, while Ecuador

and Chile have more than 370,000 each.

Another220,000 are in Braziland more

than 100,000 in the Caribbean islands.

Official data show that more than

11,000 Venezuelans a month crossed

the border on average last year, but the

official Colombian immigration check-

point was moved from the centre of the

road a few months ago after being

caught in crossfire during a gun battle

old son. “The border is crazy. If you

don’t pay, they shoot you.”

Once across,arrivals deemed to be in

greatest need are housed and fed in a

purpose-built UNHCR “integrated

assistance centre” near Maicao for 30

days while they receive medical and

psychological treatment and legal

advice.

Between 60,000 and 80,000 Venezue-

lans are estimated to be living in or

around Maicao, a city with a pre-crisis

population of 160,000 located in La

Guajira, Colombia’s second-poorest

province. The UNHCR transit camp has

space for just 600 people a month,

though that will double when an exten-

sion is completed in a few months’ time.

Refugees with friends or relatives

already in Colombia may have some-

where to go. Many others end up in

primitive squatter camps on the fringes

of Maicao, like Bendición de Dios (Bless-

ing of God), a stretch of occupied waste-

land where 575 refugees eke out a living.

Margarita del Carmen Palmán, 40,

lives with her husband and three chil-

dren in a shack made of plastic sheeting,

which flaps loudly in the howling winds

that blow fine sand everywhere. The

family’s only visible possessions are

clothes, a few towels and a hammock.

“There is no work in Venezuela,” she

explains. “We had to go scavenging each

day for food to feed the children. Some-

times we found it, sometimes we didn’t.”

Her husband now scrapes a living sell-

ing eggs in Maicao. Ms Palmán says his

daily takings can be as low as 10,

Colombian pesos ($3), half of which is

spent on buying fresh stock.

Sympathies tested

Colombia and other Latin American

host nations have won widespread

praise from refugee agencies for their

generous response to the crisis. But as

the numbers of Venezuelans keep rising

and the costs mount, the open-door

policy is becoming harder to sustain.

Colombia’s finance minister Alberto

Carrasquilla says estimates of the addi-

tional annual cost of educating, housing

and ministering to the health needs of

Venezuelan migrants range between 0.

per cent and 0.8 per cent of gross domes-

tic product, while adding that research

suggests there would be a longer-term

benefit to economic growth.

“National budgets are exhausted and

institutional capacity is completely

overwhelmed by the crisis,” says Edu-

ardo Stein, the UNHCR’s joint special

representative for Venezuelan migrants

and refugees. “This situation continues

to worsen as more people arrive.”

A UN-led appeal last year for $738m

in aid for Venezuelan refugees was only

52 per cent funded. There is no indica-

tion that this year’s far more demanding

target of $1.35bn will fare any better.

Brookingsestimated thatthere could

be as many as 6.5m Venezuelans living

outside the country by the end of this

ye a r. “ T h e n u m b e r s c o u l d b e

significantly higher if the humanitarian

crisis in Venezuela continues to worsen,

reaching over 8m,” it said in a recent

paper.

Most of the aid to Venezuelan

refugees has come from the US

($473m), with the EU contributing

€170m since 2018 plus another €150m

from member states. The UK has pro-

vided £44.5m of aid to help Venezuelan

refugees, against £206.5m committed

this year alone in bilateral aid to Syria.

In a sign of hardening attitudes, Peru,

Ecuador and Chile imposed visa restric-

tions on Venezuelans last year, leading

many to enter these countries illegally

and a larger proportion to remain in

Colombia.

As the financial and social costs

mount, there are signs that public

opinion is starting to turn. A Gallup poll

in December found that most Colombi-

ans have shifted from welcom-

ingmigrants to regarding them as a

problem. Asked for their impression of

the Venezuelan arrivals, 69 per cent said

it was unfavourable.

Maicao’s newly elected mayor

Mohammed Dasuki laimsc a minority of

Venezuelan criminalsspread vice and

violent crime. “Colombians and people

from Maicao respect women and

children,” he says. “Venezuelans don’t

respect them.”

Mr Dasuki accused efugees of under-r

cutting locals in the job market by

working for less money and of bringing

prostitution to his city “not just of

women but also of homosexuals”.

Luis Eduardo Castro, the mayor of

Yopal in the sparsely populated, oil-rich

eastern Colombian province of

Casanare, which is sheltering nearly

20,000 Venezuelans, has started to

deport back to Venezuela migrants he

accuses of breaking the law and has

threatened to fine drivers who give lifts

to refugees.

A poster campaign in Yopal urges

locals not to hand out money to Vene-

zuelans with the slogan: “Your help is

not helping”.

Profound regional change

Such instances of xenophobia, however,

are so far seen as isolated. Aid workers

and refugee experts point out that

Venezuela’s hosting of thousands of

Colombians during the oil boom years

has created a deep reservoir of goodwill

towards the country.

VENEZUELA

COLOMBIA

ECUADOR

BRAZIL

PERU

Paraguachón

Medellín

LA GUAJIRA

Caracas

Bogotá

Yopal

200km

Maicao

CASANARE

between rival gangs, aid workers say.

“It’s one of the most chaotic and

uncontrolled borders I have ever seen,”

says Federico Sersale, head of the

UNHCR’s office for the region. “Most

people crossing here don’t have pass-

ports and most don’t enter through the

official crossing points.”

TheColombian frontier with Vene-

zuela is highly porous, passing through

jungle, desert and mountains. There are

ample opportunities for illegal crossing,

starting close to the main highway. To

one side of it is a primitive wooden stake

fence, behind which lurk a few dilapi-

dated 1980s American cars with Vene-

zuelan number plates. A couple of

blocks in the other direction, a rope

crossing guarded by an attendant marks

the start of another dirt track. Both

aretrochas, unofficial trails through

bushland that cross the border.

Lacking passports, and unwilling to

pay the hefty bribes needed to secure

them, many Venezuelans use smugglers

to cross — an often perilous journey.

“The National Guard [part of Vene-

zuela’s armed forces] and the criminals

take money off you,” says Emmanuel

Pirela, 28, who used the trails three

months ago with his wife and five-year-

A test of regional stability

Mass exodus,

above: a queue

of Venezuelans

vying to go into

Colombia at

Paraguachón

Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters

1.6m

Venezuelans living in

Colombia. Peru has

over 860,000. Chile

and Ecuador each

have 370,

6.5m

Venezuelans living

outside the country

by year-end

(Brookings estimate)

52%

Percentage of a

$738m appeal for

Venezuelan refugees

that was funded

A temporary camp for refugees in Bogotá, Colombia,

above. The collapse of Venezuela’s oil-driven economy

has heaped pressure on President Nicolás Maduro, below

‘We didn’t

want to leave

Venezuela.

But what we

earned there

was not

enough to

feed our

children.

Here we can

eat three

times a day’

‘[Venezuela’s]

National

Guard and

the criminals

take money

off you. The

border is

crazy. If you

don’t pay,

they shoot

you’

FEBRUARY 20 2020 Section:Features Time: 19/2/2020- 18:07 User:alistair.hayes Page Name:BIG PAGE, Part,Page,Edition:USA, 7, 1