Colombia Is Dealing With a Terrifying Refugee Crisis. Will Wealthy Nations Step Up to Help?

[Bacchus4.0]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/opinion/international-world/venezuela-colombia-refugees-crisis.html

MEXICO CITY — Venezuela’s refugee crisis is the worst Latin America has ever experienced. In the past 15 years, more than five million Venezuelans, equivalent to 16 percent of the population, have left their country. By the end of this year, six million Venezuelans will have fled their country. Only the civil war in El Salvador, a much smaller country, in the 1980s displaced a similar proportion of citizens.

Although the diaspora is far-flung, stretching from Spain to Chile, Colombia has borne a disproportionate share of the heavy burden of the influx. One of Venezuela’s three continental neighbors, it has taken in the largest cohort of refugees fleeing Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship. In comparison, the United States will accepts only 18,000 refugees, from all over the world, this fiscal year.

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The refugees pouring across the border into Cúcuta are largely destitute: men, women and children fleeing not only repression and human rights violations carried out by Mr. Maduro, but more significantly, hunger, disease and a lack of basic necessities including medicine. They are running from a crisis that has dragged on for years with no end in sight.

Venezuelan exiles in Spain, Mexico and Doral, a suburb of Miami, are mostly middle-class professionals. But those arriving in Colombia are largely poor. The more than 1.6 million refugees in Colombia, a country of 50 million, as well as the 3,000 that enter each day need a lot of support: papers in order to work, schools for their children, medical care. More than 24,000 children of Venezuelan parents have been born in Colombia in the past few years. The country has offered them citizenship.