Re: Venezuela
Posted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 2:01 pm
USES OF VENEZUELAN MIGRATION IN COLOMBIA FOR DISPOSSESSION AND INTERFERENCE
Maria Fernanda Barreto
25 Feb 2021 , 11:12 am .
Any action that improves the situation of migrant populations is plausible, however, that recognition should not be a veil that prevents us from seeing what is hidden behind these measures, even more so when the government that takes them is characterized by being profoundly exclusive and violating of the human rights of its own population.
Therefore, it must be said that President Nicolás Maduro was very successful in stating at the last international press conference that the temporary regularization statute for Venezuelan migration in Colombia, announced by his counterpart Iván Duque, has a lot to do with a need to cleaning up the image of the Uribe government, which days ago had aroused global outrage by declaring that it would not vaccinate the migrant population of Venezuelan origin who was illegally established in Colombia.
In addition, the party and representatives of the Colombian government under the leadership of Álvaro Uribe Vélez openly closed ranks with Donald Trump during the last electoral process in the United States, which generated the urgent need for actions that showed the will to approach the president's speech Joe Biden, immigration policy being one of the main controversies between Trump and the new US president.
Duque now offers the Venezuelan population what, as the Argentine intellectual Atilio Borón denounces , he is not even capable of guaranteeing for the Colombian people.
THE TENDENTIOUS USE OF FIGURES AND CATEGORIES
Undeniably, as the UN Special Rapporteur, Alena Douhan, pointed out in her preliminary report , the impact of the pressure exerted on Venezuela, especially since 2014, has generated a situation of violation of the fundamental rights of the population. which, among other things, has led to unprecedented emigration for a country used to receiving large migrations and not the other way around.
However, these figures are increased, manipulated, distorted and handled with very little rigor by NGOs (non-governmental organizations, almost all linked to USAID), by governments that publicly oppose the Bolivarian Revolution and even by multinational organizations such as UNHCR, for what is worth stopping for a moment in them.
The UN says that 5.4 million people have left Venezuela, for which they are already publicly requesting no less than 1,440 million dollars for NGOs and institutions of what they call host countries and multilateral organizations in 2021.
The question then is how these figures are obtained, according to which the country would look visibly diminished in population terms.
According to the Regional Platform for Interagency Coordination that was established in accordance with the request of the Secretary General of the United Nations to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees of the UN) and the IOM (International Organization for Migration, organization of the UN) on April 12, 2018, to direct and coordinate the response to refugees and migrants from Venezuela, this figure of 5 million 478 thousand 477 migrants of Venezuelan origin, "represents the sum of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers Venezuelans reported by host governments. It does not necessarily imply individual identification or registration of each individual, and includes a degree of estimation, according to the statistical data processing methodology used byeach government ”.
This is very important to know because the countries that report most of the data on Venezuelan migration handled by the IOM and UNHCR are the countries that have joined in the so-called Lima Group, whose actions against Venezuela and the intention they have made public to overthrowing the Bolivarian government are reasons enough to seriously question the objectivity of the information they offer to these organizations.
Thus, it is not surprising that, according to their own report of the data provided by those governments to this same platform, only 2 million 467 thousand 675 people of Venezuelan origin established in their countries can be declared as certainly counted, although they clarify that this number "It may include in some countries residence permits not currently in force and duplications or triplications of cases (a person with more than one permit granted)." So actually, they may be even less.
IOM and UNHCR staff greet a group of refugees from El Salvador and Honduras who arrived in Brazil in 2019 (Photo: IOM)
The rest, the almost 3 million that add to that figure, are only statistical approximations. That is, they are not scientifically verifiable.
But also in that same report the undeniable truth is clarified that once again the country in South America with the highest number of emigrants, and second in the entire region, is not Venezuela but Colombia. This is what the latest IOM report says , according to which more people have left Mexico and Colombia than Venezuela. However, only Venezuela has a special dedication to the report, challenging its objectivity.
National and international public opinion gives in to the scandal raised by these figures because they are offered out of context, they become part of a tendentious political discourse and, of course, media corporations are lining up to speak of Venezuelan emigration as a crisis of global dimensions. When the only objectively striking thing about the emigration of Venezuelans is that it is novel but, in reality, its figures are not the highest in the region and are even lower than those of Colombia.
For example, according to the latest IOM report called "World Migration Report 2020 ", the countries in the world with the highest number of internally displaced persons due to violence and conflicts are the Syrian Arab Republic with 6.1 million people , Colombia with 5.8 million and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 3.1 million.
This is closely related to the departure from the country of millions of Colombians who have emigrated to border countries, especially Venezuela, as victims of forced displacement. The images of peasants crossing the border with Venezuela along the trails, on foot with few things, their sons and daughters and the occasional domestic animal, with their hearts broken by the murder of relatives, sexual abuse and torture of groups paramilitaries to expel them from their territory, are part of the collective memory of the Venezuelan populations bordering Colombia.
Coming to Venezuela for decades has meant saving lives for many and many, and after Hugo Chávez's triumph in 1999 it has also meant an encounter with lost hope.
After a decade of work on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, and having been born in Colombia and migrated to Venezuela in my childhood, I can affirm that while Venezuelan migration is mainly economic, Colombian migration is a mix between economic migration and forced displacement by the war that should, it does, set off the alarms of all multilateral organizations that have a real interest in defending human rights.
On the contrary, the harsh reality that the Colombian people are experiencing is purposely made invisible by the media corporations that legitimize the violence of the Colombian oligarchy, distracting attention without any objective, but political-ideological, support towards Venezuelan migration.
This does not mean that Venezuelan migration is served with dignity in the countries where it arrives, nor does it mean that the millions of dollars that have managed to move with the excuse of protecting it really meet the objective.
Support was not even given to those who decided to return to the country in the midst of the pandemic. And here appears another of the important contradictions in the published figures.
Despite the fact that the UN itself registered until August 2020 more than 72 thousand Venezuelans who returned to the country as a result of the pandemic, Migración Colombia reported that just through its borders about 140 thousand people returned to Venezuela, and this would have to add more than 23 thousand who have returned by air thanks to the Plan Vuelta a la Patria , and although the borders of the entire world began to close as of February 2020, the supposed figure of Venezuelan migration was increased from 4.5 million at the beginning of 2020 to 5.4 at the beginning of the current year, without any explanation.
Even the "virtual ambassador" of the United States to Venezuela trilled from his office in Bogotá that in reality it would be almost 6 million people whom he does not classify as migrants but as "expelled by the regime."
At the same time that the Colombian Migration Office published in January 2021 that the Venezuelan population in its territory had decreased by 2.35% in 2020 . They don't give sums and subtractions because the numbers emerge from inaccurate calculations and vulgar comments.
Regarding the refugee crisis, two things should be said: first, although refugee requests from Venezuela were very rare in the 20th century, talking about a refugee crisis is extremely exaggerated. According to the UN, until February 2021 there were 798,128 refugee requests from people born in Venezuela and only 143,665 of this number had been granted refuge.
We highlight that Colombia has only granted refuge to 425 people of Venezuelan origin, which contrasts with the thousands of shelters that Venezuela has granted to refugees of Colombian origin, without raising a global scandal, as President Maduro also highlighted. Chile, for example, whose political exiles arrived in large numbers in Venezuela in the late 1970s, has only granted asylum to 17.
Obviously, both the migration policy and the manipulated figures that are disseminated are not defined by the peoples in this case of Colombia and Chile, but by their governments, both openly aligned with the United States and disrespectful of Venezuelan sovereignty.
To finish comparing figures from the source that is supposed to be the most authoritative on the matter, that is, UNHCR , only until 2018 there were 25.9 million refugees in the world, Syria being the first country of origin of these people with 6 , 7 million, followed by Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia, but the headlines are occupied by Venezuela.
Finally, it should be noted that, although the UN itself constantly makes public calls not to confuse the category "migration" with "refuge", its own representatives in the region have misused the terms when it comes to Venezuela, adding to the media war against the country.
In conclusion, it is not possible to cover the sun with a finger and hide that the Venezuelan emigration of the last five years has been unprecedented for the country. But this is the consequence of an economic and psychological pressure directed from the United States against Venezuela that is also unprecedented in history.
The truth is that the majority of Venezuelan migration is what is commonly called economic migration that does not flee from an armed conflict as it does with a large part of the Colombian population that has arrived in Venezuela for more than five decades. Even though in countries such as Spain, the United States and Colombia, the signature of a refugee application has been required from many of these people as the only possibility to enter.
The sources of the figures, which are the countries themselves, offer very uncertain numbers and different figures can even be found in the same periods from different UN agencies, which makes it extremely difficult to pin down the reality on the subject.
In the case of the figures offered by the Colombian government, there is no doubt that they are, more than imprecise and manipulated, false, as we evidenced two years ago : the number of Venezuelans in Colombia corresponds to the exact sum of people from Venezuela who have entered Colombia since 1991, that is, none of them died, returned or later went to another country.
In addition, according to that same office, 56% of that number is only an estimate that cannot be endorsed, and 75% are of economically active age, which can be very lucrative for any economy.
To all this should be added the number of people considered migrants who are actually sons and daughters of Colombians who migrated to Venezuela and who today have the right to claim their Colombian nationality, but that the government of Iván Duque has delayed the process and hinted at the possibility of suspending it despite the fact that it would violate the political constitution of Colombia, going once again to the tired ghost of Castro-Chavism .
Juan Francisco Espinosa, Director of Migration Colombia (Photo: Migration Colombia)
BUSINESS ROUNDS FOR VENEZUELAN MIGRATION
The billions of dollars that have been allocated by different mechanisms to the care of Venezuelan migration in the world are not reflected in actions of real attention to the needs of that population. Where they are is a mystery; The only thing that is clear is that they are not in the hands of the migrants who have left Venezuela.
The money that the Regional Interagency Coordination Platform (also known as "Response to Venezuelans" or "R4V", created in 2018) requests, for this year, 1 million 440 million dollars, which would be distributed among 101 NGOs, 16 agencies from the UN and 42 other organizations not specified; 641 million are requested by Colombia for 45 NGOs and 12 UN agencies.
A more than curious fact that borders on impudence and calls into question the seriousness of that request is that the resources planned by this platform for Colombia with the supposed purpose of protecting Venezuelan migration, expressly include in their document nothing less than the attention to 845 thousand Colombians and Colombians who have returned to their own country.
To this must be added that, already in May 2020, the European Union (EU) organized an " International Conference of Donor Countries " to, according to its declarations, support Venezuelan migrants and the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean that welcome. In this event, 2,544 million euros were finally committed between donations and loans. Event that, by the way, was opened by Josep Borrell (top diplomatic representative of the EU) clarifying that there are discrepancies around the real figures of this migration.
But the truth is that much of that money has not reached its destination, it is not known for sure if they have remained in the financial institutions, nor is it known who has been indebted with those loans, or how it has really been executed. that it has reached its destination, because basically those who execute them only make statements but do not present public accounts. Therefore, the peoples of the countries that have offered donations in this event should be the first to demand an audit of the execution of the money that belongs to them, in addition to examining who uses the figure of donations for tax evasion.
According to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) created by the G7 to develop policies against money laundering, non-profit organizations are particularly vulnerable to being used to hide or conceal the clandestine diversion of funds and legitimize capital, and that is Another reason why these types of activities attract so many donors.
It is not yet known where or which of the agreed resources were executed, which loans were made, who are their creditors, which financial entities they processed, or where the resources that did reach NGOs and other international institutions ended up, but now a new wheel of business about Venezuelan migration has been convened for next June of this year.
What the handling of the Venezuelan migration figures shows, the use that has been made of it as part of a media war against the Bolivarian Revolution and the huge amount of resources that have been moved around it, is that in this The hybrid war that the United States is leading against Venezuela is not only prevented from managing its own resources, but its assets abroad are stolen, and as if this were not enough, now the resources of other countries are also stolen in the name of an alleged international solidarity with the Venezuelan migration that seems more like a conspiracy to commit a crime .
https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... injerencia
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A welcomed article. The '5M refugees' always seemed too high, obvious propaganda. This is good work.