On Sunday, July 18, the largest trip of Venezuelan repatriates took place since the beginning of the Venezuelan Government’s Plan Vuelta a la Patria (Return to the Homeland) program. A total of 700 people who for various reasons had been displaced to the neighboring islands of Trinidad and Tobago decided to return voluntarily, in a trip organized for this purpose in the vessel “Paraguaná”.

It was also the first trip of the program to be made by sea since the beginning of “Vuelta a la Patria”, a program for the return of Venezuelan people to their country initiated on August 27, 2018, since the rest of the trips of this type had been made by air and land. To date, 149 flights have been carried out.

The group of 700 Venezuelans, registered and registered of their own free will to return, represents 5.3 percent of the total number of Venezuelans still living in Trinidad and Tobago. Prior to this act of repatriation by sea, there had been a Return to the Homeland flight from Trinidad, in which 96 Venezuelan nationals traveled.

The registration process continues, so that the number of Venezuelan nationals willing to return to their country of origin will increase in the coming months. The number of Venezuelans in Trinidad is approximately 11,800.

It will be easier and easier to return

Ricardo Sanchez, Minister Counselor and head of the Venezuelan consular section in Trinidad and Tobago, was part of the official delegation that organized the voluminous trip, which included entire families, single individuals and people in different socioeconomic situations.

When asked about the process to be followed by the citizens who wish to return, he revealed that it is a very simple and transparent procedure: “The persons concerned express their wish to return by sending an e-mail or using the telephone numbers provided for that purpose. Subsequently, they are summoned to our embassy headquarters to fill out some forms, a file is opened for each one and the waiting period begins, until we have the date of the next trip”.

He also commented that, in view of the fact that Trinidad has announced the opening of its borders, it is probable that those interested will have at their disposal quick, simple and inexpensive options for their return, since the eventual normalization of flights and shipping activity between the countries is foreseeable.

The pandemic situation had encouraged human smuggling networks, and this would also be more controllable in a normalization scenario.

Officials of the Consular Relations Office of the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that, with this contingent of 700 people repatriated, Vuelta a la Patria now totals more than 26,000 people brought back to their homeland in almost three years of operation (as of July 2, date of the last flight, 25,705 people had returned to their homeland).

Of the Venezuelans who were part of this group of 700, more than half are inhabitants of eastern states.

The National Institute of Aquatic Spaces participated in the repatriation operation.

Deliberately promoted policies, mainly in the economic sphere, and neocolonial practices are, among others, the main causes of migration in the Americas, especially in countries such as Venezuela and Colombia, which have experienced a continuous migratory flow in both directions of the border shared by the two countries.

Academics and specialists agreed on this argument during the development of the webinar “Migratory Flows in the Americas: Structural Causes and Challenges”, an event parallel to the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council and co-organized by ARGOS – International Observatory on Migration and Human Rights; the American Association of Jurists (AAJ) and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL).

Micòl Savia, permanent representative of IADL to the UN in Geneva and ARGOS researcher, explained in her introductory remarks that neoliberal measures and interference strategies condemn millions of people in the American continent to poverty and exclusion.

The jurist suggested that in order to rigorously address the issue of migration, the structural causes that force hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes and risk their lives in search of new opportunities must be identified, analyzed and denounced.

“The structural causes of migration and forced displacement are too often neglected,” she emphasized.

Armed conflict and Colombian migration

In the case of Colombia, the migration phenomenon is intrinsically related to the historical armed conflict and the implementation of military security plans, such as the so-called Plan Colombia, according to the analysis of Giovanni Libreros, a researcher at Colombia’s Center for Thought and Political Dialogue.

Starting in the 1990s, the escalation of this conflict led to a significant wave of migration of Colombian citizens to Venezuela, said Libreros.

However, he pointed out that the continuous and “two-way” flow of Colombian-Venezuelan migration for economic reasons, the Colombian conflict and Latin American geopolitical interests has been present since 1950.

Citing figures from state bodies and international agencies, Libreros stated that Colombian migration has been directed mainly towards Venezuela (33.23%), followed by the United States (27.82%) and Spain (12.82).

“Venezuela continues to be the first country of reception of Colombian emigrants […] The migration of Venezuelans to Colombia does not compare with the migration from Colombia to Venezuela. Although the current numbers of Venezuelans who have migrated to Colombia are high, if we look in historical terms, Venezuela has been a receiving country of Colombian migration”, he expanded.

A recent phenomenon

Venezuela has historically been a recipient country of migrants; however, the oil country has experienced in recent years an atypical migratory phenomenon, mainly to countries such as Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. 

From Caracas, Giordana García, researcher of the Non-Governmental Organization Sures, argued that the Venezuelan migration is a migration induced by the current economic crisis in the country, derived from the application of a scheme of unilateral coercive measures.

“It is not political, so it is far from being a refugee crisis,” she emphasized.

The researcher denounced that, to date, more than 100 formal unilateral coercive measures and another 300 informal ones have been applied to Venezuela. Likewise, she denounced the confiscation of assets abroad and the blocking of more than 7 billion dollars of the Venezuelan State in international banks.

Last February, at the conclusion of a visit to Venezuela, the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, denounced the “devastating effect” of these measures on the Venezuelan population.

The UN expert noted that the sanctions have exacerbated the Venezuelan economic situation, and their application would have limited the country’s income by 99%. Among other consequences, this situation has led to an increase in the number of Venezuelan migrants.

According to Giordana García, Venezuelan migration is also induced through an activist discourse with political purposes and economic objectives.

In this sense, the Sures researcher questioned the figures of international agencies -and studies that lack objectivity- regarding this phenomenon.

Biden continues Trump’s policies

In North America, President Joe Biden’s administration is continuing some of the “worst policies” of his predecessor Donald Trump, specifically Title 42, according to the assessment of Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

Since Trump implemented Title 42 in March 2020, more than 630,000 people have been expelled from the United States, 240,000 of them during the Biden administration, she said.

The U.S. professor also questioned the White House’s criteria for granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

“Venezuela was designated for TPS before Haiti, when this country has worse conditions and this is due to the fact that the U.S. government opposes the Venezuelan government, but supports the Haitian government”, she added.

At the closing of the webinar, Taroa Zúñiga, ARGOS researcher in Chile, denounced the racist and classist bias in the migration policy of the southern nation, which has been evidenced in the recent expulsions of Venezuelan migrants.

In an interview granted to the International Observatory for Migration and Human Rights ARGOS, the executive secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, José Rubiel Vargas, asserted that the Government’s failure to implement the commitments assumed in the Peace Agreement, signed in November 2016, generated since that year a new wave of violence and systematic human rights violations throughout the country.

Continue reading “Secretary of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia assures that the Government has failed to comply with the Peace Agreement”

In violation of child protection and immigration regulations, French police are expelling dozens of unaccompanied migrant children to Italy every month, Human Rights Watch denounced on May 5.

Continue reading “ARGOS condemns expulsion of migrant children in France and urges a halt to this illegal practice”

Geneva, April 30, 2021 (ARGOS).- The analysis of the book “Asylum for sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry” served as a generator of debate so that this Thursday its editors Siobhán McGuirk and Adrienne Pine, together with Honduran journalist Bartolo Fuentes and Argentinean cultural manager, Florencia Mazzadi, unmask the perverse mechanisms and the emerging industry that enriches itself from the growing global need for human mobility.

Continue reading “ARGOS unveils perverse mechanism of profit and discrimination behind the migration industry”

Geneva, April 22, 2021 (ARGOS) – On the basis of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which establishes as an obligation of the States that have signed it the respect and guarantee of the right to personal freedom and integrity, the International Observatory on Migration and Human Rights ARGOS urges the implementation of protection measures for the child migrant population at the southern border of the United States.

In the last quarter, according to The New York Times, the number of unaccompanied migrant children detained along the southern border has multiplied, filling federal detention centers, similar to prisons, where they are exposed to disease, hunger and overcrowding.

“We consider the arbitrary detentions and inhumane treatment of Central American migrant children at the southern border of the United States this year to be a serious and urgent matter,” said Maria Hernandez, director of ARGOS.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden reopened last February a detention center for child migrants who arrive at the border with Mexico unaccompanied by a family member.

The U.S. Border Patrol keeps in its custody hundreds of children who crossed the border crossing alone; many of those in a detention center under the control of Customs and Border Protection say they have barely seen “heaven”.

The director of ARGOS explains that this situation violates the right to personal freedom and integrity of migrant children, and therefore urges the cessation of any action or omission by officials that entails discriminatory and xenophobic practices and, in particular, those that imply the rejection of unaccompanied child migrants, due to their origin or nationality.

The number of migrant children in Mexico rises in 2021

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported this March 20 an exponential increase in the number of child migration in Mexico since the beginning of 2021, from 380 to almost 3,500 in one quarter.

“These children arrive after dangerous journeys of up to two months, alone, exhausted and afraid. At every step they run the risk of becoming victims of violence and exploitation, recruitment by gangs and trafficking, which has tripled in the last 15 years,” denounced UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore, during a briefing on the humanitarian situation in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Mexico, according to the UN, has become a country of origin, transit and return for this migrant population that comes mostly from the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America.

The International Observatory on Migration and Human Rights ARGOS, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that aims to investigate, with plurality of perspectives, the phenomena that motivates human migration on the world, in order to defend and promote the universality of human rights, was officially inaugurated this Friday with a discussion and poetry recital “Human Mobility: Voices, Views and Actions”.

The discussion was moderated by Taroa Zúñiga Silva, a Venezuelan-Chilean member of the Mecha Cooperative and the Secretariat of Immigrant Women in Chile, with the spokesperson, on behalf of ARGOS, of the researcher Micòl Savia, Italian lawyer, secretary of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.

The ARGOS launch honored women as the most vulnerable gender during the phenomena of human mobility and their contribution to culture, with a recital by a group of migrant poets of different nationalities: Violeta Orozco, Mexican translator and researcher living in the United States; Chana Mamani, teacher and cultural activist of Aymara origin who migrated to Argentina as a child; Fatma Galia, journalist, poet and activist for the human rights of the Saharawi people; Vanessa González Peña, Venezuelan immigrant in Chile, feminist activist and president of the National Coordinator of Immigrants of Chile, and Carolina Dávila, writer and feminist lawyer of Colombian nationality living in the United States.

In addition to reciting their poems, the writers shared, in interaction with moderator Zúñiga, their experience as migrants and how starting a new life far from their homeland has influenced their poetry.

The jurist Micòl Savia indicated that part of the work carried out by the Observatory’s research team is available at www.argosob.org, where articles and reports on human mobility processes in South America, Central America and Europe, as well as general data on global migration, can be found.

He announced that they are preparing reports on the impact of COVID-19, the fundamental rights of people in mobility, Venezuelan migration and hot returns, which will be the central theme of the next report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of migrants.

The International Observatory on Migration and Human Rights uses the methodology of action-research with the objective of accompanying and defending migrant populations whose human rights may be being violated, by generating inputs for concrete advocacy actions, as well as tools that can be useful to social, academic, civil and multilateral organizations.

The name of the NGO alludes to the Greek myth Argos Panoptes, a giant with 100 eyes that had extraordinary capacities as a guardian on Olympus, which inspires the institution to observe, with a plurality of perspectives, the migratory processes, addressing their structural causes, the vulnerable populations, the actors involved and the possible strategies of alarm, denunciation, monitoring and resolution of cases.