Previous Story
Ecuador claims “to take action” in the migration crisis of Venezuelans
Posted On 23 Nov 2018
Ecuadornews:
The chancellor of Ecuador, José Valencia, said today that the migration crisis of Venezuelans in Latin America “calls for moving from declaration to action” by inaugurating a second regional meeting of a technical nature onthe phenomenon.
“The crisis currently facing Latin America and the Caribbean is becoming increasingly evident due to the massive migration of Venezuelan citizens who have been forced to leave Venezuela because of the economic, political and institutional crisis in which they live,” the minister of External Relations and Human Mobility.
The meeting is the second to be called by Quito after another one held last September to analyze joint policies to deal with the Venezuelan exodus, which according to recent UN data amounts to three million in about four years.
For Valencia “it is urgent to articulate proposals and concrete, effective and innovative actions to manage, obtain and channel the resources of multilateral agencies” that are necessary for the states to “better serve their humanitarian and solidarity commitments”.
He also stressed that the lack of a migratory and labor status that regulates the situation of Venezuelan migrants in their host countries makes them”vulnerable” to numerous situations of human trafficking,exploitation, violence or discrimination.
“The crisis is cross-border, it is regional, and therefore, the solution that must be adopted must have this regional mark of coordination among all the states,” he defended before the delegates of the twelve Latin American states present at the meeting.
For his part, the UN special representative for Venezuelan migrants, the Guatemalan Eduardo Stein, called on attendees to turn to address “what people are demanding.”
Heacknowledged that although the mandate of the plurinational meeting, “has a very marked humanitarian field,”we cannot “neglect for a second the evolution of the political situation” in Venezuela.
In that regard, he recalled that in January a new term will begin for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which could lead to new migratory flows, for which he urged the countries of the region to prepare “for the decisions of the State in that transit.”
Stein lamented that at the international level there is “a negative reading of what migratory movements are,” and that there are organizations and media that refer to migrants “in terms of almost criminalization.”
He praised at the same time that the Latin American response has been “to put in the balance a positive, constructive and solidary perspective of attention to the neighborhoods”.
“In times of fat cows, people tolerate better the facts of squeeze or shortage. In times of lean times, when families and communities strongly feel the precariousness and high cost of living, there are greater risks of attention for any Government in exercise, “recalled the UN special representative.
The former vice president of Guatemala argued that this second meeting serves toreissue the agreements reached in the first in the Ecuadorian capital.
The meeting is attended by a dozen Latin American delegations and observer countries such as the United States and France, as well as organizations of the UN system, assistance and migration, and has the absence of Venezuela, Bolivia,the Dominican Republic and Honduras, among other nations of the region. (I)
