Latin America

Response in 2017

The first year of implementation of the provisions of Colombia’s peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) presented various challenges. Communities in several regions of Colombia continued to be affected by the presence of armed groups and unlawful activities, such as drug trafficking and illegal mining. The demobilization of the FARC also left a power vacuum in areas that then became disputed by armed actors and other dissidents. By the end of 2017, there were 7.7 million IDPs in Colombia. The Office continued to actively liaise with the second UN political mission in Colombia which succeeded the former one in September 2017 and shifted from monitoring the disarmament of former combatants to verifying their political, economic and social reintegration.
 
Ongoing displacement in the North of Central America (NCA) has had multiple causes, including violence and insecurity. NCA citizens have traditionally sought international protection in Canada and the United States of America. However, in the past two years, there was a very significant increase in the number of asylum-seekers from the NCA in Belize, Costa Rica, Mexico and Panama. More than 294,000 asylum seekers and refugees from the North of Central America were registered globally as of the end of 2017, an increase of 58 per cent from a year earlier.  UNHCR continued to work with governments to ensure: access to territory and asylum procedures; provision of immediate humanitarian assistance; secure solutions for people with urgent protection needs, including through resettlement; and humanitarian evacuation through the protection transfer arrangement (PTA) and relocation.
 
As a demonstration of the sub-regional political will, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama adopted the San Pedro Sula Declaration in Honduras in October 2017, which prompted the launch of the regional iteration of the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) for Central America and Mexico, known as MIRPS in its Spanish acronym, where States committed to strengthen protection and expand solutions in the region, with the support of all relevant actors, and to work together to further enhance regional cooperation and shared responsibility mechanisms.
 
The deterioration of the socioeconomic and political situation in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, including the lack of access to medicine, health care and other basic necessities, triggered the movement of an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans to neighboring countries and beyond. The main countries of destination are Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Spain and the United States of America. According to figures provided by host governments, more than 146,000 Venezuelans have lodged asylum claims since 2014, over half of these in 2017 alone. Another 444,000 Venezuelans have accessed alternative legal forms of stayed under national or regional frameworks. In 2017, UNHCR started working with governments and other partners across the continent to establish a coordinated and comprehensive response to support displaced Venezuelans and the communities hosting them.
 
UNHCR continued to offer support for capacity-building and technical advice within the quality assurance initiative (QAI) framework. Ecuador joined the QAI programme in 2017, bringing the number of countries in the region aiming to enhance fairness and efficiencies in their asylum systems to ten.
 
Local integration is taken to the next level with the adoption of public policies for the effective inclusion into host countries of refugees and stateless persons. In Ecuador, the ‘graduation approach’ enabled more than 1,800 families to move towards self-reliance. Costa Rica continued to integrate refugees through initiatives jointly developed with the public and private sectors, such as the living integration project—a corporate social responsibility scheme promoting refugees’ access to the labour market. Mexico continued to implement a relocation scheme to transfer refugees from the country’s economically-depressed southern States to industrial corridor States, matching them with job opportunities. The Cities of Solidarity Initiative is testimony to the way local governments in the region directly engage in solutions, socioeconomic and cultural inclusion of refugees.
 
Moving fast towards the eradication of statelessness, Chile and Haiti acceded to the statelessness conventions in 2017, while Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba and Ecuador adopted legal measures to prevent statelessness, facilitate naturalisation of stateless persons and establish statelessness determination procedures.
 
Argentina, Brazil and Chile progressed in the design and implementation of their respective resettlement and community-based sponsorship programmes, with support of the Emergent Resettlement Country Support Mechanism (ERCM).