Within Central/Latin America
Well-known are the populations crossing the US border from Mexico. Refugees were almost always displaced internally to begin with. Leaving the country is a further and harder step from the initial migration.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre presents statistics on internally displaced people and refugees around the world. Focusing in the American continent we find profiles on Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Peru.
There we see the pattern of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras having a significantly larger ratio of refugees/IDPs, while Colombia and Peru demonstrate the opposite.
The developing countries mentioned above, have a history of significant internal displacement often due to armed conflict, civil war, organised crime, drug trafficking, etc. Displaced people are but a consequence of a larger imbalance in a State’s administration.
In October 2015, the UNHCR itself presented the report named Women on the Run focusing on refugee women from Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
The report is based on interviews of 160 women who have recently fled “el Triángulo del Norte de Centroamérica”.
82% of 16.077 were fleeing persecution and torture in their home countries and were allowed to request asylum in the US.
The Norwegian Refugee Council also presented a thematic report based on the Cartagena +30 Declaration on Refugees. The report targets governments and their responsibility, now that the identification work of the displacement crisis has been done.
The report summarizes the themes of internally displaced people largely overwhelming refugees in numbers, the experiences of women and children and the role of civil society in the move for change.
The NRC provides the example of internal displacement in Colombia as a direct consequence of armed groups involved with drug trafficking.
Conectas (NGO based in Sao Paulo, Brazil) provides a more comprehensive description of Colombian internal displacement, which includes agrarian issues. The fight for territory is a large component of the complex social, political and economic conflict that goes beyond ideological discord between guerrillas and the national government. The article underlines the often ignored participation of the state in the displacement of populations.
Conectas also makes the case of the experiences of displaced peoples in the manner of a rural exodus. Being an economically disparate country, the city provides anonymity and many other commodities that are not found in rural areas. However, we fail to see forced displacement towards urban areas as necessitating a resettlement process. In this way, populations are often stuck in perpetual poverty and homelessness, without any knowledge of how to make use of potential resources.
The Constitutional Court declared the advances in critical political areas of attention towards displaced people to be insufficient to overcome the situation. Despite the effort stemming from the 1990’s, the state presents slow progress from the definition of forced migration in Colombia to institutionalised action aided by the UNHCR and other organisations.
Once again the efforts of international agencies are noted, from the position of representative of the General Secretary of the UN for IDPs created in the 1990’s. However, we come back to the conclusion of the lack of efficiency in these initiatives, being due to the inherent institutional fragility of the state itself.
FURTHER ON COLOMBIA
Through the Organisation of American States in Washington D.C., Gustavo Zafra Roldán provides an academic analysis of the fundamental problem of displaced people in Colombia.
In it he begins by stating that the number of populations in the world affected by this phenomenon necessitates equal if not more attention than the refugee issue.
Zafra leaves refugees aside to focus on IDP because that is the large majority in Colombia, with the same cause for migration and with larger attention to be brought by the country for its socioeconomic and political consequences.
