Friday, February 9, 2018

Is every other country permitted to have borders but not the US?


Venezuela’s neighbors plan to dispatch more security personnel while Brazil prepares to relocate thousands of refugees to country’s interior


Colombia and Brazil are tightening their borders in response to Venezuela’s economic crisis and food shortages that have provoked an exodus of desperate migrants.
Brazil announced on Thursday that it would send more troops to patrol frontier regions and start relocating thousands of Venezuelan refugees, who have overwhelmed social services in frontier areas, to towns and cities in Brazil’s interior.
“This is a humanitarian drama. The Venezuelans are being expelled from their country by hunger and the lack of jobs and medicine,” Brazil’s defence minister, Raul Jungmann, told reporters during a visit to Boa Vista, which lies on Brazil’s northern border with Venezuela. “We are here to bring help and to strengthen the border.”
During a visit to Cúcuta, which lies on Colombia’s eastern border with Venezuela, the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, announced measures to make it more difficult for Venezuelans to cross the frontier illegally or remain in the country as undocumented migrants. He also dispatched 3,000 more security personnel to border regions.
Over the last half of 2017, the number of Venezuelans moving to Colombia jumped by 62% to about 550,000, according to immigration officials. But due to illegal immigration, some officials estimate that more than 1 million have moved to Colombia since Venezuela’s economic crisis took hold in 2015.
“Colombia has never before experienced a situation like this,” Santos said during a visit to Cúcuta, a border city of 670,000 that is the main receiving center for Venezuelan migrants.
Santos laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian president, whose socialist policies have provoked food shortages, hyperinflation, and a collapse of the currency. Many Venezuelans now earn the equivalent of just a few British pounds a month and have trouble finding staples such as milk and pasta.
“I want to repeat to President Maduro: this is the result of your policies. It is not the fault of Colombians and it’s the result of your refusal to receive humanitarian aid, which has been offered, not just from Colombia but from the international community,” Santos said.
As they straggle into Cúcuta, tired and hungry Venezuelans often sell their possessions, including wedding rings and even their hair, in order to buy food. Some hole up in temporary shelters or on park benches and rely on soup kitchens set up by churches.
One of the newcomers, Jesús García, said he quit his job as an industrial mechanic with Venezuela’s state oil company in December. Hyperinflation in Venezuela, which the International Monetary Fund forecasts will hit 13,000% this year, meant that he could no longer afford food for his wife and two kids.
García arrived in Cúcuta last month and is looking for work in Colombia’s oil patch. Meanwhile, he busks in a Cúcuta park, playing a harp and singing folk songs alongside a a fellow Venezuelan, who strums guitar. Bystanders toss the equivalent of about £8 ($11) per day into an open guitar case – which is more than García earned as an oil worker back in Venezuela.

No comments: