Biodun.BBC: Venezuelans

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Thursday, June 20, 2019

ANALYSIS: Colombian armed groups recruiting desperate Venezuelans, army says

June 20, 2019 14H:10 GMT/ZULU

by Renee Celeste and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and Reuters News Analysts, ARAUCA/CUCUTA, Colombia

ARAUCA/CUCUTA, Colombia - Venezuela’s crisis is spilling across the border into Colombia as Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries recruit migrants to strengthen their ranks, according to five Colombian military commanders.

Violence still simmers in Colombia despite a 2016 peace deal with leftist FARC rebels, meant to end five decades of conflict. Dissident FARC fighters, the rebel National Liberation Army (ELN), right-wing paramilitaries and drug-trafficking gangs are battling each other and the military.

Keen for recruits, these armed groups are targeting Venezuelans as they traverse the porous 2,219-km (1,380-mile)frontier at illegal border crossings, according to the military officials, human rights officials and migrants themselves.

Five military commanders told us at Reuters that as many as 30% of insurgents in Colombia’s eastern border region are Venezuelans, willing to take up arms in return for food and pay.

“Recruitment of Venezuelans is happening,” said Colonel Arnulfo Traslavina, military commander of a special unit battling armed groups in Colombia’s eastern border state of Arauca. “The ranks of illegal armed groups are increasing. It’s a major threat to Colombia.”

Nationwide, an estimated 10% of fighters are Venezuelan, the commanders said. Their estimates were based on information from informants, deserters, captured rebels and residents.

Reuters was not able to independently verify these figures.

The head of Colombia’s military and government spokesman on this issue, General Luis Fernando Navarro, told us at Reuters that armed groups were targeting Venezuelans because they were easier to recruit than Colombians.

At the last official count by military intelligence in May, there were 2,296 FARC dissident combatants and 2,402 fighters from the ELN in Colombia. Including their urban offshoots, the two groups total nearly 8,400 members.

Rebel numbers are small compared with the 250,000 combat troops in the armed forces but Colombia’s rugged jungle terrain - spread across a country the size of France and Spain - makes it difficult for the military to tackle small, mobile units of fighters.

The military officers say they had interrogated some Venezuelans who had defected from armed groups and identified Venezuelan nationals killed in combat. They did not provide a total number for Venezuelan casualties.

Reuters was not able independently to confirm the information provided by the commanders or speak directly to any Venezuelans who had been recruited by an armed group.

Several Venezuelan migrants told us at Reuters that they had been approached by armed groups for recruitment on entering Colombia.

“They said I’d get clothes, food, money, accommodation, a cell phone,” said Gregorio, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant who said he was asked to join an unspecified group in the mountains as soon as he waded across the Tachira River onto Colombian soil.

“I was tempted, but scared... I’d been told there were bad people offering such things and I didn’t want to join,” said Gregorio, who declined to give his second name for fear of reprisals.

An estimated 1.3 million Venezuelan migrants have settled in Colombia in recent years, fleeing shortages of food, electricity and water as the South American nation has seen its economy unravel amid a bloody political confrontation.

Most Venezuelans do not come to Colombia to enlist in insurgent groups but with almost nothing in their pockets, the prospect of food and shelter is enticing, said Deisson Marino, human rights ombudsman for the border region of Arauca.

“They end up enrolled in a war that has nothing to do with them,” said Marino, whose job involves traveling to remote areas and speaking to victims of the conflict and armed groups.

RECRUITING IN VENEZUELA

Colombia’s Defense Minister Guillermo Botero has said the military has more than doubled operations against armed groups since President Ivan Duque took office in August, looking to tackle a rise in illicit drug production and trafficking. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

“The ELN has been retreating - at least its leadership - to Venezuela where it’s recruiting for greater strength, to attack us,” Botero said recently.

A FARC dissident, who asked not to be identified, told us at Reuters that the group was also present on Venezuelan soil and was recruiting Venezuelans.

The Venezuelan information ministry - which handles media enquiries for the government - did not respond to a request for comment about the conscription of Venezuelans by Colombia’s armed groups.

Venezuela’s government has acknowledged that the ELN and dissident FARC are present on its territory. It has said it does not support the groups or tolerate their presence, and that its troops pursue them as they would any other illegal group.

Representatives of the ELN did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FARC, which became a political party after the peace deal and kept its former acronym, has publicly expelled the armed dissidents.

Since it was founded in 1964, the ELN has funded itself from kidnapping, drug trafficking and extortion but is increasingly making money from illegal migration, the officials said.

Military officials and rights workers say the ELN and colectivos - shadowy irregular armed groups in Venezuela affiliated with President Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist Party - control most of the crossing points into Colombia and demand payment from migrants and traders.

GRAPHIC - Colombian armed groups recruit Venezuelans - tmsnrt.rs/2XXgY4Q

PICKING COCA

Army Colonel Rodolfo Morales, head of the army’s 30th Brigade in the border town of Cucuta, said migrants were also being drafted by drug trafficking groups to pick coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Antonio, another Venezuelan migrant who declined to give his second name, said that after crossing the border he was offered money by unidentified men to go into the jungles around Tibu - a border town around 115 km north of Cucuta in the dangerous Catatumbo region - to pick coca leaves.

“I’d rather go hungry than go with them,” said the 33-year old from the central Venezuelan state of Carabobo.

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups, which battled the ELN and FARC for decades, are also recruiting migrants, the military officials said.

The paramilitaries were behind most of the 260,000 killings that occurred during the nation’s half-century conflict and never fully demobilized under a 2006 peace agreement.

Eddinson, 26, a migrant from Venezuela’s coastal state of Aragua, said he and three other Venezuelans were approached by armed men who identified themselves as paramilitaries as they trekked through the mountains of Santander province near the border.

Eddinson said the leader of the eight armed men - who were dressed in khaki uniforms - tried to recruit them.

“He said that training would last six months. We’d be given salaries according to rank,” said Eddinson, adding that he and the other Venezuelans declined the offer. “He told us that we’d know our start date but not when we could leave.”

Thursday, February 7, 2019

With border blocked, desperate Venezuelans ask how U.S. aid will arrive

February 7, 2019 10H:49 GMT/ZULU

by Renee Celeste and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and Reuters, URENA, Venezuela/CUCUTA, Colombia

URENA, Venezuela/CUCUTA, Colombia - Desperate Venezuelans asked on Wednesday how they would gain access to U.S. food and medicine aid due to arrive via the Colombia border after President Nicolas Maduro’s government blocked the frontier crossing to any humanitarian shipments.

Despite widespread hunger and shortages of staple goods in Venezuela, Maduro vowed to turn back U.S. aid after President Donald Trump’s administration last month recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful interim ruler of the South American nation.

Venezuelan security forces blocked the three-lane border crossing from the Colombian town of Cucuta on Tuesday using two shipping containers and a fuel tanker. Armed Venezuelan soldiers stood guard at the customs building, pledging to turn back any attempt to cross the border.

‘PEOPLE NEED HELP’

Peering through cracks in a sheet metal fence to an area where U.S. humanitarian aid is due to be stockpiled in Cucuta, Venezuelan Yesica Leonett pleaded for information on how her four children can benefit from the donations.

“People need help. My children eat boiled banana skins, shredded like meat,” said Leonett, 31, who fled Venezuela eight months ago. “What a joy to get help to my children. An even greater joy would be to get rid of Maduro.”

Police who provide security on the Colombian side of the bridge told us at Reuters that there has been a huge number of Venezuelans asking when and where the aid will be delivered.

“There’s nothing to tell them because we don’t have any information. Sometimes they despair but we can’t do anything, it’s so sad,” said a patrolman located a few yards (meters) from the border.

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Colombia has received more than 1.1 million Venezuelans, with about 3,000 entering each day. Government estimates reach 4 million by 2021 if the crisis in Venezuela is not resolved.

“I’d like to believe this is the beginning of a new Venezuela, but I’ve seen so many attempts by the opposition fail, I prefer not to have false hopes,” Venezuelan Carmen Perez, 67, said in a trembling voice as she bought eggs from the back of a truck.

Friday, August 24, 2018

Venezuelans rush to Peru to beat passport deadline

24 August 2018 - 09H09 GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Renee Celeste and Biodun Iginla, France24, TUMBES (PERU)

TUMBES (PERU) -

Days before Peru was set to tighten its border controls, Venezuelan migrants dashed to get into the country Thursday as new passport rules threatened to leave thousands stranded in Ecuador or Colombia.

In Tumbes, on the Peruvian side of the border with Ecuador, lines of people waited to have their papers checked, surrounded by banana plantations and sweating from the tropical climate.

Many had traveled on foot, but they had to accelerate their progress after Peru's announcement last week that it would implement stricter border controls from this Saturday.

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Following Ecuador's lead, Peru decided it will only allow in Venezuelan migrants in possession of a passport.

The problem is that only around half of the Venezuelans heading south to escape poverty and economic crisis are carrying passports, according to Colombia's migration director, Christian Kruger. The other half have ID cards.

Ecuador acted after more than half a million Venezuelans entered the country of less than 17 million people since the start of 2018.

Peru has also been struggling to cope as Venezuelans flow into the country at an average rate of 2,500 per day -- although the United Nations Refugee Agency says that number has spiked recently.

Earlier this month a record 5,100 people crossed in a single day.

- Weary and hungry -

Peru's migration superintendent, Eduardo Sevilla, said on Thursday that "there are already 400,000" Venezuelans in the country and if they continue flooding over the border at the same rate, there will be "half a million by the beginning of November."

Many queueing at the border only left Venezuela on foot at the beginning of August. They've already travelled 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles), but those who get through face another 1,200-kilometer journey to the Peruvian capital Lima.

Local churches handed out food to the weary and hungry migrants as they waited.

Meanwhile, Peru has called for calm, saying the number of Venezuelans affected by the new policy will be relatively minor.

"No-one's talking about the closing of borders," said Interior Minister Mauro Medina.

He said Peru is improving its "migration control for reasons of order and security," adding that "80 percent of Venezuelans who come into the country do so with a passport."

Kruger criticized the measures announced by Colombia's two southern neighbors, admitting he was "worried about the consequences."

"Asking for a passport isn't going to stop migration because they're leaving their country not out of choice but out of necessity," he said.

The UN says more than two million Venezuelans have fled the country since the current crisis began in 2014.

Under President Nicolas Maduro's leadership, Venezuela is suffering from hyperinflation, shortages of basic necessities such as food and medicine, and failing public services.

- 'Multilateral action' -

Colombia's Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo said earlier this week the country would petition the UN to appoint a special envoy "to coordinate a multilateral action to combat this humanitarian crisis" at next month's general assembly in New York.

Ecuador said it would organize a meeting of 13 Latin American countries to discuss the migrant crisis.

Kruger, though, called on Ecuador and Peru to work with Colombia, which has granted temporary citizenship to more than 800,000 Venezuelans, "in a coordinated manner, employing similar policies to address this phenomenon."

Venezuela is in a fourth straight year of recession with double-digit falls in its Gross Domestic Product, while the International Monetary Fund says inflation will reach a mind-boggling one million percent this year.

Industry is operating at only 30 percent, hit hard by the oil price crash since 2014 in a country that earns 96 percent of its revenue from crude.

Maduro and his government have implemented a number of measures recently to try to boost the economy including a redenomination of the bolivar, a loosening of foreign capital rules and a massive increase in the minimum wage, but critics and analysts say those moves will likely be counterproductive.