Violence by armed groups along Colombia's southern border is pushing growing numbers of people to seek refuge across the frontier in Ecuador
BOGOTA (AlertNet) - Violence by armed groups along Colombia’s southern border is pushing growing numbers of people to seek refuge across the frontier in Ecuador, prompting the two Andean nations to step up efforts to tackle the problem after they re-established full diplomatic relations late last year.
Decades of fighting between the Colombian military, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups have uprooted up to four million Colombians, local rights groups estimate. The majority have fled from their rural homes to other regions inside Colombia, becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs) in their own country.
But tens of thousands of Colombians have also spilled across the porous 640 km jungle border with Ecuador, which stretches from the Pacific Coast to the Amazon basin.
The number of officially recognised Colombian refugees in Ecuador has increased from only a few hundred in 2000 to over 52,000 last year, according to the Ecuadorian government, but aid officials estimate there are a far greater number of undocumented Colombians in the country.
This makes Ecuador the country with the largest refugee population in Latin America, according to the UNHCR, most of them from Colombia.
While the security situation in some parts of Colombia has significantly improved and guerrilla violence ebbed, the country’s southern border provinces remain areas where state presence is still fragile and sporadic. These regions remain a hotspot of guerrilla activity where clashes between the Colombian military and rebels occur almost daily.
“In the last 10 years, the numbers of Colombians seeking asylum in Ecuador has increased. While there is stability in some parts of Colombia, in the south it is the opposite,” Deborah Elizondo, UNHCR’s representative in Ecuador, told AlertNet in a telephone interview from the capital Quito.
“There is an ongoing conflict in certain parts of Colombia where people are fleeing because of generalised violence and human rights violations. Because of this conflict, Colombians cross the border seeking international protection.”
Since early 2000, the Colombian military has launched a series of U.S.-backed offensives in the south aimed at dislodging leftist Revolutionary Armed Forced of Colombia (FARC) rebels from their jungle strongholds. This, together with increasing military pressure on rebel groups in Colombia’s cities, has pushed the guerrillas further towards remote and jungle border areas, escalating the conflict along the country’s borders.
This shift has often meant communities, especially Colombia’s indigenous groups, living in the southern border provinces of Putumayo, Cauca and Narino, are trapped in the middle of clashes between the army and rebels and clashes do to with drug turf wars.
“There are several irregular armed groups operating in the southern part of Colombia such as neo-paramilitary groups, guerrilla and other gangs which threaten and attack the civilian population, engaging them in the conflict,” said UNHCR’s Elizondo.
Colombian farmers and their families are also fleeing across the border to avoid their children being forcibly recruited into rebel ranks. Others are driven from their homes, say local rights groups, because government crop-spraying campaigns to eradicate coca – the raw ingredient for cocaine – not only destroy the illegal coca shrub but also, in some cases, destroy subsistence food crops like maize.
INVISIBLE AND VULNERABLE
Only a fraction of the Colombians who have fled to Ecuador have applied for asylum or refugee status. The UNHCR estimates that up to 140,000 exiled Colombians are undocumented, making up a population of invisible and often ignored refugees.
Without documentation and a recognised legal status, many Colombian refugees live on the margins of Ecuadorian society and often face stigmatisation and difficulty in integrating, says the UNHCR.
Around half of Colombian asylum seekers in Ecuador are women and children, it says. Many live in wooden shacks on stilts along poor river communities and jungle border villages, often with no access to clean water, electricity, healthcare or schooling for their children. Some women are forced into prostitution to make ends meet.
FAST-TRACK REFUGEE REGISTRATION
The Ecuadorian government has recently stepped up its efforts to tackle the situation of undocumented Colombian refugees in the country. This has been made easier by better ties with Bogota following a two-year suspension of relations after Colombia bombed a guerrilla camp across the border.
Last year, with funding and support from the UNHCR, Ecuador introduced a new mobile registration scheme that involved mobile teams of government officials going to remote and border areas to speed up the approval of asylum claims by refugees to within a day rather than several months. Over 20,000 Colombians were registered officially as refugees in Ecuador during the scheme.
While Ecuador spends around $40 million a year caring for refugees and has implemented initiatives to streamline the registration process, government resources remain insufficient to confront the problem.
Last month during a visit to Colombia and Ecuador, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, called on the international community to provide more support to cope with refugees in Ecuador and Colombia’s displacement crisis.
"The impact of this humanitarian crisis is little known in the rest of the world and more support is needed from the international community," he said.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
