Avalanche of criticism of the Colombian government for the exclusion of almost one million Venezuelans from the vaccine

Venezuelan citizens try to cross the border with Colombia near Cúcuta, last March.SCHNEYDER MENDOZA / AFP

Years ago, Colombia adopted an open-door policy with Venezuelan migration, a massive flow that intensified with the deterioration of the economic crisis and the institutional blockade in Caracas.

Of the nearly five million people who left in search of opportunities, almost 1.7 million settled in the neighboring country, according to official data.

The impact of those numbers on Colombian public services comes from afar, but President Iván Duque made a particularly controversial announcement on Monday that cost him a wave of criticism.

Migrants without papers, he maintained, will not have the right to the vaccine against covid-19 that will begin to be administered in February.

Behind this statement there is another figure: around 950,000 Venezuelans "in irregular condition", one of the most vulnerable and exposed sectors of society, will be excluded from the vaccination program, which as a whole includes the distribution of 40 million doses.

“We have the prioritization, it will always be the Colombian citizens.

That will be our priority, because that is how it is marked, ”Duque said in an interview on Blu Radio station.

The president explained that cases of citizens with dual nationality "will be handled, not based on nationality."

"If they are people who are regularized, if they are people who have the conditions and, additionally, are within the pathologies and the population at risk defined by the Ministry of Health, that gives guiding criteria for the application of the same," he added in reference to the vaccine.

When asked about migrants without residence, he insisted: “Those who do not have the accreditation of being Colombian citizens at this time and who do not have their immigration status regularized, of course not.

If not, imagine what we would be experiencing: at this moment we would have almost a call for a stampede for everyone to cross the border to ask to be vaccinated ”.

Duque is radically opposed to the regime of Nicolás Maduro and has given his support to the opposition led by Juan Guaidó.

With these premises, his government chose to allow with hardly any obstacles, on humanitarian grounds, the entry of Venezuelan migrants.

The closure of the entire land border, more than 2,200 kilometers full of informal roads, the so-called trails, would otherwise have been unfeasible.

That measure was not even effective in the weeks of strict isolation decreed by the coronavirus pandemic.

In any case, the decision to exclude the undocumented from vaccines, which in Colombia will be made by the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and AstraZeneca and the Covax platform, clouded an already very tense political horizon.

The scope of the questions is of a social and health nature.

“Not vaccinating Venezuelans is a bad idea from an epidemiological point of view.

But it is above all an unethical proposal: it excludes the most vulnerable and discriminates in an almost threatening way against a group of people because of their nationality and migratory status, "said the former Minister of Health, Alejandro Gaviria, through social networks today rector of the Universidad de los Andes.

One of the opposition leaders, former presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, harshly rejected the substance of the announcement.

“This message makes millions of Colombians clap their hands, forgetting that there are millions of Colombians in Venezuela, Ecuador, the United States and Spain, and that we would not at all like to be excluded from the vaccine.

Xenophobia is one of the pillars of fascism, ”said the leftist senator.

Former President Ernesto Samper wondered what would happen if "Trump decided to deny the Pfizer vaccine to all Latino migrants living in the United States."

Venezuelan migrants without papers and without formal employment are precisely those who are most exposed to the virus.

And the scarcity of resources, the precarious living conditions and the fact that they cannot isolate themselves because their subsistence depends on what they earn from day to day, mainly thanks to street trade, can multiply the risks of the rest of society.

Duque does not want to generate, he assures, a knock-on effect, but this decision clashes with the immigration policy that he embraced when he won the elections in 2018. From Caracas, Maduro took the opportunity to once again attack Bogotá, speaking of “xenophobia” and even stating in a public act: "We have to take care of Colombia, because from there comes all the evil that enters Venezuela."

Relations between the two countries have been broken for years.

The bankruptcy is irreversible and the Bolivarian government considers Duque and the outgoing president of the United States, Donald Trump, as its main adversaries.

At the same time, the Venezuelan opposition referred to in Guaidó avoided criticizing the measure and came out in defense of the president of Colombia. “The pandemic has affected everyone and the most vulnerable more severely. With the beginning of vaccination, all efforts are urgently needed to achieve it in the shortest possible time, countries such as Colombia and President Iván Duque are already beginning an accurate strategy in that direction, ”wrote the founder of Voluntad Popular. The representative of his team in Bogotá, Tomás Guanipa, who is an ambassador in Colombia, stated that the Colombian government “has always had an outstretched hand to support the more than 1.7 million Venezuelans who have had to flee from the humanitarian emergency ”. "Its integration, health and education policies have been pioneers in the region," he added. Duque has always asked for greater international investment to sustain the migratory phenomenon. In May, a donor conference allocated nearly $ 2.8 billion to Venezuelan refugees and migrants.