Iván Duque during the announcement of the temporary protection status for migrants from Venezuela.LUISA GONZALEZ / Reuters
Iván Duque delivered a coup on Monday that puts Colombia at the forefront of migration policies in Latin America and gives his government a considerable international reputation as the main host country for the diaspora from neighboring Venezuela.
The president announced a temporary 10-year protection statute that aims to regularize about one million undocumented Venezuelan migrants who are already in the country, the most affected by the exodus.
The nascent Temporary Protection Statute for Venezuelan Migrants (ETPV) is a plan to integrate that population and allow them more easily access to formal work, education or health, precisely on the eve of the mass vaccination to immunize the population against the covid -19 that the Government plans to start on February 20.
In summary, the announced legal mechanism opens the door to the offer of State services and, over time, will benefit more than 1.7 million Venezuelan citizens who are already in Colombia, but especially the 966,714 who in December 2020 they were in an irregular situation, according to figures from immigration authorities.
When the ten-year term expires, Venezuelan citizens will be able to apply for a residence visa if they decide to stay.
Duque himself presented the ETPV as an example for other countries in the region to adopt similar reception policies and repeated once again his call for "the international community to contribute resources and tools to serve the migrant population."
"With this, Colombia reaffirms its love and support for all the Venezuelan people who have been victims of this tragedy," he stressed in reference to the Government of Nicolás Maduro, which is radically opposed.
The Colombian president assumed power in August 2018 with a promise to isolate Hugo Chávez's heir, whom he does not recognize.
His unrestricted support for the opposition led by Juan Guaidó has raised tension between two countries that share a border of more than 2,200 kilometers that is difficult to control and full of informal crossings.
The announcement allowed Duque to change the focus of public debate at a time when the numerous critics of his Government demanded the resurgence of violence in different regions of the country, the incessant murder of social leaders and ex-combatants who signed the peace agreement with the extinct FARC guerrilla and the delay in the start of vaccination against other countries in the region.
The worldwide accolades were almost immediate.
"This important act of solidarity will allow at least a third of the five million refugees and migrants in the region to formally access services and contribute to the Colombian economy," said the UN Secretary General, the Portuguese António Guterres.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Italian Filippo Grandi, who accompanied Duque during the announcement at the Casa de Nariño, described it as “the most important humanitarian gesture that has been made on the continent since the Cartagena Declaration. [on refugees] of 1984 ".
The shower of congratulations included the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the ambassador of the European Union in Colombia, Patricia Llombart, who considered it "a decision of solidarity, courageous and unprecedented."
Duque was elected with an unprecedented figure of more than ten million votes, under the shadow of former president Álvaro Uribe, his political mentor and the most staunch critic of the peace agreement that Juan Manuel Santos sealed with the FARC, today disarmed and turned into a politic party.
Since then, it has undergone a prolonged popularity crisis, and it even ended 2019 besieged by the wave of protests that shook the country.
Analysts used to agree that his government lacked a definite direction until the pandemic upset the political agenda.
During a conclave last month at the presidential hacienda of Hato Grande, a few kilometers from Bogotá, the government itself set the economic reactivation and mass vaccination of Colombians as the priorities for this year, the last one before the presidential elections in May 2022. The temporary protection statute offers a much clearer health horizon to include the migrant population in vaccination plans, and with its 10-year validity it also allows Duque to project a legacy beyond the year and a half that remains. mandate.
The measure has to do with the reputation of the government, points out the political scientist and internationalist Sandra Borda.
Due to the hesitant implementation of the peace agreement, serious problems have emerged such as the murder of social leaders, he recalls, but "now we have a president who is implementing an unparalleled migration policy", and that "catapults him onto the international scene" .
It is also an electorally risky decision, striking for coming from a conservative Executive when right-wing parties in the world tend to an anti-immigration discourse upon discovering that it is profitable at the polls, he warns.
The international pressure to implement the agreements and defend human rights to which Duque has been subjected "could well be tempered by the argument that no one is doing so much for migrants," he concludes.