Bogota (AFP)
The UN special envoy for Venezuelan refugees and migrants, Eduardo Stein, Tuesday urged the international community to increase its contributions to manage Venezuelan migration, whose volume exceeds the capacity of host countries.
"The problem is too important for the current capacity," Stein said Tuesday at a press conference in Bogota. "The international community needs to redouble its efforts and contributions to countries and international organizations concerned with the crisis," he added.
He also said that the UN General Assembly in September in New York was a good place for the international community to commit more resources, saying that 70% of funding was still missing.
It is necessary, he stressed, that "this is reflected (...) not only in messages of solidarity, but in concrete acts of contributions", especially as the migratory flow of Venezuela is "far from "as long as this country does not solve its internal situation.
UN special envoy hailed the efforts of Colombia, the first host country with 1.4 million Venezuelans on its territory, despite an "exhausted budget" and "overburdened institutional capacity" .
According to the UN, at least 3.3 million people have left Venezuela since 2016, fleeing the serious economic and political crisis in which this oil power is plunged. The vast majority would migrate to other Latin American countries, according to the UN.
For his part, Colombian Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo, who met with Stein, expressed concern about the "low mobilization" of international funds and the "rapid growth of Venezuelan migration".
"The mobilization of resources is still insufficient if we take into account that our country has welcomed more than 111,000 new migrants in the last three months," he said.
Trujillo said that out of the 315 million dollars in aid pledged, Colombia received only 66.
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