Over 5,000 Displaced Colombians Receive Asylum in Venezuela

In recent days the world has watched as Venezuela launched a campaign to rid its border with Colombia of paramilitaries from the neighboring country, after three Venezuelan soldiers were injured by these death squads.

But while the Colombian government has protested the deportation of around 1,000 of its citizens with suspected links to these violent groups, the Venezuelan National Commission for Refugees has revealed that there are 5,991 Colombian refugees living there, displaced by their homeland’s internal conflicts. A further 20,000 have applied for asylum.

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Rosalba Peña fled to Venezuela with her children and grandchildren after nine of her family members were assassinated by paramilitaries.

“We have to leave exiled from our country, fleeing the murders to protect our lives and those of our children,” Peña told teleSUR from her home in San Cristobal, Tachira state.

Peña has been given all the same benefits as Venezuelans, she said, including free medicine and food.

“I am respected. Here there is a lot of respect for grandparents and children. We live a better life. Being here the trauma of Colombia violence has passed from us a little,” she said.

Another former asylum seeker, Elsa Peña, came to Venezuela after her husband, a prominent figure in the political left, was “disappeared” in Colombia.

“I came fleeing the violence to safeguard the life of my children,” she said.

Peña was helped by Mission Miracle, a Bolivarian Revolution initiative that offers medical attention to people with sight problems. “I have been embraced by the Cuban-Venezuelan agreement. They took me to Cuba for visual surgery without paying a cent.”

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Peña told teleSUR that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos needs to “stop playing the victim.”

“The Colombian people have suffered in their own flesh what violence really is, the bombings and the forced disappearances,” she said.

Earlier this week, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) said that Venezuela is the leading country in the region offering refuge to displaced Colombians fleeing poverty and violence.

“(These Colombians are) victims of political and social violence, abandoned to their fate without the minimum compassion of the Colombian state, controlled (historically) by violent political minorities,” said Ambassador Roy Chaderton.

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