The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and migration agency (IOM), have stepped up their response to the crisis and are launching a joint appeal for $1.79 billion, to fund a regional plan for supporting the increasing needs of the refugees and migrants from Venezuela, and their host communities across 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

COVID factor
Violence, insecurity and a lack of food, medicine and other services in Venezuela had forced millions of people to flee the country, creating one of the largest displacement crises in the world, according to the UN refugee agency.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has further aggravated the already delicate living conditions of refugees and migrants from Venezuela. In addition to serious health impacts, the health crisis has caused economic disruptions and exacerbated protection risks,” said Eduardo Stein, Joint UNHCR-IOM Special Representative for Venezuelan refugees and migrants.

The agencies noted that the pandemic had amplified a situation that was already precarious in terms of growing unemployment and poverty and access to education and basic services.

Serious protection risks arising from their lack of regular status, and closed borders due to the pandemic, have led to Venezuelans resorting to using informal routes.

These journeys are often taken on foot, and at great personal risk involving extreme climate conditions, natural hazards, threats from human traffickers or exploitation and abuse by smugglers.

Giving back
“Those who have left Venezuela are ready to contribute and give back to the communities that have welcomed them,” the joint representative said, noting that support from the international community remains crucial to helping the refugees and migrants and their host countries to ensure that “no one is left behind”.

This year’s response plan brings together 192 partner organizations involved in the response, including United Nations agencies, international and national non-governmental organizations, civil society, and refugee-led, migrant-led and community-based organizations.

Source: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1107522

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CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s opposition said on Thursday the United States has granted it access to millions of dollars of frozen Venezuelan government funds to support efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19 in the country.

The U.S. Treasury Department had approved the release of the funds, the opposition said in a statement without specifying the total amount.

The statement said part of the released funds would go to pay some 62,000 health workers $300. During a live appearance on Twitter on Thursday night, opposition leader Juan Guaido said health workers could register accounts to receive payments of $100 a month starting Monday.

Healthcare workers in Venezuela can earn as little as $5 a month.

Guaido first announced the additional support for healthcare workers four months ago, but distribution required a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as the frozen funds were held by the New York Federal Reserve.

The opposition plans to distribute the funds using AirTM, a digital payment platform, but on Thursday, the website was blocked in Venezuela.

“You have to be very bad to block an account for men and women who are giving everything with conviction to protect our people when they are going to receive a bonus,” said Guaido.

The opposition leader added healthcare workers would be sent a manual with the steps to download a virtual private network (VPN) so they could circumvent the restrictions. AirTM also tweeted instructions how to use a VPN.

Guaido has been recognized by more than 50 countries as Venezuela’s rightful president after assuming an interim presidency in 2019 on the grounds that Maduro’s 2018 re-election was fraudulent.

In July, the opposition obtained permission to distribute $17 million in funds frozen in the United States that would be channeled through international health organizations to purchase supplies for medical workers.

The license also approves another $4.5 million to support Venezuelans at risk of death, an opposition press release said.

Venezuela is suffering economic collapse and its crumbling health system has so far registered 37,567 cases of COVID-19 and 311 deaths, although experts say the number is likely to be higher due to widespread insufficient testing.

(Reporting by Sarah Kinosian; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Source: https://www.metro.us/u-s-unfreezing-venezualan-assets/

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At this point in the Venezuelan crisis, many of the men have already gone ahead in search of work. Their families now follow. Children drag luggage behind them. Mothers carry babies or cranky toddlers. Their clothing is generally unsuited to a trek in which temperatures start in the high-90s but dip into the low-40s in the mountains. Many make the long walk in flip-flops or Crocs.

Along the route are a string of way stations, run and supported by organizations including the International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, Samaritan’s Purse and World Vision (my host). A station called El Diamante, sponsored by a local Catholic church, is helping 300 to 400 walkers a day, providing hot food, bathroom facilities, and temporary shelter.

“There is no work and no food [back in Venezuela],” one woman resting at El Diamante told me. “I can’t buy diapers or milk.” Another added, “I came here because I suffer from diabetes and can’t find any medicine there.” A man holding his child explained to me, “My son didn’t have anything to eat. I need to fight for him.”

The president of World Vision U.S., Edgar Sandoval, lived in Venezuela as a teenager. “People all over the world came to Venezuela looking for a better life,” he told me. “I still keep in touch with some people in the country. Access to water is an issue. Some make several trips a day with a wheelbarrow to get water for their needs. Malnutrition among children is a significant issue. I know of kids who are 2 years old and not walking or talking. That’s when desperation sets in.”

Venezuela is now a world leader in the production of desperation. In the early 2000s, socialist strongman Hugo Chavez created a system, funded by oil revenues, in which food, education, and health care were all essentially free. Salaries were small but were mainly used for extras, not essentials. When the price of oil crashed, so did the system of subsidies. Poor and middle-class Venezuelans were left only with their salaries, paid in a local currency that hyperinflation rendered essentially worthless. Some products are still available, but only when purchased in U.S. dollars.

So: The minimum wage in Venezuela is now worth about $6 a month, while one kilo of cornmeal (around two pounds) costs about a quarter of that amount. Add to this the rolling blackouts, and hospitals without gauze or painkillers, and no propane for cooking, and chronic shortages of toilet paper and hygiene products. And add to this a regime that stays in power through brutal oppression, enforced by the national guard and deputized street gangs called “colectivos.” The result is a country that more than 4 million refugees have chosen to flee.

The recently reopened Simon Bolivar International Bridge in Cúcuta is where most refugees walk out of Venezuela. Those fortunate enough to get remittances from relatives abroad can pick up dollars at the Western Union on the Colombia side and pay for a bus trip to their destination. But the very poor are left to walk through the mountains or subsist by begging or petty smuggling across the border.

At the Colegio La Frontera, a public school in Colombia that mainly serves Venezuelan students, I met a refugee named Jheyde, a bright, confident, outspoken girl of 13. With support from World Vision, she now doesn’t miss a day of school. But she spent years working at odd jobs along with her mother. Jheyde once sold cuttings of her hair for use in wigs. She recalled smuggling pineapples and being forced to pay bribes if caught by the police or the colectivos.

This is what the Venezuelan experiment in Chavism has become: the employment of armed thugs to extort impoverished little girls. A better future will require an end to the Venezuelan regime’s cruelty, corruption, and incompetence. But in the meantime, the humanitarian emergency is acute and expanding. Aid organizations are operating at the limit of their resources. And the walkers continue their difficult journey.

Michael Gerson’s email address is michaelgerson@washpost.com.

Source: https://www.hutchnews.com/news/20190619/venezuela-is-world-leader-in-production-of-desperation

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When about 100 Russian servicemen and military equipment were reportedly flown into Venezuela in late March, US President Donald Trump’s response was to declare that ‘Russia has to get out’. Moscow refused, saying that the troops would stay ‘as long as needed’ and that they were only there to repair equipment, such as Venezuela’s Russian-made S-300 air-defence system. Russia has denied the recent reports that it had told the US that it was pulling defence personnel out of Venezuela.

Amid the continuing political, economic and humanitarian meltdown of Venezuela, an anti-American alliance consisting of Russia, Cuba and Iran is coalescing to counter US economic and diplomatic pressure on embattled President Nicolas Maduro. The anchor of the alliance is Cuba, which colonised Venezuela through its security services when Fidel Castro’s protege Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998.

Castro then began shipping tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day back to Cuba, while Venezuela became what is widely considered a ‘mafia state’. He also expanded his relationships with the narco-terrorist insurgencies plaguing the region, most famously FARC and the National Liberation Army in Colombia. Cuba’s security services helped stand up loyalist paramilitary organisations called colectivos to terrorise opponents of the Maduro regime. More recently, Cuba assisted in creating the Special Actions Force, or FAES, which strikes at opposition figures.

But Cuba is not alone. It cooperated with its longstanding ally, Iran, to help build security architecture to protect its colony. The expeditionary wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, worked alongside Cuban intelligence in Venezuela to consolidate the regime’s hold. Since 2005, Iran has extended €1 billion (A$1.61 billion) in loans to Cuba and is heavily involved in several projects there, including a shared intelligence station to block US radio broadcasts.

A proxy of the Quds Force, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, has also had a close relationship with the Venezuelan regime, which mostly revolves around proceeds from illicit drugs, money laundering and other organised crime to supplement its activities in the Middle East. In an exposé on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s operation to track and shut down Hezbollah’s global operations, Josh Myer writes that:

[B]eginning in 2007, DEA agents watched as a commercial jetliner from Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa airline flew from Caracas to Tehran via Damascus, Syria, every week with a cargo-hold full of drugs and cash. They nicknamed it ‘Aeroterror,’ they said, because the return flight often carried weapons and was packed with Hezbollah and Iranian operatives whom the Venezuelan government would provide with fake identities and travel documents on their arrival.

The Venezuelan embassy in Iraq was reportedly involved in a similar effort.

In 2010, an unclassified US Defense Department report to Congress on Iranian military power noted an increased Revolutionary Guard presence in Venezuela, and there are now credible reports of a Hezbollah terrorist training camp on Venezuela’s Margarita Island, as well as in Cuba. Maduro recently wrote a letter to Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah thanking him for his support after Nasrallah pledged military and security specialists to preserve his regime. Nasrallah said it was but a ‘small part’ that Hezbollah could offer Maduro and the memory of Chavez in return for the support they gave Hezbollah and Iran, particularly in providing funds for Hezbollah.

Just as worrying to the Americans as the pervasive Iranian presence in Venezuela is the increasing Russian interest in preserving Maduro’s rule. Moscow has almost single-handedly kept Maduro’s regime afloat financially, primarily through the Russian energy company Rosneft, which has used its leverage to take possession of Venezuela’s oil and oil infrastructure in exchange for massive loans. Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s chief executive and one of Russia’s most powerful men, had a close relationship with Chavez and reportedly meets with Maduro regularly.

As demonstrated in Syria, Moscow doesn’t like to let its allies fall, and the troops deployed to Venezuela aren’t the only indicator of increasing Russian military involvement there. In January, Reuters reported that perhaps hundreds of Russian ‘mercenaries’ from the Wagner group—a Russian military intelligence front with a presence in Syria, Ukraine, Sudan, the Central African Republic and possibly Libya—had been deployed to help protect Maduro. The report was published a day after Russia and Iran discussed coordinating their response to the crisis in Venezuela, and Russia is almost certainly leveraging Iranian and Cuban infrastructure to help keep Maduro in power.

In February, for example, Russia granted Cuba a military credit line for €38 million (A$61.25 million), and the Wagner contingent was said to have flown to Venezuela via Havana. There are also reports that Russia is looking to establish new bases in both Cuba and Venezuela, which it denies. In April, Iran opened a direct route to Caracas for Mahan Air, a company that’s been sanctioned in much of the Western world for being a transport system for Quds Force personnel and weapons. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, reportedly mooted sending Revolutionary Guard personnel to protect Maduro.

Trump initially seemed to favour military intervention in Venezuela. He has since done a complete about-face, following a mid-May phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin who he says assured him that Russia ‘is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela’. The failure of senior US officials to stage-manage Maduro’s overthrow using only sanctions and diplomacy has prompted Trump to lash out at their hawkish rhetoric and false assumptions.

While the current US strategy is simply to maintain sanctions and international pressure and wait out Maduro’s regime, the dynamics set in motion by the US and by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido could take on a life of their own. Military intervention is extremely unlikely, but any uncalculated escalation or sudden collapse of the regime could inadvertently involve US forces battling Iranian- and Russian-backed Venezuelans in America’s own backyard.

Oved Lobel is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. Image courtesy of the President of Russia.

Source: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/what-are-russia-iran-and-cuba-doing-in-venezuela/

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The socialist leader ordered a review of Venezuela’s relationship with the U.S. hours after the Trump administration officially recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation’s interim president.

A day earlier, Vice President Mike Pence sent a recorded video to Venezuelans referring to Maduro as “a dictator with no legitimate claim to power.”

‘Maduro must go’: Pence officially backs Venezuelan opposition, condemns President Maduro

“He has never won the presidency in a free and fair election, and has maintained his grip on power by imprisoning anyone who dares to oppose him,” Pence said in the video.

Hours after the video was sent on Tuesday, Maduro spoke on state television, saying that Pence had brought about a 200-year low in relations between the two countries by authorizing a coup.

On Wednesday Trump recognized 35-year-old Guaido, head of the opposition-controlled congress, as the country’s interim president.

“The citizens of Venezuela have suffered for too long at the hands of the illegitimate Maduro regime,” Trump tweeted after Guaido spoke to his supporters, and tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets in widespread protest against Maduro.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said later Wednesday that the U.S. stands with Guaido, and “does not consider former president Nicolas Maduro to have the legal authority to break diplomatic relations with the United States or to declare our diplomats persona non grata.”

VENEZUELA’S CONGRESS NAMES NEW LEADER, VOWS TO BATTLE MADURO

Guaido’s supporters, shouting phrases including “Get out, Maduro,” say they’re fed up with spiraling inflation, a shortage of basic goods and a migration crisis dividing families.

The protest is considered a crucial test for the reinvigorated opposition as it seeks to send a forceful message that Maduro no longer has the people’s backing and appeals to the military and the poor to shift loyalties that until recently looked solidly behind the president. The protests were called to coincide with a historic date for Venezuelans — the anniversary of the 1958 coup that overthrew military dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.

Maduro, who started his second term as president on Jan. 11 after disputed elections, is facing increasing hostility from the international community. He has sought to shore up support from the armed forces by doling out key posts to top generals, including one as the head of the oil monopoly that is the source of virtually all of Venezuela’s export earnings.

He has also been acting as commander in chief, appearing last week at a military command meeting wearing camouflage fatigues and receiving the blessing of the defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino Lopez.

Maduro has accused the opposition of inciting violence with the aim of provoking a bloodbath. Top socialist leaders have threatened to unleash menacing motorcycle gangs of pro-government die-hards known as “colectivos.”

“I demand the full rigor of the law against the fascists,” Maduro said Tuesday night, blaming “terrorists” allegedly linked to Guaido’s Popular Will party for a fire at a cultural center named for a pro-government lawmaker murdered in 2014.

Fox News’ Nicholas Kalman and Lucia Suarez Sang and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/maduro-severing-venezuelan-relations-with-us

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