Three million Venezuelan citizens have fled the country in the eight years since the South American nation entered a socioeconomic and political crisis, according to the United Nations.
New data released Thursday states nearly 10 percent of Venezuela’s population has fled because of the country’s hyperinflation, starvation, rise in murder and other crime, and lack of employment that started during Hugo Chavez’s administration in 2010 and has worsened now under President Nicolas Maduro.
Around 32 million residents remain in the country, according to World Bank data from 2017.
The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration and High Commissioner for Refugees said in the report Venezuelans have fled to countries all over the world, as well as to next door Colombia and other nations on the continent.
Around 2.4 million of the 3 million migrants and refugees remain in Latin America and the Caribbean. Colombia has taken in 1 million people; Peru has received 500,000; Ecuador, 220,000; Argentina, 130,000; and so on.
The remaining 600,000 people have gone to the U.S., Mexico, Europe, Asia, and other nations.
“Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have largely maintained a commendable open-door policy to refugees and migrants from Venezuela, however, their reception capacity is severely strained, requiring a more robust and immediate response from the international community if this generosity and solidarity are to continue,” Eduardo Stein, UNHCR-IOM Joint Special Representative for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela, said in a statement.
The set of crises unfolding in Venezuela are the worst in the nation’s history and one of the most economically devastating a nation in North or South America has seen.
The 3 million migrants and refugees from Venezuela make up 1 percent of the total number of people in the world who are living in a country other than the one in which they were born: 258 million, according to the U.N.’s 2017 International Migration Report, though that includes students and foreign workers.
In Syria, violence between the Islamic State and government regimes that has been unfolding over the past few years has driven 5.6 million Syrians to flee the country as refugees. Another 6.1 million are displaced within the country, according to a September report by World Vision.
