CONFIDENTIAL
Mrs J.Wyeth
Disaster and Refugee Unit
ODA
Сосомын
BRITISH EMBASSY
BOGOTA
12 September 1986
Dear Mrs Wyeth
need 22/9/86.
ETU du (=;
UNHCR PROGRAMMES IN SOUTH AMERICA
1. Charles de Chassiron requested in his letter of 31 July our views on the scope and efficiency of the UNHCR programme in Colombia, as part of a world-wide exercise you are conducting. There is no resident UNHCR representative in Colombia (it is covered from Lima) but I called on Dra Miriam de Blanco of the Secretario Permanente del Episcopado Colombiano (SPEC), which is the executing agency in Colombia, to discuss the programme.
2. The main source of refugees in Colombia continues to be Central America and Nicaragua in particular, there being on 30 June 1986 47 active Nicaraguan. cases (86 persons); Chile is the other major source, with 44 active cases (91 persons). There were also 44 active cases of elderly Europeans (174 persons), displaced during the Second World War. There had been a small but noticeable drop in the number of new cases; SPEC put this down to the worsening security situation in Colombia which was encouraging refugees to go elsewhere, and expected this reduction to continue for the foreseeable future.
3. The South American refugees were easier to settle than the Central American ones. This was because the former (principally from Chile) tended to be professional people from the middle classes for whom it was relatively easy to find employment, while the latter were comprised mainly of fishermen from the Nicaraguan coasts who had very low levels of education and who were therefore in competition for jobs with Colombians in a socio-economic group suffering high unemployment.
4. Cooperation between SPEC and the Colombian authorities is clearly very good; this is of course facilitated by the fact that Colombia has a particularly liberal policy towards refugees. Refugees are issued with a special two year resident's visa on arrival, which is easily extended; this permits them to live and work without restrictions, with the exception that for political reasons Nicaraguan refugees are not allowed to live on the island of San Andrés.
5. My conclusion is that the small programme (less than 100 new arrivals per year) is being efficiently handled, and with excellent cooperation from the Colombian authorities. The only major problem appears to be the failure of many Nicaraguans to become self-supporting.
Yours sincerely
Tam Carfer
TH Carter CONFIDENTIAL
cc: C R L de Chassiron, South America Dept, FCO
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