39PART 1

THE AMERICAS

5 COUNTRIES WITH MOSTNEW DISPLACEMENT(conflict, violence and disasters)
United States

Conflict 404,000
Disasters 1,687,000
7.5% of the global total

1,247,000

El Salvador

250,700

Colombia

212,000

Brazil

86,000Cuba

52,000Weather-related disasters once again impacted
several countries in the Americas in 2018. In addition,unresolved conflict, criminal violence and social andeconomic crises continued to push people to flee. Disasters triggered the majority of new displacements in theregion, accounting for around 1.7 million. In addition,
about 404,000 new displacements associated withconflict and violence were recorded.
Hurricanes and wildfires triggered more than 1.2
million new displacements in the United States, thehighest figure in the region. Florida was struck by two
major hurricanes during the year. Hurricane Florence
triggered 464,000 new displacements in August,and hurricane Michael another 375,000 in October.
Unprecedented and devastating wildfires triggered
354,000 new displacements in California in the second
half of the year, accounting for around 30 per centof the total new displacements in the US (see UnitedStates spotlight, p.42).
Confrontations between different armed groups, intimidation and extorsion triggered 145,000 new displacements in Colombia in 2018, an increase comparedwith previous years. The government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed apeace agreement in 2016, but to date the country’s
military has been unable to secure areas the demobilised
guerrilla group used to control. The power vacuum hasbeen filled by other armed groups vying for controlof land, illegal mining and drug plantations and trafficking routes. Fighting between two smaller guerrillagroups, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and thePopular Liberation Army (EPL), triggered most of thenew displacements.
Norte de Santander was the worst affected department.
Around 30,000 new displacements were recorded,
the highest figure since 2002 and 20 per cent of thenational total for last year. The department also sharesa border with Venezuela, and its capital Cúcuta has
been the main crossing point for refugees and migrants
fleeing Venezuela’s political and economic crisis (seeColombia spotlight, p.44).
More than 67,000 new displacements associated withdisasters were also recorded in Colombia. Floods in thenorthern department of Antioquia led to more than
26,000 evacuations in April and May, when construction failures at the Ituango hydroelectric complex,
Colombia’s largest and one of its most controversial
development projects combined with rising waters
upstream, raising fears the dam would burst.190 Torrential rains caused several rivers to break their banks inthe southern department of Putumayo triggering morethan 30,000 in August.
Around three million people have been recorded as
fleeing Venezuela in the past 18 months, but thegovernment’s unwillingness to acknowledge its population’s growing humanitarian needs means solid information about any internal displacement is scarce.191
Evidence suggests that it has been significant, however,particularly toward border areas as people seek easier40

A city bus burned by gang members in Apopa, 19
kilometres away from the city of San Salvador, El
Salvador. Photo: Shutterstock/ES James

access to basic services in Colombian and Brazilian
border towns.192 Venezuela’s crisis escalated significantly
in 2018 as food shortages increased and the provisionof basic services including electricity and healthcare
deteriorated.193
At least 420 new displacements associated with conflictand violence were recorded in Ecuador, as the presenceof FARC dissidents and drug trafficking groups such as
the Mexican Sinaloa cartel in the province of Esmeraldas forced people to flee.194 Esmeraldas is a strategic
location for these groups because it shares sea andland borders with Tumaco, the largest coca-producing
municipality in Colombia.195 Joint military operations
have taken place on both sides of the border and theemerging situation shows that drug production andtrafficking remain significant drivers of conflict, instability and displacement in the region.
Violence associated with the drug trade also triggered
at least 11,000 new displacements in Mexico, where
the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca
and Sinaloa were worst affected. Figures on internal
displacement and policies to address it are far fromcomprehensive, but the modification of the coun-GRID
2019

try’s General Victims Law to include IDPs as a vulnerable group and the Senate proposition to establish aspecific law on IDP protection in 2018 are positive steps
forward.196
Mexico also saw 13,000 new displacements triggeredby hurricane Willa, which tracked across six stateswith wind speeds of up to 220 kilometres an hour inNovember. Many of these displacements can be attributed to evacuations organised by the authorities asa result of the advanced disaster risk management
systems in place in the country.
In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which makeup the Northern Triangle of Central America, highlevels of violence, much of it urban, continued to trigger
displacement. Gang activity, structural violence, generalised insecurity, heavy-handed state security responses,
corruption and a culture of impunity have all been identified as drivers of internal and cross-border displacement in the region.197
Around 246,000 new displacements associated withconflict and violence were recorded in El Salvador and
950 in Honduras. Ongoing violence in Guatemala

41

Urban perspectives
Many countries in the Americas have undergone rapid
urbanisation over the last 50 years, and with it came aconcentration of economic development in and aroundlarge cities. Increasing trade and employment opportunities have drawn economic migrants from rural areasand secondary and less economically active cities toward
capitals and other major urban centres.199 Internal
displacement has tended to follow similar patterns.200
These influxes have combined with natural urban demographic growth to make the Americas the most urbanised region in the world, with around 80 per cent of its
population living in towns and cities.201
Its urban centres are characterised by the concentration of wealth in specific pockets and among specificgroups, creating socioeconomic and spatial inequalities
that drive urban poverty, segregation and marginalisation. Many poor people, including IDPs, live in rapidly
expanding but unplanned, unregulated and underserved settlements in peri-urban areas.202
This issue is among the region’s main urban challenges. Poorly planned urban development in the US
has increased disaster risk in many cities, and evidenceshows that disasters disproportionately affect poor
households living in exposed areas, often leading totheir displacement.203 Estimates also suggest that morethan 20 per cent of Latin America’s urban population live in unregulated and underserved settlements,
many of them built in hazard-prone and often insecureareas.204 This puts the urban poor at particularly highrisk of displacement triggered by disasters, criminal
violence and evictions.
Many of the region’s cities rank among the mostdangerous in the world, and cases of individuals andfamilies being forced to flee targeted and generalised

gang violence have been documented. 205 Violence
perpetrated by criminal groups associated with drugtrafficking in Mexico has triggered displacement in manycities, including Ciudad Juárez, Culiacan and Tijuana.206
Direct and indirect security threats have also been
observed to trigger intra-urban displacement, in whichpeople move from one neighbourhood to another, incities including San Salvador in El Salvador and Medellinin Colombia (see Medellin and San Salvador spotlight,p.81). 207 The scale and dynamics of urban displacement associated with criminal violence, however, remain
poorly captured and understood across the region.
Some countries have implemented successful urban
poverty reduction measures, particularly by upgrading
informal settlements. Many initiatives in Brazil havecombined physical and architectural with social andparticipatory components to prevent evictions anddisplacement. 208 Urban regeneration projects in
Colombia that combine improved transport, security
and social support have benefited hundreds of thousands of poor urban dwellers, including IDPs living in
marginalised peri-urban areas.209 Disaster risk reduction
initiatives have also helped to mitigate displacement risk
in cities such as Santa Fe in Argentina, Montego Bay inJamaica and Lima in Peru.210
Cities in the Americas will play an ever-greater role insupporting durable solutions and reducing the risk ofdisplacement. Robust urban planning with a focus onrisk reduction and conflict prevention will be vital if its
triggers and drivers are to be addressed and its impacts
reduced.211

PART 1suggests that displacement has taken place there too,
but not enough data is available to compile an estimate. Of the three countries, not all recognise internal
displacement associated with violence let alone collectdata on it systematically, effectively rendering thephenomenon all but invisible. It is clear, however, thatmany IDPs fail to find safety and security in their own
country, leading to significant numbers of cross-border
movements within and beyond the region.198 The caravans that gained momentum in 2018 are illustrative of
this point.

42SPOTLIGHT

UNITED
STATES
California wildfires: urban
expansion and the risk ofdisplacement
The western US state of California is highly prone towildfires. In recent years, the combination of climatechange and people’s increased vulnerability and exposure to hazards made the wildfire seasons longer
and more destructive. The extension of the two long
seasons, the first spanning from June to September andthe other from October to April, has the potential ofturning wildfires into a year-round threat.212 Prolonged
drought, higher temperatures, stronger winds and theoveruse of water for agriculture have caused significant
harm to local ecosystems, leaving forests tinder-dry andlittered with dead wood.213 The increasing housing stockin the wildland-urban interface, where housing meetsand intermingles with wildland vegetation, also means
ever more homes are exposed to fire risk, which in turnincreases the risk of displacement.214The state experienced the deadliest and most destructive outbreak of wildfires in its history in the second halfof 2018, burning about 355,000 hectares of land, fourtimes the annual average for the past five years.215 Morethan 100 people are thought to have died. At least 22
wildfires triggered over 354,000 new displacements,
accounting for almost 30 per cent of the total new
displacements recorded in the United States last year.
The Carr, Holy and Mendocino Complex fires, named
after the places where they started, forced the evacuation of over 90,000 people in July and August, andduring the Woolsey and Camp fires a further 235,000
people in November.
Camp fire alone killed 85 people, displaced at least
53,000 and destroyed almost 14,000 homes.216 It burnt
62,000 hectares of land and caused between $11 and$13 billion in commercial and residential losses. It was
not the largest fire. Mendocino Complex burned almost

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four times the area. Nor was it unique in how fast itspread. The Tubbs fire in 2017 moved at similar speeds.
What set Camp fire apart and made it the deadliest andmost destructive fire in California’s history was what
happened in Paradise, a town which lay in its path.217
Paradise, a picturesque town in Butte county nestledin the Sierra Nevada foothills, had a large percentage
of its homes in the wildland-urban interface, increasing
the town and its residents’ exposure and vulnerability
to wildfires. 218 Within a few hours of taking hold,the fire had spread and destroyed most of the town,
displacing about 30,000 people. It was an example ofurban conflagration, a phenomenon last seen morethan a century ago in which a fire leaps from structure
to structure igniting them as it goes.219
Since the 1906 San Francisco fire, urban design anddevelopment have included better materials and moredefensible spaces, space between buildings and grass,trees or shrub, to prevent fire from spreading quickly.220
Since the 1990s, however, millions of homes have been
built in undeveloped areas on the fringes of towns andcities. This has increased the interface between wilderness and urban areas, and the trend is set to continue
as ever more people move to such places to live closer
to nature and reduce living costs.221
If future urban conflagrations are to be prevented,
homes in the wildland-urban interface will have to
be built with more fire-retardant materials and larger
defensible spaces between them to slow the spread offires.222 The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection recommends that homes have between 30 and 100
feet (10 to 30 metres) of defensible space, but without

43

A view of a suburban Californianneighborhood, after a wildfire
burned the hillside right up to edgeof the houses. Photo: Shutterstock/
Erin Donaldson, 2018state enforcement of regulations on private property,
such guidelines are more often than not ignored.223
In an area that was already experiencing a housing
shortage, Camp fire left thousands of people homeless.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
has dispersed millions of dollars in assistance to those
who lost their homes, but many of those displaced
still struggle to find somewhere to live locally. FEMA
is encouraging people to look for housing in Sacramento, 135 kilometres away, and further afield, but
this would disconnect people from their livelihoods andsocial networks.224 The lack of available and affordable
housing in the area will inevitably affect those withfewer resources the most.
The 2018 wildfire season in California demonstrates how
climate change and urban expansion have combined
to intensify fires, alter their patterns and extend theseasons. Average temperatures will continue to riseand populations living in the wildland-urban interface
to grow, exposing more people to the risk of displace-ment. The disaster in Paradise offers an example of what
the future may hold if authorities do not enforce urban
planning legislation and strengthen disaster prevention
and response.225

44SPOTLIGHT

COLOMBIA
Norte de Santander, where twodisplacement crises converge

Two displacement crises converged in Colombia in 2018.
The one that has attracted by far the most media attention had its origins in neighbouring Venezuela, wheremore than 3.4 million people are thought to have fled
the country to escape economic meltdown and hyperinflation, increasing criminality and human rights abuses,
worsening food shortages and deteriorating provisionof goods and services.226 Colombia has received morethan half of Venezuela’s refugees and migrants. Somehave continued their journey onward to Ecuador andelsewhere in the region, but more than a million havestayed in the country.227 Between 300,000 and 500,000
Colombians have also returned from Venezuela since
the start of the crisis.228
These events have diverted the international community’s attention and resources away from ongoing internal
displacement in Colombia. Many aid providers now
dedicate less than 30 per cent of their resources to theissue.229 Despite the 2016 peace agreement between
the government and the FARC, the number of new
displacements associated with conflict and violence
increased in 2018 compared with the previous year tomore than 145,000.230 In addition, 5.8 million people
remain displaced in Colombia as of the end of the year.
The situation in Norte de Santander department, whichborders Venezuela, is of particular concern. Around
30,000 new internal displacements associated withconflict and violence were recorded in 2018, the highest
figure since 2002.231 Within the department, the Catatumbo region has been particularly hard hit. Once aFARC stronghold, the territory has since been retakenby the ELN and the EPL, two other guerrilla groups
which have been present in the area for decades. FARC
dissidents and other armed groups have also joined
the fray.232

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Armed clashes intensified after the breakdown of anagreement between these groups on illegal businesses,
including drug trafficking. Not only did coca cultivationin Catatumbo increase by 145 per cent between 2015
and 2017, but the expansion of the drug trade combinedwith the reconfiguration of conflict has led to a growing
number of attacks against civilians.233 At least 31 social
leaders were assassinated in Norte de Santander in
2018, out of a national total of 172.234
Fighting between ELN and EPL in January and March
restricted the movement of almost 18,000 civilians,
whose access to basic goods, livelihoods and healthservices was also impeded. Humanitarian organisations struggled to reach those affected.235 Children’s
education was also disrupted when 80 schools had tosuspend classes because of violence and the presenceof landmines.236
The accompanying influx of Venezuelans risks undermining livelihood opportunities for the department’sIDPs and poor host communities. The situation in thecapital, Cúcuta, highlights some of the challenges associated with the combination of internal and cross-border
movements. Not only is it a destination for IDPs fleeing
conflict and violence in rural areas of the department.
It is also the busiest border crossing between Colombia
and Venezuela, and hosts more Venezuelans than any

45Venezuelan refugees and migrants cross theSimon Bolivar Bridge, one of 7 legal entrypoints on the Colombia-Venezuela border,
the largest entry point with over 30,000
people crossing into Colombia on a dailybasis. Photo © UNHCR/Siegfried Modola,January 2019other municipality in the country. Thousands cross theborder every day in search of food, medicine and basicservices.237 Hospitals and other social service providers
struggle to meet the growing population’s basic needs,
and local authorities are close to overwhelmed.238
Cúcuta has the highest unemployment rate in thecountry, reaching 15.8 per cent between Septemberand November 2018.239 It also has the highest participation rate for informal labour, at more than 68 percent of the workforce.240 The influx of Venezuelans has
increased competition for this type of work. There arefew alternatives and some IDPs report finding it harder
to secure employment.241 The integration of Venezuelans into the workforce is well recognised as an unprecedented challenge for Colombia.242
This, in turn, has led to a rise in xenophobia toward
Venezuelans. Threatening leaflets have been circulated in Cúcuta, Molotov cocktails have been thrownat places where they live and they have been targeted
for robbery and extortion.243 The lack of opportunities
and increasingly hostile environment have led somewho cross the border into the city to move on directly
elsewhere in Colombia, or further afield to Ecuador,
Peru and Chile.244 International humanitarian organisations, government agencies and the private sector
have introduced initiatives to tackle xenophobia andrefocus attention on the true priorities of the region’s
unprecedented displacement crisis.245
The government in Bogota has adopted an open andsupportive approach to the influx of Venezuelans, ofwhom as many as 770,000 entered Colombia in 2018.
In a spirit of reciprocity, it has acknowledged that in
the past, Colombians have flowed into Venezuela insearch of better opportunities or to escape conflictand violence. More than 574,000 Venezuelans were
officially registered in Colombia as of February 2019,
240,000 were in process of registering and 218,000
had no legal status.246 Supporting these refugees andmigrants is rightly a priority in the region, but doing
so should not be at the expense of those internallydisplaced, particularly at a time when peacebuilding andreconciliation are key priorities in Colombia.