Pathways to Dignity on Colombia’s Border
When his brother was assassinated in the Venezuelan town of Betijoque on March 16, 2012, Arsenio Ortiz Acuña knew it was time to make the perilous crossing back into Colombia.
His brother’s killing was a rude awakening, sending him back into the orbit of the violence he had escaped only four years prior. Ortiz had fled his Colombian homeland for Venezuela in February 2008. At that time, Colombia’s northeastern border department of Norte de Santander was besieged by paramilitary and guerrilla war. Leftist insurgencies raged. And just as the rightwing paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), known for its fearsome death squads, was officially demobilizing, it was quickly being replaced by more nebulously organized groups that continued targeting leftists and community leaders. The department’s capital city of Cúcuta was absorbing waves of violence from Catatumbo, a rural region little more than sixty miles north.
After packing a few pieces of clothing and tucking some bolívars (the local currency) into his shoes, Ortiz made the journey from the distant Venezuelan state of Trujillo. “The Venezuelan guards see being Colombian as being paramilitary, and would arrest us if we didn’t pay,” Ortiz told The Progressive in Villa del Rosario in June.
He arrived in Villa del Rosario that same year, a Colombian border city of slightly less than one million residents in the southern municipality of Cúcuta, where he would rebuild his life in the barrio, or neighborhood, of El Páramo. There, he founded the Asociación Los Hoyuelos de Isabella, a community center that serves migrants and returnees. He also works with the Andean chapter of the Mesa Nacional de la Sociedad Civil para las Migraciónes. Now, fourteen years after Ortiz’s arrival in Colombia, the region braces for the immigration policy changes of the newly elected, far-right president, Abelardo de la Espriella.
The idiosyncrasies of this part of Norte de Santander are all too easily lost in translation. As the birthplace of Gran Colombia—the short-lived South American republic that dissolved soon after the end of Simón Bolívar’s rule in 1830—and the mighty resistance against colonial Spain, it is intractably intertwined with Venezuela. From the mountains engulfing the horizon, to the rhythm of daily life across the Simón Bolívar International Bridge and the Táchira River, Cúcuta and its environs are more influenced by the economy and culture of Venezuela than the rest of Colombia.
During a half century of war, Colombia earned the moniker of “a wandering nation.” More than seven million people have been internally displaced since 1985, and 400,000 people have become refugees. As Hiram Ruiz, former senior policy analyst at the U.S. Committee for Refugees, wrote during the peak of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s power, those who had the fortune and privilege to escape were mostly “urban, middle-class people who fear—or have already been subjected to—kidnapping or extortion, primarily by the guerrillas.” Those who were too poor to leave the country but desperate enough to take their chances, wound up as irregular migrants, defined by the International Organization for Migration as “movement that takes place outside the regulatory norms of the sending, transit and receiving country” and typically lacking documentation.
Colombia’s peace process, which began in 2012, entrenched justice for victims of armed conflict and forced migration, promising safe and dignified return to Colombians who fled the war abroad and were internally displaced, particularly for regions heavily hit by conflict like Norte de Santander. Known as the Integrated Truth, Justice, Reparations and Non-Repetition System, this process agreed to “create the conditions for rebuilding their lives, including access to the basic rights to employment, health, housing and education at all levels.”
At the time Ortiz fled Norte de Santander, official estimates of Colombian war refugees in Venezuela stood around 200,000 people. Millions more were fleeing poverty. Their fates became tangled up with Venezuelan migrants fleeing to Colombia. Despite ongoing conflict, Colombians living abroad like Ortiz were incentivized to return by a 2012 law, known as the Law of Return, that sought to reduce bureaucratic barriers for Colombians living abroad. By 2015, 22,000 Colombians were expelled or had returned from Venezuela.
Ortiz believes that a “lack of political will” has kept municipal governments from applying the national Law of Return, and sees people falling through the cracks of the immigration system, struggling to integrate, and facing discrimination at work and in their communities.
“This is my beloved homeland, where I grew up, where my family lives,” Ortiz says of Villa del Rosario. “I thought the government would actually provide the support it promised to Colombians who voluntarily return.”
Some Colombians have spent their lives in Venezuela: they either hold Venezuelan status, or are perceived as Venezuelan and treated as such. And that shared plight with Venezuelans reveals continued xenophobia and wider anti-immigrant sentiment amid Colombia’s political return to the right.
Thrown open to the street in the heart of the El Páramo barrio, the Asociación Los Hoyuelos de Isabella center is small and humble. People drop in for help with immigration processes, for one of the various events and programs, or just to say hello. Since the spring, Ortiz says, the center has hosted migrant youth in weekly psychosocial support programs to help them stay in school. Kids are learning about how to deal with the xenophobia Venezuelans often experience in Colombia, Ortiz says, and how to “close their eyes to negativity.”
Some insults used against young migrants, like Venecos—short for “Venezuelan-Colombians”—are subtly loaded. “We are brother countries. And people say it as if it were a bad thing, to shut them down,” Ortiz says.
The center is a touchpoint for many Venezuelans seeking help with regularization, the process of legalizing the immigration status for irregular migrants. In 2021, former Colombian president Iván Duque Márquez introduced the Temporary Protection Statute, a regularization pathway to connect Venezuelan migrants with health care and social services. The Temporary Protection Permit (Permiso por Protección Temporal, or PPT) was part of this plan, granting Venezuelans who arrived before January 31, 2021, regularized status for ten years. The program was funded by the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and, until its dismantling in 2025, by the United States Agency for International Development.
Demands from humanitarian experts and migrant rights advocates to remove cut-off dates for eligibility have persisted for years, but the government has instead further restricted them. By 2023, only minors enrolled in school were eligible. Parents of migrant Venezuelan children who arrived before December 31, 2023, are eligible for a different program called the Permiso Especial de Permanencia. But that program’s future is uncertain under de la Espriella’s new government, which has already begun enacting a harsh campaign against migrants.
The lines between Cúcuta and Villa del Rosario display the obvious dichotomy between wealth and deprivation. Sun-baked white mansions and gated communities sprawl alongside abject poverty. In underprivileged communities, many ways to make a living are irregular at best. Lives are lost and rebuilt. People find refuge, while others are forcibly disappeared by armed groups and criminal organizations (currently at least 5,522 people across Norte de Santander). And the contrasts are only growing.
Ortiz is proud of his barrio. His serious demeanor brightens as he shows off El Páramo’s basketball courts and football fields. In a neglected region known more for migrant crossings, coca farms, and drug trafficking, sports can change lives, or at least offer a semblance of normality. Ortiz points out a field that was once used for drug trafficking and prostitution: Now, he says, kids play football (soccer) freely. To him, the field represents the deeper cycle of violence that traps migrants in poverty and dangerous living situations.
Informal settlements near the border are growing more prevalent. Colombia is in the process of legalizing some of these as part of a wider peace-building strategy. But many are known as criminal hotspots with an “invisible border”—including Los Cumbres in northern Cúcuta, where Ortiz says police can’t enter because of gang violence: “When someone comes, they start shooting.”
“Everything that was happening in Caracas that was on TV in the past, is happening now in Cúcuta,” he adds, referring to the soaring violence in the wake of popular insurrection in 2014 that led to Caracas being deemed the murder capital of the world.
De la Espriella’s hardline security policy has divided even some marginalized communities. Ortiz shows off the center’s security footage on his phone. He is proud of the changes in his barrio over the past four years, pointing out street lighting, alarm systems, and cameras on lampposts. Amid the ubiquitous surveillance, he says the community is safer this way: You’re less likely to be robbed or kidnapped.
He’s had a hand in driving these changes. Since 2018, Ortiz has represented his barrio as a leader of a junta de acción comunal (JAC), a local community action board akin to community government. This can be a dangerous occupation: The government of Norte de Santander has increasingly sanctioned JACs without due process according to the Cúcuta Community Federation. And it’s not just pressure from above—community leaders are often targeted by armed actors who are engaged in drug trafficking or assert power over territories under their control, with several leaders killed across Cúcuta and the rural Catatumbo region this past year.
Not all who leave Venezuela come to Cúcuta or Villa del Rosario—some venture farther north into Catatumbo, where guerrilla groups and paramilitaries regularly fight over coca fields and border crossings. “Among Venezuelan migrants, what does them in most is selling and consuming drugs,” Ortiz says, referring to how migrants are roped into illegal economies. “It’s easy pay.” And in Colombia’s largest coca-producing region, many end up working in the coca fields, fueling a fierce cycle of prejudice.
With de la Espriella now promising renewed military bombardments to tackle “narcoterrorism” and liquidate armed groups, vulnerable migrants and laborers are caught in the middle. Instead of “an absurd war on drugs and an absurd war over power,” Ortiz says, the government should create jobs, encourage youth toward entrepreneurship and help them out of the cycles of violence. After all, Ortiz knows well the invisible scars of violence: “War is not eradicated with more soldiers, more explosive power, or by calling on more people to join the battle.”
“I’m more concerned about the divisions between Venezuelans here in Colombia, than between Colombians and Venezuelans,” Esmeralda García Ramírez, a migrant rights activist, tells The Progressive in Bogotá, Colombia. An organizer with the migrant rights advocacy organization Fundación Venezolanos Perseverantes, she has seen the fissures of polarization harden Venezuelans against one another.
Since Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis escalated in 2015, roughly seven million migrants and refugees have fled the country, with nearly three million people migrating to Colombia. The iron grip of economic and oil sanctions had long throttled the country. When inflation skyrocketed and many were unable to afford basic necessities, blame was placed at the feet of the government of Nicolás Maduro. Disillusionment around political corruption and croneyism mingled with an existential anger over a growing food crisis and medicine shortage. The world watched as Venezuela’s people suffered. And over the following decade, roughly 330,000 people would flee from Venezuela to Norte de Santander in Colombia.
Maduro’s hardline critics overlooked the impacts of U.S. sanctions on migration, Ramírez says. Like many of her fellow Venezuelans, she came to Colombia for economic reasons. She has a degree in university administration from Venezuela’s University of Los Andes in Mérida. Though she hasn’t worked with Colombian universities, she describes some of the systemic issues facing those who try. Having a foreign university degree recognized can be a prohibitively expensive process for migrants, but certification is not on its own a silver bullet. It also elevates a person’s status in the SISBEN, a system used in Colombia to measure socioeconomic status and vulnerability. “This is a complex issue, because academic professionals then appear to not be in vulnerable conditions,” Ramírez adds.
The Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement found in 2023 that less than 3 percent of Venezuelans with post-high school education have had their degrees formally recognized. The majority of those who haven’t are missing documents, can’t afford the fees, or don’t know how to navigate the bureaucracy. Access to social assistance programs and essential public services is often complicated further by requiring migrants to already have proof of rental contracts, school enrollment, or medical records.
Former Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whose four-year term ended this August, took an approach to Venezuelan migration that some observers have called a “policy of silence,” underplaying the country’s systemic issues with integration of migrants into the country.
But the new government, Ramírez says, spells a “catastrophe for irregular Venezuelan migrants.” “If [migrants] have resources, it’s no problem, they are well received,” she says. “It’s not a problem of the left against the right, or the right against the left. The problem is with the top against the bottom, supremacists against the poor.”
The tides of far-right rule across South America have dredged up a refrain of irregular migrants as “delinquents and assassins.” Guilty until proven innocent, Venezuelans now live in the shadow of fears around the “invasion of Tren de Aragua,” a transnational criminal group deemed a terrorist organization by the Trump administration.
“I am in favor of legal migration,” de la Espriella told Colombian media. De la Espriella’s political party, the rightwing Homeland Defenders, have asserted that Colombia can’t absorb the Venezuelan crisis, and that irregular migrants are a threat to national sovereignty. The country, per de la Espriella’s campaign motto, is “first for Colombians, and second for Colombians.”
“It’s increasingly fascist,” Rut Mercedes Vilchez Escobar tells The Progressive. Originally from Venezuela, she studied migration at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and works as a migrant rights activist across Colombia. Guaranteeing migrants’ human rights has “not been converted into a robust public policy,” she says.
De la Espriella’s national security agenda is not only militarizing the country’s borders, but the right to movement itself. It’s a callback to Duque’s military operations to take control of trochas, or informal crossings, after the Venezuelan government shut its borders. She sees the rightwing governments of South America as increasingly adopting a U.S.-style externalization of borders.
“De la Espriella is not changing the narrative, only assuming a common enemy,” Escobar says. “It exacerbates reactionary xenophobia and discrimination.” It’s even more concerning as de la Espriella’s government efficiency strategy includes weakening human rights oversight by eliminating various ministries and agencies involved in administering the peace process.
Jessica Vargas has seen this play out before. The thirty-eight-year-old Colombian writer and delegate with the citizen participation and advisory group Mesa Nacional Civil para las Migraciones was studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina, when she became involved in local activism in 2017. Argentina was long seen as a country of open doors, but this hospitality did not extend to all, Vargas says, as discrimination against racialized migrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru is common there.
After Argentina’s then-president Mauricio Macri enabled the mass deportation of immigrants in 2017 through an emergency decree, Vargas returned to Colombia along with many other university students. The bill was repealed four years later, but the country’s current president Javier Milei has only continued along this path, deporting at least 14,000 people since the beginning of 2026 and negotiating with President Donald Trump to receive deportations from the United States.
When Colombia elected Gustavo Petro and the Pacto Histórico party in 2022, the balance of power in South America shifted toward more progressive policies. Now, that pillar has again toppled. Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador are all mirroring President Donald Trump’s ultranationalist rhetoric, the desperate and poor facing slamming doors across the Americas. “It’s a regional struggle for the progress of continental rights,” Vargas says.
Migrants stuck in bureaucratic limbo in Chile risk deportation amid far-right President José Antonio Kast’s crackdowns on undocumented migrants. Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa introduced sweeping repressive reforms and signed an asylum cooperative agreement with the United States last year. Meanwhile, human rights violations mounted in the countries’ military cooperation against narcotrafficking.
Even Petro’s government cowed to Washington, with more than 4,500 Colombian migrants deported from the United States and Panama, where some had lived for more than a decade. De la Espriella too has jumped on this train, backing U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio, who said of irregular migrants, “any Colombian citizen seeking asylum should return to Colombia.” As for Colombia, both returnees and migrants risk stepping into regions still affected by armed conflict, like Norte de Santander.
“It’s a cycle, because it’s not just economic, it’s violence,” Vargas says. “People don’t want to return to a land where there is violence, and [they] are lost in limbo.”
“We feel like we are strangers here, like we are invading this country. But in reality, we’re not all bad,” says Abdy Silbana Mogollón Florez. In her early fifties, she is from Venezuela, having lived in the Venezuelan cities of San Cristóbal and San Antonio del Táchira. She first crossed through a trocha, as irregular border crossings are known, where she recalls fellow migrants trying not to use phones to light the way at night. “It’s dangerous, because it’s a guerilla crossing,” she says, with illumination of the path prohibited. Since 2020, she now lives in Villa del Rosario and holds a Temporary Protection Permit.
“Here in Colombia, it’s not easy finding work opportunities for a person of fifty-two years old,” she says. As a graduate of administrative studies and early childhood education, she now runs her own artisanal yogurt business in Villa del Rosario. “It’s very close, but it was a big change,” Florez says. “I’m still not used to it. The way of life is very different. People are different—grittier.”
Florez says discrimination based on migrant status is common here. She sees Venezuelan children in the community develop anxiety as a result of bullying, sometimes so severely that they stop going to school. Other times, community members target and ostracize adult women. “They say that a Venezuelan woman only comes here to marry a Colombian man,” Florez says. She still goes back to Venezuela to visit family—in the Cúcuta municipality, it’s normal for people to cross the border regularly to visit family, study, or work.
Florez recalls working as a cleaner at an “immense” house in 2020, in the barrio of Belén in Cúcuta. “They paid the same as for a normal house,” she says. Over the course of two weeks, she says she was expected to stay later and later to clean the sprawling rooms, and wasn’t given breakfast or lunch as the owners had promised. Colombia’s monthly minimum wage is just over 1.75 million pesos, or about $560 USD, but migrants are typically paid roughly half under the table—and are required to do more work, she says. “If you were a Venezuelan migrant, they wouldn’t want to pay you a full salary,” she says.
“As a Colombian, you can exercise your rights, but not as a migrant,” Florez says.
Despite Colombia introducing a ten-year integration policy for Venezuelan migrants in 2021, experts have warned that “legal frameworks alone are insufficient.” Meaningful change needs to reach to a cultural level.
During his 2024 visit to Colombia, former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Olivier De Schutter described the country as running on a caste system. This system is shaped by the deliberate discrimination and alienation of the poor, known as aporophobia—as deeply entrenched as xenophobia and Colombia’s estrato system of assigning neighborhoods a socioeconomic rank. In Cúcuta and Villa del Rosario particularly, studies show that “exclusionary employment practices” are heightened by government neglect and heightened criminal and armed group activity. Nearly 80 percent of Venezuelan migrants in the Cúcuta metropolitan area don’t even have bank accounts.
Precarity is ripe for predators. Some young Venezuelans are lured to Colombia with the promise of work, or their parents fall for false advertisements. Florez recalls the teenage daughter of an acquaintance being kidnapped this way, having been promised domestic work in a town just west of Villa del Rosario. She was given a cellphone to communicate with her boss, Florez says. After about a week, neither she nor the employer were responding to the girl’s family.
“I searched in Los Patios, where she was supposedly living, and she wasn’t living there,” Florez says. The girl was later found on the other side of the country in Cali when a humanitarian worker recognized her from an alert and brought her to the hospital, beaten and bruised. “This happens a lot,” she says.
Despite the challenges she sees in her community, Florez adopts a fighting spirit. A strong and wilful woman, she speaks of her family and community, and the way they show up for one another in the darkest times. And while many aren’t so lucky, she has the basics covered.
“We have light. We have water. We have gas. We have food,” Florez says. On this periphery, where constant uncertainty is habitual, she believes that survival is a matter of mindset.
“You must have a lot of inner strength,” she says.