Ecuador has declared a state of emergency in three northern states after a large influx of migrants from crisis-ridden Venezuela entered the country via Colombia.

The move is intended to help establish the infrastructure to support the new arrivals, who do not have humanitarian refugee status in Ecuador, as they do in some other Latin American countries.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility said in a statement on Wednesday that in recent days, the number of Venezuelans arriving daily had risen to 4,200 and a contingency plan is needed to assist them.

Santiago Chavez, the vice minister of human mobility, said the plan would "give an effective and forceful response in benefit of the preservation of those entering Ecuadorian territory".

As part of the contingency plan, extra immigration officials will be hired and more doctors, social workers and psychologists will be sent to the Carchi, Pinchincha and El Oro provinces along Ecuador's border with Colombia, to assist sick and vulnerable migrants.

International aid organisations will also assist in the efforts by providing tents, water and food.

This is the first time a state of emergency has been declared in these provinces. It will stay in place until at least the end of August.

Special measures

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A number of Latin American countries are introducing special measures to cope with migration from Venezuela, which is led by President Nicolas Maduro and is suffering from ongoing political, social and economic crises.

In August, former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, granted 440,000 Venezuelan refugees temporary residency permits, which allow them to study, work and get medical care in Colombia.

Brazil declared a state of emergency in May and briefly closed its northern border with Venezuela on Tuesday.

Argentina has taken in some 31,167 Venezuelans under a law that allows foreign nationals to remain in the country "when there are exceptional reasons of a humanitarian nature".

Uncertainty in the country

Meanwhile, Venezuela's pro-Maduro Constituent Assembly revoked the immunity of opposition lawmakers Julio Borges and Juan Requesens for allegedly masterminding what the president called an assassination attempt against him.

Requesens was seized by intelligence officers overnight, while Venezuela's Supreme Court ordered Borges' arrest.

Maduro said in a broadcast that Borges was living in neighbouring Colombia.

A drone loaded with explosives on Saturday detonated near a military event where Maduro was giving a speech. The president escaped unharmed but seven people were wounded.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab said moves were being made to put Requesens on trial, while Maduro is pressing Colombia and the US to extradite opposition figures, including Borges.

Borges, who on Tuesday attended the swearing-in of Colombia's new president, Ivan Duque, called Maduro's accusation against him "a farce."

Translation: Nicolas Maduro you have accused me of the economic war, of the cash crisis, of the hyperinflation, of the generalised scarcity.. And now of the farce of the attack? You do not cheat anyone. You are the only one to blame for the tragedy of the country, Borges wrote in Twitter.

.@NicolasMaduro me has acusado de la guerra económica, de la crisis del efectivo, de la hiperinflación, de la escasez generalizada, de trata de blancas ¿Y ahora de la farsa del atentado? No engañas a nadie. El único culpable de la tragedia del país eres tú. — Julio Borges (@JulioBorges) August 8, 2018

These events came as Venezuela's economy continues to struggle, the International Monetary Fund projects inflation could top 1 million percent this year.

The currency has fallen 99.99 percent against the US dollar on the black market since Maduro came to power in April 2013.

Many Venezuelans are choosing to leave their country as the recession is now entering its fifth year.

Maduro blames the crisis on an economic war led by opposition leaders with the help of Washington, which last year levied several rounds of sanctions against his administration.</s>QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador on Wednesday declared a state of emergency in three provinces due to an unusually high volume of Venezuelan migrants crossing over the northern border with Colombia after fleeing the OPEC nation’s economic crisis.

Venezuela’s hyperinflation and chronic product shortages have fueled an exodus of citizens who typically travel by land via Colombia, often continuing south toward Andean nations including Ecuador, Peru and Chile.

“The government of Ecuador has declared a state of emergency related to human migration in the provinces of Carchi, Pichincha and El Oro to provide urgent attention to the Venezuelan migrants on the northern border,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

It added that Ecuador this week began receiving 4,200 Venezuelan migrants arriving each day. It did not say how many had been arriving before or why the numbers had increased.

The state of emergency, which will last for the month of August, is meant to speed up the deployment of doctors and social workers to attend to the migrants’ needs, as well as police to provide support for immigration proceedings.

The statement added agencies including the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, would also help in the effort.</s>QUITO: Ecuador has declared a state of emergency in three provinces due to an unusually high volume of Venezuelan migrants crossing over the northern border with Colombia.

 Venezuela’s hyperinflation and chronic product shortages have fuelled an exodus of citizens who typically travel by land via Colombia, often continuing south towards Andean nations including Ecuador, Peru and Chile.

 “The government of Ecuador has declared a state of emergency related to human migration in the provinces of Carchi, Pichincha and El Oro to provide urgent attention to the Venezuelan migrants on the northern border,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

 It added that Ecuador this week began receiving 4,200 Venezuelan migrants arriving each day.

 It did not say how many had been arriving before or why the numbers had increased.

 The state of emergency, which will last for the month of August, is meant to speed up the deployment of doctors and social workers to attend to the migrants’ needs, as well as police to provide support for immigration proceedings.

 The statement added agencies including the International Organization for Migration and the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, would also help in the effort.

 Meanwhile in Caracas, a super-legislative body loyal to President Nicolas Maduro revoked the immunity of two Venezuelan opposition lawmakers, in order to put them on trial for allegedly masterminding a drone “assassination” bid on the leader.

 Maduro, who has systematically sidelined the opposition as he tightens his grip over his troubled nation, accuses the opposition and Colombia of being behind Saturday’s drone “attack.” — Reuters/AFP</s>The state of emergency is in place in Carchi, Pichincha and El Oro provinces, the ministry specified, adding that the measure would last at least until September.

"We reacted in a timely manner. The state of emergency is introduced for the first time to give an effective and substantial response in favor of the people who come to Ecuador," Deputy Foreign Minister Santiago Chavez was quoted as saying by the ministry.

READ MORE: Venezuela to Ask Colombia, US for Assistance in Probe Into Maduro Murder Attempt

According to the European Parliament, over 2 million people have left Venezuela since 2014.</s>BOGOTA — Ecuador has declared a state of emergency in three of its provinces in an effort to cope with the growing influx of migrants from crisis-wracked Venezuela.

A spokesman for Ecuador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday that the government will send more immigration officers and health workers to the country’s northern border with Colombia, where up to 4,000 Venezuelans are seeking entry into Ecuador each day.

The South American nation also said it is working with U.N. agencies to get tents and personal care kits for the Venezuelan migrants, who often arrive with little money and have no place to sleep.

At least 1 million people have left Venezuela since 2015 as its government fails to control hyperinflation, high crime rates and widespread food shortages.</s>US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a public statement Thursday to recently elected Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno to commemorate his country's National Day celebrations.

"I extend congratulations to the people of Ecuador on the anniversary of the first call to independence on August 10, 1809, which sparked [its] movement in Latin America 209 years ago," read the statement. "Since we established bilateral relations, our nations have enjoyed deep ties, which are growing stronger every day."

"The United States is committed to working with the Ecuadorian people and their government to expand bilateral trade and investment, strengthen security cooperation, and increase cultural and educational exchanges," it continued. "We welcome the opportunity to work with President Lenin Moreno and his administration to build a stronger bilateral relationship in areas of mutual interest."

The growing bromance between the two countries follows developments earlier this summer, where US vice president Mike Pence telephoned Moreno following a General Assembly meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS), a White House statement said June 4.

The two officials discussed "the on-going humanitarian and economic disaster in Venezuela, and the need to work together with like-minded nations to protect and promote freedom in the hemisphere," the statement mentioned.

The two also issued a joint statement at the Palacio Carondelet June 28, reiterating their affinity for each other and mentioning the word "freedom" 14 times.

"[Our] two nations declared our independence only 33 years apart, and ever since we have been a part of the history of this hemisphere of freedom," Pence remarked.

"Freedom was always the foundation of the friendship between the United States and Ecuador, and today we are renewing that bond," he stressed.

Since VP Pence's visit to Quito, the US State Department has been feverishly bargaining with Ecuadorian leadership to isolate Venezuela. Venezuela and Ecuador are both members of the Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and used oil rents to fund public programs and subsidies.

"One specific threat to our collective security [is] the ongoing collapse of Venezuela into dictatorship, deprivation and despair," Pence told reporters at the news conference with Moreno as quoted by Reuters. "We respectfully urge Ecuador and all of our allies across the region to take steps to further isolate the Maduro regime."

Secretary of State Pompeo tweeted Wednesday the same rhetoric, stating that he wanted America's "allies and partners" to join forces against Iran-another OPEC member.

Doing so allows the US to influence global oil production rates, which US president Donald Trump complained about on July 4, where he tweeted that "[the] OPEC Monopoly must remember that gas prices are up & they are doing little to help."

Influencing Ecuador allows the US to place pressure on Venezuela, who possesses the world largest proven oil reserves amongst OPEC members (24.9% or 302.8 billion barrels) as of 2017, followed by Saudi Arabia (21.9%/ 266.2 bb), Iran (12.8%/ 155.6 bb), and Iraq (12.1%/ 147.2 bb).

Moreno began distancing himself from his predecessor, former president Rafael Correa, after he took office in May 2017 and proposed a referendum barring future presidents from unlimited terms. Both are members of Ecuador's Country Alliance party, BBC reported.

Moreno then began a rapprochement with the US and enacting neoliberal reforms, including the business-friendly "Organic Law For Productive Promotion [and] Investments Attraction", ending Ecuador's Pink Tide revolution era.

READ MORE: Ecuador to Withdraw Asylum For Assange — Reports

Furthermore, the growing rapprochement between Moreno and Pompeo indicates their commitment to evicting Wikileaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012.

"Ecuador has been looking for a solution to this problem. The refuge is not forever, you cannot expect it to last for years," Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia stated.

Assange remains there due to fears that the UK will extradite him to the US to stand trial for espionage after leaking thousands of classified documents.

The Times disclosed that the UK and Ecuadorian authorities were in ‘secret talks' to remove Assange from the embassy, prompting a media frenzy on the whistleblower's asylum rights. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) ruled in Assange's favour early February 2016 and demanded that the UK and Sweden let him go and offer compensation.</s>More than half a million Venezuelans have crossed into Ecuador this year as part of one of the largest mass migrations in Latin American history, the United Nations said on Friday.



About 547,000 citizens of the crisis-stricken South American country have entered Ecuador since January – mostly through its northern border with Colombia – to escape rampant crime and political violence, a collapsing economy and severe shortages of food and medicines.

That is nearly 10 times the number of migrants and refugees who attempted to cross the Mediterranean into Europe over the same period. The International Organization for Migration this week announced that 59,271 migrants and refugees tried to reach Europe by sea between January and August, with most coming to Spain, Italy or Greece. 



The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, said a daily average of up to 3,000 Venezuelan men, women and children had entered Ecuador this year but that the already “massive influx” was now accelerating further. 



About 30,000 Venezuelans – more than 4,000 per day – arrived in the first week of August, leading Ecuador to declare a month-long state of emergency.



Some reports have suggested fears Colombia’s newly installed president, Iván Duque, could close his country’s borders had caused the surge which has seen huge crowds of roofless migrants converge on the Rumichaca Bridge between Colombia and Ecuador. 



UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told reporters: “Many of the Venezuelans are moving on foot in an odyssey of days and even weeks in precarious conditions.”

“Many run out of resources to continue their journey and, left destitute, are forced to live rough in public parks and resort to begging and other negative coping mechanisms in order to meet their daily needs.”

For all of those hardships many exiles say conditions abroad are preferable to those back home where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts inflation will hit one million per cent this year. 



More than a million Venezuelans have crossed into Colombia since the exodus began in 2015. Others have fanned out across Latin American and Caribbean nations including Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Trindad and Tobago. Tens of thousands have hiked into Brazil down a remote Amazon road known as the Hunger Highway.

Spindler said about 20% of those entering Ecuador were expected to remain while most continued south to Peru or Chile. About 40% were women and girls who faced “serious risk of sexual violence, in particular survival sex and trafficking”.

The Venezuelan exodus has become an increasingly high-profile and contentious political issue in neighbouring countries, with some border regions struggling to cope with the influx. 



“Xenophobic reactions to the exodus have been noted in some quarters,” Spindler said. Earlier this week a Brazilian judge briefly blocked Venezuelans from entering northern Brazil. 



On Thursday night the crisis was raised during the first televised debate ahead of Brazil’s October presidential election. “The [Venezuelan] government is collapsing and this is generating a humanitarian crisis of absolutely unacceptable proportions,” said one candidate, the former finance minister Henrique Meirelles. “We must act so that the situation changes in Venezuela and the regime changes ... so Venezuelans want to go back.”



Álvaro Dias, another presidential hopeful, said Brazil could not turn away those fleeing hunger, violence, misery and death: “It would be perverse to expel human beings who have been driven out by a bloodthirsty and merciless dictatorship.”</s>RUMICHACA BRIDGE, (Reuters) – Thousands of Venezuelans overwhelmed the Ecuadorean-Colombian border high in the Andean mountains yesterday, as fears of border closings led to a sudden surge in migrants from the ravaged OPEC-member country.

Impoverished Vene-zuelans are fleeing food shortages, hyperinflation, and violent crime in their homeland, often taking days-long bus rides across South America because they cannot afford flights.

Ecuador’s government on Wednesday declared a state of emergency in three provinces due to a jump in Venezuelans who arrived through Colombia. Authorities said up to 4,500 Venezuelans had crossed daily since the weekend, up from around 500 to 1,000 people previously.

Almost a dozen Venezuelans at the Rumichaca bridge, which divides the Ecuadorean-Colombian border, told Reuters they pushed forward their emigration out of fear that the porous Colombian-Venezuelan border, which most migrants cross at the start of their odyssey across South America, could be closed.

“There were rumours that the border with Venezuela was going to be shut and I left early to avoid getting stuck,” said Irene Bravo, 55, sitting on the ground surrounded by big bags as she waited to get her passport stamped by Colombian authorities.

“The situation is unsustainable in Venezuela. Everything is expensive and you cannot afford to eat,” added Bravo, who planned to continue on to Chile with her two sons and extended family.

Around her, tired children slept on suitcases and adults huddled under flimsy blankets to try to ward off the cold mountain temperatures.

Some Venezuelans said they had heard Colombia’s new president, right-wing Ivan Duque, could toughen border crossings, while others said they feared leftist Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro would.

Duque is more hardline than his predecessor, centrist Juan Manuel Santos, but he has not mentioned anything about closing the border and stressed during his inauguration on Tuesday that Colombia had a duty to help its “Venezuelan brothers.”

It was not clear what precipitated the rumour. It was not immediately possible to reach the Colombian government and Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

In the middle of the commotion at the border, musician Jose Ramon Sanchez played the harp, instantly cheering up his fellow Venezuelans who clapped at the sound of the traditional music from the grasslands and shouted “Out with Maduro!”

“Playing the harp helps me calm the pain of having left my family,” said Sanchez, 37, who left Venezuela’s state of Barinas on July 23 and has been performing songs along the way to pay his way to Peru.</s>CARACAS, Venezuela -- A Canadian gold mining company on Thursday won the right to go after Venezuela's prized U.S.-based oil refineries and collect $1.4 billion it lost in a decade-old take-over by the late socialist President Hugo Chavez.

Chief Judge Leonard P. Stark of the U.S. Federal District Court in Delaware made the ruling in favour of Crystallex, striking a blow to crisis-wracked Venezuela, which stands to lose its most valuable asset outside of the country -- Citgo.

Chavez took over the gold mining firm and many other international companies as part of his Bolivarian revolution that's left the country spiraling into deepening economic and political turmoil.

Venezuelans struggle to afford scarce food and medicine as masses flee across the border. In a sign of rising political tensions, current President Nicolas Maduro threw an opposition lawmaker in jail this week, charged in a failed assassination plot using two drones loaded with explosives.

The latest order by the U.S. judge could set off a scramble by a long list of creditors owed $65 billion from bonds that cash-strapped Venezuela has stopped paying within the last year, said Russ Dallen, a Miami-based partner at the brokerage firm Caracas Capital Markets.

"This was the most vulnerable low hanging fruit for debtholders to go after," Dallen said. "It looks like Crystallex is the lucky lottery winner because they got there first."

Chavez in early 2009 announced Venezuela's take-over of the Canadian mining operations in Bolivar state, a mineral rich region with one of the continent's largest gold deposits. He accused mining companies of damaging the environment and violating workers' rights.

Crystallex spent years trying to negotiate a deal with Venezuela before making its case in 2011 to a World Bank arbitration panel, which sided with the Canadian firm, despite Venezuela's vigorous fight.

U.S.-based Citgo, part of the state-run oil company PDVSA, has three refineries in Louisiana, Texas and Illinois in addition to a network of pipelines. If the order is carried out, Crystallex won't get all of Citgo -- valued at $8 billion -- but Venezuela could be forced to liquidate it to make good on the court order.

Today, the gold mining region once operated by Crystallex is largely lawless and dangerous, run by rogue miners who blast the earth with water and mercury to expose gold nuggets and sell them to government forces, often leading to deadly conflicts.

The judge's ruling is unique, because government assets, like PDVSA, are normally protected from lawsuits against a sovereign nation. But the judge found that Crystallex can attach Citgo's parent because Venezuela has erased the lines between the government and its oil firm, now run by a military general.

Upon issuing the order, the judge delayed enforcing it for a week, which Dallen said could be a move to give Crystallex and Venezuela time to reach an agreement, such as returning to payment terms of an earlier resolution, Dallen said.

"This gives Venezuela the chance to honour its settlement agreement," Dallen said. "Or they'll lose Citgo."
Ecuador declares a state of emergency over increases in migrant entry from Venezuela.