Migration Crisis in the Andes: A Case Study of Localization through Acompañamiento from Medellin, Colombia

• In Event: Responses to migration crises by local third sector organizations: examples from three continents

Abstract

People move from their homelands for multiple reasons, including economic and labor considerations as well as to escape dangerous situations due to political strife, war, atrocities, and prosecutions. The latter forms of migration are often considered forced migration. Forced migration is understood as distinct from economic and labor migration, but this division in theory and practice is diminishing in many settings. In many Latin American cases especially, migrants leave home countries for economic and labor reasons often compounded by violence and drug cartel activity (Garip, 2016).

As a team of Latin Americanist scholars and practitioners who study nonprofit organizations, we explore the following question: how do local nonprofits respond to migration crises? We focus on the migration context across Colombia and Venezuela, two countries situated in the Andean region of South America with histories of migratory patterns, and geographies where public goods and services by government are limited, leaving nonprofits often as primary service providers (Appe and Layton, 2016; Garkisch, Heidingsfelder and Beckmann, 2017). In recent migratory trends, Colombia has received almost 2.5 million migrants from Venezuela since 2017 due to the country’s economic hardship and political strife in (https://www.crisisgroup.org/). In fact, after Turkey, Colombia hosts the second most absolute number of refugees globally (UNHCR, 2022).

We explore our research question through the case study of the nonprofit organization Fundación Huellas. Fundación Huellas, legally incorporated in 2007, works in the outskirts of Medellín, Colombia, a city that that has received the second largest number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees after the country’s capital, Bogotá. Medellín hosts almost 10% of Venezuelans in Colombia, estimated to be 190,000 migrants and refugees (GIFMM, 2021; Yu, 2022). The case study of Fundación Huellas outlines a local, community-based nonprofit responding to migratory crisis in Colombia. While micro-territorial in scope (the organization focuses on two neighboring municipalities in the department of Antioquia outside of Medellín), we posit that the case helps to understand the role(s) of nonprofit organizations in migration crises and demonstrates an important dimension to localization in the provision of public goods and services in these contexts.

Our findings suggest that localization can be explored and understood in Latin America as through the dimension of “acompañamiento” (or accompaniment in English), which manifests in daily nonprofit practice. We use our case study data to introduce and explain the dimension of “acompañamiento” in localization and migration crises and to call on the field and funders to better recognize and support this orientation in local nonprofit responses.

References
Appe, S. and Layton, M. D. 2016. « Government and the Nonprofit Sector in Latin America.” Nonprofit Policy Forum, 7(2): 117–135.
Garkisch, M., Heidingsfelder, J. and Beckmann, M. (2017). Third Sector Organizations and Migration: A Systematic Literature Review on the Contribution of Third Sector Organizations in View of Flight, Migration and Refugee Crises, Voluntas, 28, 1839–1880.
GIFMM. (2021) Colombia: Joint Needs Assessment. Joint Needs Assessment of the Interagency Group on Mixed Migratory Flows
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). (2022) Global Trends Report 2022. https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-report-2022
Yu, H. E. 2022, December 20. “Medellín's Holistic Housing for Refugees.” Mayor’s Migration Council. https://www.mayorsmigrationcouncil.org/

Authors

• Susan Appe, University at Albany, SUNY

• Fabian Telch, Binghamton University

• Lenis Yelin Araque, Fundación Huellas