The current exodus of Venezuelans has generated the largest migration crisis of its kind in recent Latin American history, as Human Rights Watch has pointed out in its most recent report. More than 2.3 million Venezuelans have left their country since 2014, according to the United Nations, and many others have left whose cases have not been registered by authorities. Venezuelans are fleeing their country for multiple reasons, which includes severe shortages of medicine, medical supplies, and food; extremely high rates of violent crime; hyperinflation; and thousands of arbitrary arrests, torture and other abuses against detainees.

Today on CID’s Speaker Series podcast, Nizar El Fakih, MPA/MC Mason Fellow candidate at the

Harvard Kennedy School, interviews José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch and a general expert on Latin America, who provides insight on this mass exodus and the current humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, and the role of the international community in this crisis.

// www.growthlab.cid.harvard.edu //

Interview recorded on September 26, 2018.

About José Miguel Vivanco: José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division, is a general expert on Latin America. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Vivanco worked as an attorney for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organization of American States (OAS). In 1990, he founded the Center for Justice and International Law, an NGO that files complaints before international human rights bodies. Vivanco has also been an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University. He has published articles in leading American and Latin American newspapers and is interviewed regularly for television news. A Chilean, Vivanco studied law at the University of Chile and Salamanca Law School in Spain and holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.