Colombia counts 3.7 million internally displaced people and 380,000 refugees abroad, making it the country with the most people displaced by violence in the world, the United Nations said Monday.
In a report presented at a regional summit on refugees in the Ecuadorean capital of Quito, the U.N.’s refugee agency UNHCR said that Colombian refugees are seeking asylum in 36 countries, primarily Ecuador, which shares a 447-mile border with Colombia and according to its own official data has granted asylum to more than 50,000 Colombian refugees.
In its yearly report presented in June, the UNHCR counted 3.3 million internally displaced people.
According to Jorge Rojas, director the Colombian NGO CODHES, the number of displaced in Colombia exceeds that of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Colombia has had a violent conflict involving leftist guerrillas since the 1960s and right-wing paramilitaries and drug gangs since the 1980s.