Venezuela’s protracted collapse has driven millions to seek protection across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), making it one of the largest displacement situations in recent years. By May-2025, over 7.7 million Venezuelans had migrated worldwide, around 6.8 million within LAC. Yet, despite the scale and persistence of this movement, most governments have refrained from activating either the asylum frameworks under international refugee law or their own regionally expanded definitions better suited to the Venezuelan context. Instead, they have turned to temporary, ad hoc protection pathways as palliative measures to grant short-term residence. While these arrangements may seem pragmatic in the immediate term, they lack the legal certainty and stability offered by the refugee status. These responses illustrate an emerging regional shift. At a top-down level, this trend reflects a retreat from the institutional authority of refugee law and a gradual erosion of the asylum institution itself; at a bottom-up level, it constrains refugees’ capacity to achieve long-term stability and social integration within host societies.

The Venezuelan exodus is unprecedented in scale and character. Unlike most historical patterns of emigration from LAC, this forced displacement situation constitutes a South–South movement, with the vast majority relocating to neighbouring countries such as Colombia, Peru and Brazil. As highlighted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Venezuela has experienced grave and systematic human rights violations. Thousands of people, particularly those perceived as government opponents, were subjected to arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including sexual violence against women. Attacks on freedom of expression and the erosion of the rule of law have created widespread impunity and insecurity. Against this backdrop, Venezuela’s mass exodus constitutes a case of forced displacement under international law, placing it within the framework of refugee protection.

Despite this reality, the use of asylum has not been prioritized by host countries in the region. Instead, states have increasingly relied on temporary protection pathways, as seen in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. Often modelled on practices developed elsewhere, these measures are presented as pragmatic solutions capable of delivering immediate relief. Yet their extensive adoption is striking given the region’s own established legal frameworks for protection. This generally robust architecture is best highlighted by the 1984 Cartagena Declaration , which expressly broadens the definition of refugee to include contexts such as generalized violence, massive human rights violations, and international and internal armed conflict (see para.3).

Only a minority of countries, such as Mexico and Brazil, have explicitly recognised Venezuelan refugees under the Cartagena definition, and only doing so at some moments. The prevailing regional pattern is either a restrictive application of the 1951 Refugee Convention or the creation of temporary protection pathways to circumvent asylum recognition. From a legal perspective, this pattern reflects the enduring influence of a Northern-centric design in the global protection regime, one that often fails to accommodate the specific types of displacement encountered in the Global South.

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) provide a useful lens to better understand this context, as it calls for a critical examination of the origins and institutional design of international law. The framework highlights how Global South states are often marginalised in legal development and compelled to inherit predominantly Eurocentric legal frameworks, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, which do not necessarily reflect the mobility dynamics Global South states face. Understanding legal protection responses to Venezuelan displacement in LAC through a TWAIL perspective reveals how international instruments rooted in regional experience, most notably the Cartagena Declaration, often remain more rhetorical than operative.

Although these legal instruments specifically designed to address large-scale, intra-regional displacement, the Venezuelan mobility highlights how they have been sidelined in favour of practices that instead offer ad hoc, temporary solutions. Examples include Peru’s Permiso Temporal de Permanencia (PTP) and Carné de Permiso Temporal de Permanencia (CPP), Ecuador’s Visa de Residencia Temporal de Excepción (VIRTE), the Categoría Especial Temporal (CET) in Costa Rica.

The practical consequences of privileging temporary statuses are tangible. Protections typically associated with refugee status such as non-refoulement, family reunification, and simplified administrative procedures, are rarely considered in these ad hoc legal pathways. At the bottom-up level, Venezuelans often face legal limbo, as expiring permits and uncertain renewals create precarity and leave them without viable pathways to long-term solutions and integration. Comparative evidence indicates that such instability carries serious social and economic costs and ultimately undermines effective protection at scale.

These developments not only limit legal protections but also risk eroding LAC’s distinctive asylum traditions, a defining feature of Latin America’s long-standing legal tradition, exemplified by its enduring practice of granting diplomatic asylum and its expansive interpretation of the refugee definition. They embody a paradox in which regional states, by privileging externally driven and short-term instruments, risk bypassing their own legal contributions to International Refugee Law.

The way forward is not a dismissal of the 1951 Convention nor a rejection of temporary statuses, but rather a deliberate reorientation of policy and practice toward legal mechanisms that respond more effectively to the realities and needs of displaced people in LAC. This requires the consistent application of regional frameworks, strengthened administrative capacity and funding to ensure fair and efficient refugee status determination procedures, secure access to family reunification and social rights, and the creation of pathways to long-term solutions. From a TWAIL perspective, addressing these challenges also means advancing the decolonisation of the global refugee regime by prioritising Global South narratives and fostering the meaningful application of LAC’s own legal frameworks.