The Quito Process, a Dialogue Space for Host States

Abstract

In 2018, eleven countries of Latin America and the Caribbean signed the joint declaration from which one of the most relevant regional spaces for dialogue in recent decades was created, the Quito Process. Conceived as an intergovernmental initiative of a technical nature, it was formed to agree on non-binding mechanisms and commitments between the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the aim of coordinating joint efforts and actions to respond to the crisis of Venezuelan migrants and refugees that has been challenging since mid of the last decade to the entire region. However, a more acute analysis of this initiative allows us to identify signs that reveal structural elements that constitute what international security studies call regional security complexes. The primary objective of these devices is to deploy a series of containment mechanisms based on the extraterritorial control of physical and geographical spaces based on the role played within these devices by the national States that comprise them, called host States for these purposes.

Below, a series of original considerations regarding the Quito Process will be deployed, for which theoretical approaches usually coming from global security studies will be used, thus exposing the reverse of the plot of this relevant space for dialogue that developed countries, international agencies and multiple cooperators have promoted and stimulated, but today it is not showing its best version. Beyond the obligations that the Quito Process presents, it is possible that the critical voices that historically rose against the security tendencies of the management of human mobility find in experiences of this type a subtle operation from which to look with new eyes on security-based approaches to forced displacement.