Why are passports missing in Peru? Migration Crisis Affect Thousands of Travelers

Processing a passport in Peru has become a real ordeal for millions of Peruvians who are affected by the lack of this important document that allows them to leave the country. This crisis has surpassed the Office of Migration, where the authorities have not been able to respond, much less explain.

The lack of projection or mismanagement causes thousands of Peruvians to paralyze trips, jobs or urgent procedures that they have to do abroad.

Today chaos broke out at Jorge Chavez airport. Dozens of people were unable to process their passports on time and missed their flights to Europe, the United States and other Latin American countries.

This situation generated a wave of complaints inside the air terminal where they demanded explanations, but the Migration Office on the spot took several hours to report the failure in the system that did not allow the documents to be printed.

The injured people ran to the counters of their airlines to be able to find out about the date change of their flights until the problem was solved in Lima, however many had to pay large sums of money to avoid losing their tickets.

The crisis in migration has been dragging on since the beginning of 2021, where there was a shortage of this document due to the large number of applications received after the reopening of offices throughout the country following the restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That year 698,000 passports were issued.

According to report 000616-2021-DIROP/MIGRACIONES, the issuance of passports increased by almost 90,000 passports until October and it was reported that the balance for 2022 of this document was only 126,670.

Therefore, the acquisition of passports was recommended to meet the projected demand by 2022. Even since August last year, the management of the then National Superintendent of Migration, Roxana del Águila, warned of the urgency of acquiring 700,000 passports.

But the new management turned a deaf ear to this recommendation and it was only in January of this year that the good pro was handed over to the winning company and whose contract was only signed in February.

With this delay in the acquisition, Sunday's Panorama warned in a report that the 700,000 passports would take months to enter circulation, that is, there would be a worrying delay in the printing of these documents and the high demand could not be met.

The zonal head of migration in Lima, Guillermo Nieto, told the newspaper Gestión that the first batch of 300,000 passports would only arrive this April and the other 400,000 in the following months.

The Superintendent of Migration, José Armando Fernández Campos, in the face of the chaos caused at the Jorge Chavez airport and in the main office on Avenida España in Breña, stated that “due to the overload that has occurred these days over the long weekend that is coming to us, the system is not identifying the notebooks of the passports”.

“Technological advances cause these problems, operating systems become outdated and when they become overloaded they have these drawbacks. It is a system that was acquired during the government of Ollanta Humala that has technological obsolescence that was programmed for one million 200 thousand passports, we are already over 3 million passports and therefore we are asking the MEF for an investment project that will allow us to change the system and allow us to avoid these inconveniences,” he explained.

COLLAPSE IN MIGRATION

Caroline Gibu, warned in an article for El Comercio that in 2017 589 thousand passports were issued and since this document expires every five years, this 2022 those people will renew it, in addition to those who apply for one for the first time and who are waiting for an appointment to be attended to.

Migrations, in order to avoid crowds in its offices, opted for alternative mechanisms to the regular appointment system and opened direct and non-appointment services at Jorge Chávez airport as long as it is due to emergency, to process a visa or carry out a residence procedure for another country, to obtain a scholarship or a student exchange.

The institution has not responded about a possible shortage of passports throughout the country, but this new chaos in the issuance of passports would show that the Superintendency could be going through a simple “failure in the printing system”.

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