In the wake of two-and-a-half years of bloody conflict, Syrians are being displaced in droves.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), approximately 5 million Syrians have been uprooted from their homes internally and another 2 million have fled the country for the safety of a better life abroad. Considering that the entire country's population is only 23 million, that's an enormous number of refugees.
Most of those refugees have passed, by land, to refugee camps in neighboring countries like Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. According to Fox News, Turkey alone has 460,000 people in camps along the nation's southern border. However other Syrians have taken to the skies, and emigrated to South American havens like Colombia and Brazil, which have offered asylum to 100 percent of Syrians seeking it.
For Brazil, the major hub of asylum seekers has been Sao Paulo, which has a large Syrian community already. There are an estimated 3 million Syrians in the Brazilian community, which has long been a historic hub of multiculturalism and a political safe haven.
In fact, South America has been the unofficial "escape route" country for much of the last one hundred years. Following World War II, more than 20,000 displaced Jews immigrated to the area, with Argentina the primary location of new arrivals. Ironically, Nazi war criminals also emigrated to Brazil and Argentina via "ratlines" (i.e. escape routes) at the same time, settling into the same cities as their new Jewish neighbors.
In July, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden sent out requests for and received offers of asylum from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia as the United States government seeks to persecute the former intelligence operative for leaks he made to the Guardian concerning state spying programs.
Of course, the situation Syrian refugees find themselves in is entirely different than that of Snowden; the millions of men, women and children displaced by the largely consists of civilians, simply caught in the crossfire.
"UNHCR considers that the vast majority of Syrian nationals leaving their country under the current circumstances are in need of international protection," Andres Ramírez, UNHCR's Brazilian representative said. "We are glad to see Brazil keeping its borders open and processing asylum claims in a timely manner."