The Italian Consulate General in Caracas introduces new working methods

The Italian Embassy, the Italian Consulate General in Caracas and the Italian Consulate in Maracaibo are fully aware of the difficult economic and social situation the Italian community living in Venezuela is going through at this point in history. With the constant support of Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and in particular of the Directorate General for Italians Abroad, they have spent years committing every possible resource to improving services for fellow citizens and easing their circumstances as far as possible.

To understand the commitment of our consular offices and to judge their results, it is worth bearing in mind the human resources available, which are very limited. The Italian Consulate General in Caracas currently has just 24 staff, including the Consul General, and the Consulate in Maracaibo has seven, including the Consul.

The Italian community living in Venezuela numbers 150,000 people, of whom 125,000 are in the Caracas district and 25,000 in that of Maracaibo.

To get a rough sense of the complex effort facing the Consulate General in Caracas, consider that a city comparable to the Caracas district is perhaps Bergamo, in northern Italy, with 120,000 inhabitants. Bergamo council has 840 employees against the Consulate General's 24, but it is not responsible for passports, which fall to the Questura, or for school records, which fall to the education department. A more accurate comparison would therefore be between the Consulate General's 24 employees and more than 1,000 across the institutions that serve the same number of citizens on Italian soil.

In that context, the Consulate General issued 8,178 passports in the first half of 2018, against 4,662 in the first half of 2016, a rise of 75 per cent, and 5,966 in the first half of 2017, a rise of 37 per cent, despite a reduction in staff.

The projection for 2018 is therefore 16,356 passports, against 9,510 in 2016, a rise of 72 per cent, and 12,063 in 2017, a rise of 35.5 per cent.

In June 2018 alone, however, 1,824 passports were issued, giving a possible 2018 projection of 21,888 passports, 130 per cent above 2016 and 81.4 per cent above 2017. That figure looks highly likely, since the first three months of 2018 were largely taken up with preparing for the Italian general election of 4 March 2018, so the much higher productivity of recent months should be taken as the basis for the statistical projection.

To date, with the 8,178 passports issued in the first half, Caracas is the third best performing of Italy's 220 consulates worldwide, behind London with 13,390 and Buenos Aires with 9,956. The Consulate General in London, however, has 50 staff and the Consulate General in Buenos Aires 49, that is 108 per cent and 104 per cent more than Caracas. Taking the ratio to staff into account, Caracas is already the most productive Italian consulate in the world. The projection of 21,888 passports could place Caracas first or second in absolute terms by the end of the year.

It should be added that since January 2018 passports have been issued on the spot. The applicant comes to the Consulate General once, hands in their documentation and receives the passport within minutes. That arrangement is almost unique among European consulates in Caracas, most of which have to send the data to their capitals and wait for the passports to be sent.

Two mobile units for capturing biometric data have already been obtained from Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for the honorary consulates in Barinas and Porlamar, which will allow travelling missions to be concentrated in other regions of the country.

This dual arrangement, travelling missions and mobile units, makes clear that, taking other procedures into account, only 40 per cent of passport files go through an appointment requested online. The remaining 60 per cent of appointments are granted through other procedures, with emphasis on cases of proven urgency.

In the civil registry area for Italian citizens living in the Caracas district, the backlog of files accumulated in 2013, 2014 and 2015 has been entirely cleared. Thanks also to the work of the previous administration, there was no backlog for 2016 and 2017, and there is therefore currently no outstanding file to recover in that area.