Venezuela Takes Control of Its Border as Bogotá and Caracas Bring Their Cases to UNASUR
Venezuela Takes Control of Its Border as Bogotá and Caracas Bring Their Cases to UNASUR
August 31, 2015
By: Frederick B. Mills and William Camacaro, Senior Research Fellows at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
On July 13, 2015, President Nicolas Maduro launched an ambitious campaign to fight organized crime (the Operation to Liberate and Protect the People–OLP) in the most seriously impacted states of the country. Over the past week, as a critical phase of this campaign, Venezuela has moved to take control over its notoriously porous border with Colombia in Táchira State, seriously disrupting the routine but illicit trade in contraband goods coming from Venezuela that has fueled a parallel economy in Colombia. This illicit trade, however, as well as manipulative currency exchange practices in the frontier area, has been generating some of the commodity shortages and the depreciation of the bolívar fuerte suffered by consumers in Venezuela. This is not a new issue. The crime and contraband problem along the border had been brewing for more than a decade. Moreover, a growing public outcry calling for decisive action to address both public security concerns and persistent commodity shortages has become particularly intense over the past two years and now threatens to derail the Bolivarian project ahead of the December 2015 legislative elections. Maduro had to either take decisive action or preside over the demise of the revolution.
This essay argues that there is a direct relationship between a significant part of the shortages of basic goods in Venezuela and the parallel economy in Colombia that is fueled by contraband smuggled out of Venezuela. This relationship, moreover, is unsustainable for the Venezuelan side and is a poor substitute for legitimate employment on the Colombian side. Though recent stepped up interdiction efforts over the past year have been intercepting contraband on a routine basis, the movement of subsidized goods out of Venezuela nevertheless has been unrelenting. Even the current operation, however, is only a temporary fix; it will take cooperation between Bogotá and Caracas on security, economic, and social matters along their common frontier to bring about a satisfactory resolution of this issue.
The Security Front
On the security front, Caracas maintains that the smuggling of contraband out of Venezuela for sale in Colombia is not being suppressed with any vigor on the Colombian side. Some of these operations feed networks in Colombia that are even quasi-legal, and thus some analysts suggest that the continued existence of at least part of the parallel economy informs state policy in Colombia.
To make matters worse, the parallel economy in Colombia has involved, to some degree, paramilitary and other criminal elements who have infiltrated Venezuela through the frontier area over the past decade, as well as sectors of the poor and those displaced by the armed conflict, some of whom form the ranks of lower level operatives of this informal economy. It also has depended upon the collaboration of easily encountered corrupt public officials on the Venezuelan side who have looked the other way for a price or otherwise collaborated with the smuggling networks.
More:
http://www.coha.org/venezuela-colombia-border-dispute/