Some Venezuelans have also fled across the Caribbean to nearby islands that they once frequented as tourists such as Aruba, Curacao, and Trinidad and Tobago. Their exodus has led to a range of effects including expanded criminality and even piracy off Venezuela’s coast. But it’s Colombia that has felt and will likely feel the brunt of the crisis and likely collapse of the failed Bolivarian project in Venezuela.
The border between Colombia and Venezuela has always been an area of significant interchange of people with a culture neither fully Colombian nor fully Venezuelan. Even President Maduro has a Colombian mother from Cúcuta, and some say Maduro himself was actually born in Colombia.
Initially, as state controls and government mismanagement distorted the economy, Venezuelans crossed the border to exploit such distortions to earn money, buying gasoline in Venezuela at enormously subsidized prices ($.07/gallon at one point) to sell it in Colombia. As the Venezuela crisis worsened, ironically, the flows increasingly reversed, with thousands of Venezuelans crossing into Colombia to buy goods not available in their own country.
As the Colombia-Venezuelan border was sporadically closed to such traffic by the Maduro regime, opportunities to criminally profit from increasingly desperate populations grew as well, with corrupted Venezuelan border units, as well as FARC, the ELN, and criminal gangs such as the Gulf Clan, Pelusos, and Puntilleros on the Colombian side all extorting the “shoppers” for their safe passage.
An unknown but increasing portion of those crossing the border have opted to stay in Colombia. The roads to Colombia from the Venezuelan capital Caracas (and other important cities such as Puerto Cabello, Maracay, Valencia, Merida, and Barinas), tend to channel refugees toward the Colombian border town in which President Maduro’s mother was born, Cúcuta. The town, and the surrounding Colombian department of Norte de Santander, is already a major focal point of coca growing and other criminal activities by the aforementioned criminal groups the ELN, Gulf Clan Puntilleros, Pelusos—with territorial struggles between those groups made worse by the withdraw of the FARC from the zone area under the terms of the organization’s peace agreement with the government of Colombia. The inflow of tens of thousands of desperate refugees provides these powerful and warring criminal groups a steady flow of potential victims and recruits.
Beyond Cúcuta, the refugees are also crossing into Colombia at other points, near Riohacha and Valledupar in La Guajira, and further to the south at Arauca, Puerto Carreño, and Inírida, where there is an important illegal coltan mining industry, and where controls over the border are weaker.
Where will they go?
Of those currently crossing into Colombia from Venezuela—and the much larger number who could enter if the economic crisis and violence in Venezuela deepens—a portion hold Colombian citizenship, having previously migrated to Venezuela to escape economic