Border reopening signals thaw in Colombo-Venezuelan relations
Seven years after Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro closed the Colombia-Venezuela border to vehicle traffic, his Colombian counterpart, President Gustavo Petro, stood on the Simón Bolívar international bridge on 26 September to watch the first lorries cross into Venezuela since 2015. The reopening of the border was one of Petro’s key campaign pledges, and is expected to deliver an economic uplift to both countries. It also offered further proof of how Maduro is managing to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of key regional players, despite ongoing concerns over human rights abuses under his authoritarian government.
Maduro’s decision to close the border in 2015, which he said was due to concerns over smuggling, was a key moment in the deterioration of a bilateral relationship which had been poor since the election of Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) and would worsen significantly under Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque (2018-2022). The closure has cut off the economic lifeblood of the border regions and led to the stagnation of cities such as Cúcuta, the capital of Colombia’s Norte de Santander department, where the poverty rate increased from 33.1% in 2014 to 49.0% in 2021.
There is also a broad consensus that the border closure benefitted illegal armed groups on both sides of the frontier by increasing the demand for smuggled goods and reducing communication between the Colombian and Venezuelan security forces. That includes the Colombian guerrilla group Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), dissident factions of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc), and smaller rebel outfits such as Colombia’s Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL), known as Los Pelusos, and Venezuela’s Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación (FBL). The resumption of cross-border trade should hurt these groups’ finances, although their main source of revenue – the smuggling of drugs and illegally mined minerals – will not be affected.
Addressing the security implications at a ceremony to mark the border’s reopening, held on a bridge between Cúcuta and the Venezuelan city of San Antonio del Táchira, Petro predicted “a qualitative leap for human rights along the whole border”. There had been some speculation that Petro and Maduro might have their first face-to-face meeting at the border ceremony. In the end, however, Maduro did not attend and Petro was left shaking hands with Venezuela’s transport minister, Ramón Velásquez, and minister for industry, Hipólito Abreu. In a tweet, Maduro said that “the reopening of the border between Colombia and Venezuela is without doubt a historic event that marks the beginning of a stage of brotherly, respectful, and peaceful relations”.
Despite Maduro’s absence, Petro’s presence on the border underlined the importance that his administration has placed on improving ties with Venezuela. Having moved quickly with the appointment of Armando Benedetti as Colombia’s ambassador in Caracas – ending a three-year diplomatic freeze that had followed Duque’s recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president in 2019 – Petro has so far avoided any direct criticism of Maduro’s human rights record. This silence may have been made harder to maintain following the publication on 20 September of an excoriating report by the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, which accused Maduro of directly ordering “crimes against humanity”, including the arrest and torture of political opponents [WR-22-38 ].
The Petro administration has made no public reference to the report, although it appears that Colombian officials are privately raising some human rights concerns with Venezuela. On 25 September, Spain’s daily?El País?cited Colombian government sources as saying that attempts are being made to persuade the Maduro administration to resubmit to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, from which Venezuela withdrew in 2013. Petro may become increasingly open about these conversations if he finds himself criticised for appearing too friendly towards Maduro; given the Colombian right’s longstanding efforts to paint Petro as an aspiring strongman in the mould of Chávez, turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in Venezuela could badly backfire on the new president.
Petro, however, is likely acting on the assumption that an economic bounce following the border’s reopening will override any concerns about his relationship with Maduro. The forecasts are good, with the Colombo-Venezuelan chamber of commerce (CCV) predicting that Colombian exports to Venezuela could reach up to US$1.2bn by the end of this year. That this bounce is likely to be most heavily concentrated in border departments is even better news for Petro, given that these were areas where he struggled in the election’s second round; in Norte de Santander, the most populous border department, Petro’s rival Rodolfo Hernández took over 77% of the vote. Coupled with a possible improvement in the security situation in these regions, Petro may well see his stock rise in time in border populations that have more immediate concerns than the moral nuances of his foreign policy.
Petro’s decision to re-establish relations with Maduro, however, was one of the many complaints of thousands of protesters who gathered in the country’s principal cities, such as Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla, on 26 September, along with criticism of an increase in fuel prices, and Petro’s tax, agrarian, labour, and ‘total peace’ reform proposals. The fact that Petro was subjected to protests so early in his mandate, before he has pushed through a single reform that might have warranted protest action, was a sign of the hostility there has always been to Petro from a significant minority of Colombians. Persuading them just to tolerate his government would be a major achievement. Reaching out to former president álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) again (he invited him to a meeting shortly after his electoral victory [WR-22-37 ]) looks like an attempt to do that.
Meeting Uribe
Petro invited Uribe to the presidential palace Casa de Nari?o for talks the day after the protests and the reopening of the border to Venezuela. This was designed to send the message that his decision to reopen the border was pragmatic rather than ideological and that he is prepared to engage with his opponents rather than stigmatise them as in Venezuela.
Despite their fierce disagreements in the past, there is an underlying respect, however grudging, between Petro and Uribe, both fierce patriots. With no clear opposition figurehead, Petro’s decision to elevate Uribe, the king or kingmaker of Colombian politics for two decades before Petro’s electoral victory, as unofficial leader of the opposition makes sense. Landowners form part of Uribe’s core support base, and agrarian reform is one of Petro’s most challenging objectives.
Agrarian reform
Uribe emerged from the meeting saying that it was “a big step” that the government had not announced any plan to expropriate land. Significantly, he also expressed his support for the Petro administration’s planned acquisition of 3m hectares of unproductive land at commercial rates, as part of its agrarian reform, to sell on much more cheaply to small-scale farmers, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities. The agriculture minister, Cecilia López Monta?o, announced last week that by 15 November the government will have granted titles to 681,000 hectares of land to 12,600 families in 19 departments nationwide.
Uribe’s support will help with José Félix Lafaurie, the president of Colombia’s powerful cattle ranchers’ federation (Fedegan), who Petro also met this week, on 27 September, to focus on solving the issue of land invasions. Lafaurie has tweeted about forging a “common defence” with landowners against such invasions, evoking unsettling parallels with the origin of paramilitarism in Colombia.
It was significant that Petro invited the peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, and the defence minister, Iván Velásquez, to attend the meeting, as well as the senate president, Roy Barreras. Barreras said afterwards that no “violent self-defence groups” would be permitted to form but neither would the government turn a blind eye to invasions. Rueda, meanwhile, made it emphatically clear that the land invasions complicated Petro’s efforts to resolve the historic land ownership problem in Colombia.
Lafaurie’s concerns will be assuaged by Uribe’s positive talks with Petro. Speaking after their meeting, Uribe, referring to “President Petro” throughout, promised to provide “constructive opposition”. For instance, he said that Petro could grow the economy and control tax evasion without the need for a tax reform but he recognised that this was “a political decision that we respect, while suggesting modifications”. Uribe also said that there was an agreement for the government and his Centro Democrático (CD) party not to stigmatise each other as “neo-Communist” and “far right” respectively. He even jested that it was very reasonable of Petro to allow CD Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay (who had featured in the protests the previous day) to take part in the meeting.
Uribe pointedly promised to “work for Colombia…to contribute to making the Petro government one of social democracy rather than failed 21st?century socialism”. He said Colombia would follow the European, rather than Latin American, model, where “neither the left nor the right are too far from the centre” (although the result in the Italian general elections on 25 September, with a victory for the far-right populist Fratelli d’Italia under Giorgia Meloni, slightly undermined this comparison).
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