Despite expectations raised by the reopening of border crossings between the two countries and the normalization of relations, insecurity and violence persist in Cúcuta, Colombia’s largest city bordering Venezuela. The capital of the embattled department of Norte de Santander has seen a spate of twenty killings over the past week, largely over the scoreline in a dispute between criminal groups that has alerted civil society and human rights defenders. Local authorities are demanding a stronger presence from Gustavo Petro’s national government.
So far this year there have been 165 murders in the department, 128 of them in the capital – 35 of them within 30 days. “Cúcuta is very vulnerable due to our border situation, we have a commuting population of more than 68,000 people per day crossing the border in our territory and we have no cooperation with Venezuela,” Mayor Jairo Yáñez lamented Thursday after a safety tip. “The frontier requires more government attention,” I argue. From the Council, they have asked the President to declare a social emergency given the public order situation.
The city is shocked by a crisis caused by a combination of factors. “There is no strategy, feasibility or technical assistance to deal with crime amid a growing Mafia conflict,” laments Estefanía Colmenares, director of local newspaper La Opinión. In a year of regional elections, to the clashes over micro-commerce in several communities and extortion in various neighborhoods, we must add that the murders are being recorded by cameras, which arouses the security zeal of candidates who want to position themselves. The people of Cucuta will vote for Mayor Yáñez’s successor in October in a race that still has no favorites.
Nowhere else in Colombia are relations with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela so intense, nor has it suffered so much from successive crises. The “gradual normalization” was one of the main focuses of the new Colombian diplomacy. The transport of goods through the binational bridges Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander has been restored since September, while the symbolic Tienditas Bridge, a modern infrastructure renamed Atanasio Girardot, has been opened to the passage of vehicles from 2023, since it has never been had previously been dwarves. At the height of the mini Cold War that the two countries have been trying to put behind them since Petro took power almost a year ago, Venezuelan authorities have withdrawn the containers that were being crossed by soldiers loyal to Chavismo.
Cúcuta residents during a demonstration to demand an end to the violence. Ferley Ospina
The relief in Cúcuta, at least on the security front, is not yet felt. More than 2,200 kilometers long, the border line is permeable and full of informal routes through which all manner of contraband goods flowed in the past. Despite the reopening of the bridges, the secret boundary and traffic flow along the trails are still mandated. Crime has not given way to legality. “It is a dynamic that is taking place in the absence of the Colombian state and a clear security agreement between the Colombian and Venezuelan authorities. There is a lack of coordination,” says Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher at the Observatory of Venezuela at the Universidad del Rosario.
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Cúcuta has long been the epicenter of the violent episodes that preceded Petro’s rise to power. In mid-2021, a car bomb exploded in an army brigade, wounding dozens but not killing them, and in those days the helicopter carrying then-President Iván Duque was also shot. In December of the same year, further early-morning explosions at Camilo Daza Airport killed three people, two police officers and the man carrying the explosives.
In addition to the bi-national unrest, Norte de Santander is one of the places hardest hit by the armed conflict that has lasted for more than half a century and that Colombia has been trying to emerge from since signing a peace deal with the extinct FARC guerrillas in late 2016 The department is home to the Catatumbo region, which has one of the highest concentrations of coca leaf plants in the country. The dissidents of the FARC, the National Liberation Army – the last armed guerrilla – or the gang known as Tren de Aragua are part of the disorderly archipelago of criminal groups that operate in the region, fighting for illegal rents and arranged for the capsize
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