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Latin American Economy & Business - September 2015 (ISSN 1741-7430)

Colombia-Venezuela: Closed frontier, bad business

The border between Colombia and Venezuela has been closed on the orders of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, on security grounds (Maduro cited clashes between Colombian smugglers and Venezuelan security forces as the trigger for the move, which began in the state of Táchira in late August and has now been extended to the entire land border with Colombia). The measure has been accompanied, very controversially, by the expulsion and voluntary repatriation of up to 20,000 Colombian migrants eking out a living just inside the Venezuelan border, sparking strong tensions between the two countries. A direct meeting between Maduro and Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos in late September resulted only in an agreement for the ‘progressive normalisation of the border, which Maduro said could take six months.

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