Colombian armed conflict spills over and infiltrates Venezuela

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The confrontation in Apure state left at least two Venezuelan soldiers dead, 32 Colombian guerrillas detained and six camps dismantled. This is the official report released by the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense in a communiqué, but according to the analysts consulted, it is part of the plan to give the impression that they are attacking terrorism when the causes could be more complex.

For Luis and María Andarcia, crossing the border through trails is part of their daily routine since the pandemic began. The cab driver and his wife sell Venezuelan scrap metal in Colombia, the least lucrative business with the heaviest load in the long list of goods crossing one of the most dangerous borders in the hemisphere. Armed Colombian civilians are the ones who decide who can cross the river between the two countries.

“They say they are the ones in charge, they check us, and depending on the scrap metal you carry they decide how much they charge us to pass,” says Luis Andarcia. “I am careful to only carry scrap metal, they ask if we are carrying copper, which is a strategic material; if someone lies and they find copper when they check, they are even capable of taking away your motorcycle,” he explains.

“We live in anxiety,” laments María Andarcia. “We don’t like to do this but we have no choice, we are over 50 years old and we can’t find work because of the crisis in Venezuela.”

The risk of crossing the border is increasingly higher. According to the NGO Control Ciudadano, every 6 hours a person is murdered in the 6 Venezuelan states that have a border with Colombia. In addition, every two days a person disappears or is kidnapped and every day there are between one and two armed confrontations on the border.

In a recent presentation where DW was present, the president of Social Watch, Rocio San Miguel, explained that “the increasing presence of illegal armed groups on the border, controlling all the traffic that takes place in these areas, including human trafficking, has led the population to coexist with irregular armed groups and criminal gangs along the border.”

Armed confrontation

In the most recent confrontation, which occurred on March 21 in Apure state, two Venezuelan soldiers were killed when anti-personnel mines were detonated, weaponry that is not common in Venezuela and that the NGO Fundaredes has been denouncing since 2018. The president of Fundaredes, Javier Tarazona, explained that what happened in Apure was not a simple confrontation between Venezuelan military and Colombian guerrillas.

According to Tarazona, “these latest confrontations of the Venezuelan Armed Forces are not against the FARC and the ELN as a whole, but with FARC dissidents who refuse to receive orders from Jesús Santrich and Iván Márquez and this has undoubtedly led to the repetition of these confrontations in Venezuelan territory.”

Rocio San Miguel agrees when she explains that there is a complicity that little is known about the role that the Venezuelan army is playing in this situation. “There seems to be a perverse triangulation on the border, which ends up protecting the ELN so that they continue acting with a low profile and punishing the FARC dissident that tends to act with a high profile; investigations must be carried out because in this way the responsibility of the army commanders who have jurisdiction in these Venezuelan border spaces would be very seriously compromised,” explains San Miguel.

Illegal trade on the border

Tarazona denounces that there are more than 9 FARC and 10 ELN dissident fronts operating in 20 Venezuelan states. “If there were a confrontation between the State and these armed groups we would not have guerrilla FM stations on the Venezuelan radio spectrum,” says Javier Tarazona. At the heart of it all is the illegal trade across the border, explains San Miguel.

“The illegal economy is expanding more and more every day; not only does it involve illegal armed groups, but it is also involving more and more Venezuelan state security forces and legal and illegal armed forces along the border, the scene par excellence of this economy”.

The consequences of the tension on the border are already evident with the increase of Venezuelans fleeing to Colombia. Fundaredes monitors the migratory process at the border and assures that many families from Apure seek refuge in Arauca, in Colombian towns where there is no conflict. Fundaredes’ research shows that “there is an impact due to the migratory issue, we are seeing families leaving everything behind, who lost everything in the middle of these combats, and dire situations in this flight they are undertaking,” says Tarazona.

Growing violence

Violence on the border tends to deepen, according to Rocio San Miguel, who said that “what we have learned with respect to illegal economies at border crossings is that they end up being conflictive, these issues are settled by weapons, that has not been taught by the trafficking of drugs, people, minerals in different parts of the world.”

What worries him the most is that “this perverse situation can reach in a very short time collective homicides similar or comparable to war figures that at some point the armed conflict in Colombia showed.”

“When we heard detonations and screams on the other side of the river, I left the scrap metal on the shore and ran back, it is not worth losing my life to cross into Colombia,” explains Luis Andarcia, who assures that every day it is more difficult to cross the border.

His merchandise is difficult to carry into Colombia, he often cuts himself and gets hurt with rusty metal. For Luis and Maria “it is not worth the risk, but it is that or nothing, because here in Venezuela there is no work or money and what we can get and is within our reach is scrap metal.”

Source: DW