When Aidé Plata and her husband heard that Venezuela’s national guard was rounding up Colombians living in the border town of San Antonio they holed up in their house for four days without venturing out.
But one Sunday last month, the guards came knocking on the door.
Unable to produce Venezuelan IDs, Plata and her husband were detained with dozens of other Colombians and deported. They were not permitted to take any of their belongings with them. Before the guardsmen drove her out of their neighbourhood, Plata saw her home spraypainted with an “R” to indicate it had been checked, and a “D” marking it for demolition.
“We lost everything,” says Plata, 47, who moved three years ago to San Antonio, where she ran a food cart.
Since being kicked out of her adopted home, she has been sleeping in a shelter in the Colombian city of Cúcuta, one of 1,532 Colombians deported from Venezuela – and nearly 20,000 more to leave of their own accord – as part of a crackdown along the border that has caused one of the most bitter diplomatic spats between the neighbours in recent history.
Plata is hinging her hopes that she can recover her belongings on a meeting this Monday between presidents Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia. The leaders are due to meet in Quito in a summit brokered by Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, and the head of Unasur, a regional body of South American nations.
“I don’t know if they will agree to open the borders again,” said Plata by telephone as she had breakfast at the shelter. “I just hope they can come to some sort of arrangement so I can go get my things.”
The episode began on 19 August, when Maduro closed the border crossings connecting Venezuela’s Táchira state and Colombia’s Norte de Santander department, saying he wanted to stem the flow of smuggled goods from Venezuela, whose socialist government subsidises basic goods, to Colombia, where they fetch prices thousands of times higher.
Maduro blamed the Colombian smugglers for the severe shortages of items such as toilet paper, cooking oil and corn flour, which have plagued Venezuela in recent years.
On 8 September he closed another major border crossing between Venezuela’s Zulia state and Colombia’s Guajira and on Monday he extended the measure south to the frontier between Apure state and Arauca. The border closures have been accompanied by the declaration of a state of exception in two dozen towns, which allow authorities to conduct warrantless searches and ban protests.
Colombia protested against the mass deportations and denounced Maduro’s government for human rights abuses against its nationals.
While the deportations have slowed, tensions remained high after the Colombian air force reported two unauthorised incursions into its airspace by Venezuelan military aircraft last weekend, which the Venezuelans denied. Late on Thursday a Venezuelan fighter jet crashed near the border with Colombia after detecting an “illicit aircraft”, believed to be Colombian, violating its airspace.
Last weekend, the Colombian air force reported two unauthorised incursions into its airspace by Venezuelan military aircraft, which the Venezuelans denied.
On Wednesday the two leaders agreed to meet in Quito which would be their first encounter since the border crisis began.
But Santos sharply criticised Maduro. “Expanding the closures is not going to bring us closer to a solution to the problems on our border,” Santos said. “What’s required is an exchange that’s respectful, frank, sincere, based on facts and realities.”
Santos added that he expected the meeting to be more than a photo op and Maduro said he would arrive in Quito with “concrete proposals”.
Maduro said he hopes the meeting would produce “a historic pact of coexistence, respect and a relationship of brotherhood, cooperation and mutual benefit”.
Relations between the two neighbors have been any but that for the past decade and a half, since Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez set the country on a path of “21st-century socialism”. Francesca Ramos, director of Venezuela studies at Colombia’s Rosario University, says relations have been in a “process of constant crisis” broken by “brief moments of cooperation”.
That included a total breakdown in relations in 2010 when Chávez protested against planned US bases in Colombia and Colombia accused Venezuela of turning a blind eye to Colombian leftist rebels who set up camps in its territory.
However, a veteran diplomat called the current crisis the “most worrying” in recent times. In one poll published this week, nearly half of Colombians fear a war could break out, although the diplomat discounted that possibility.
But Colombia is bracing for the tensions to continue until the end of the year when Venezuela is due to hold legislative elections. The elections, in which Venezuelans will chose members of the national assembly, are hotly contested and polls show that the ruling Socialist party could lose control of the parliament. Maduro’s critics see the border crackdown as a way to divert attention from the growing economic crisis and his party’s sinking approval ratings.
From the shelter in Cúcuta where she has been living, Plata says she has had it with Venezuela and even if he dispute is resolved, she has no plans to return. “They kicked me out, like a dog,” she says bitterly. “Why would I want to go back?”
