Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a meeting with ministers at Miraflores Palace in Caracas.
Reuters/Caracas
Venezuela has extended a partial border shutdown with Colombia and sent another 3,000 troops to the area in a crime crackdown that has sent thousands of Colombians fleeing their adopted homeland and led to accusations of rights abuses.
The dispute has also created a diplomatic blow-up between President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government and the conservative administration of Juan Manuel Santos in Colombia.
Critics say Maduro is creating a distraction and playing the nationalist card before a December parliamentary election in which polls show his ruling Socialist Party in trouble.
The government says it is tackling crime gangs on the border who wreak violence and drain Venezuela’s recession-hit economy by trafficking subsidised goods from flour to gasoline.
Having shut main frontier points in Tachira state last month, Maduro also ordered the closing of the Paraguachon crossing in Zulia state to the north late on Monday.
Local Wayu and Guajiro indigenous inhabitants would, however, be exempt from the measure, which was intended to “keep advancing against crime, criminals, paramilitaries and smugglers,” Maduro added at a cabinet meeting.
He ordered another 3,000 soldiers to the porous 2,219km border, adding to 2,000 already there.
Maduro also decreed a “state of exception” in three municipalities of Zulia. There is a similar situation in five municipalities of Tachira, meaning constitutional guarantees are temporarily suspended.
Rights groups say that has led to abuses by security forces, as some 1,400 Colombians have been deported and another 15,000 have fled, according to the UN figures.
Some of the Colombians’ homes were marked “D” for demolition before security forces knocked them down, and many people left with all they could carry across a river.
Maduro has smarted at accusations of abuses, pointing out Venezuela was only chasing criminals and was gladly providing a home to 5.6mon Colombians - in a total population of 29mn - who had fled war and economic hardship in past decades.
Santos said on Monday that Uruguay’s President Tabare Vazquez had offered to mediate. “I reiterate my disposition to meet President Maduro so that through serious and respectful dialogue we can resolve the border problems,” he said.
Maduro said Brazil and Argentina also had offered to set up a meeting with Santos in Manaus or Buenos Aires.
“I have accepted,” he said. “Let’s meet, let’s restore dialogue, respect, co-existence of models: you are a capitalist, right-wing, I am socialist, Bolivarian, Chavista,” he said, referring to Venezuelan independence hero Simon Bolivar.
