Venezuela will close its border with Colombia at nights to fight smuggling driven by the price differences for food and fuel in the two countries.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his counterpart in Bogota, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, agreed to shut the 2,200km border from 10pm to 5am starting today, Tachira State Governor Jose Gregorio Vielma Mora said on Saturday on Venezuelan state radio.
Decades of price controls in the OPEC member have made gasoline in Latin America’s largest oil exporter much cheaper than in Colombia. Calculated at the official exchange rate, gas in Venezuela costs about US$0.06 a gallon (3.8 liters), compared with US$4.60 a gallon in Colombia, while basic food products such as rice and cooking oil cost about 10 percent as much as in Venezuela as in Colombia.
The gap has created a sophisticated contraband industry, with 10 to 15 percent of all car fuel and as much as 20 percent of the rice consumed in Colombia smuggled into the country from Venezuela, according to Bogota.
Criminal gangs are shipping the equivalent of 60 to 100 tanker trucks of subsidized Venezuelan fuel per day into Colombia, much of it paid for with cocaine, the head of the Colombian National Tax and Customs Direction said.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan shelves go bare. In cities close to the border, such as Maracaibo and San Cristobal, people sleep outside supermarkets to buy out deliveries of subsidized products when they arrive and take them to Colombia.
The 50km to 100km drive from both cities to the border takes about four hours on a road choked with 1970s trucks and sedans loaded with food and fuel.
In the sparsely populated savanna further south, Venezuelan ranchers drive the same herds of cattle back and forth across the border to exploit currency exchange differences, said Orlando Zambrano, a congressman from Venezuela’s Apure State.
The ranchers buy the animals in bolivars at Caracas’ official exchange rate and sell them in Colombia at a black-market rate 12 times as high.
Venezuela will hold a national debate on raising the price of gasoline for the first time in 15 years, Maduro said on Friday.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS