Chavez border crackdown hits Venezuelans

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080131/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/venezuela_troubled_border;_ylt=AoLIg9HHlhTMuVoqwCnOCdG3IxIF


URENA, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez's drive to halt food-smuggling into Colombia is hurting thousands of his own countrymen whose livelihood has depended on the free flow of goods across one of South America's most porous borders.


Venezuelans lined up near the border on Wednesday to buy food seized from smugglers — a momentary bonanza from Chavez's crackdown on an underground economy that thrives on his government's price controls.

But the fire sales of tons cooking oil, rice, sugar and pasta to people with Venezuelan ID cards did little to quell anger along the frontier.

The anti-contraband campaign enforced by stepped-up vehicle searches has coincided with Chavez' political spat with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and is designed to combat shortages in Venezuela.

Instead it has badly affected the poor — Venezuelans and Colombians alike — who live across the Simon Bolivar International Bridge in Cucuta, Colombia's fifth largest city, and depend on cheaper Venezuelan food staples.

Chavez ordered the crackdown less than two weeks ago as he escalated a war of words with Uribe by saying Colombia's leftist rebels should be classified as insurgents, not terrorists.

But while relations between the neighbors are at an all-time low, legitimate cross-border trade is barely affected.

And commercial and familial ties across the frontier are so strong that few believe the rhetoric will escalate into the armed conflict Chavez accuses Colombia and the United States of fomenting.

Still, merchants and factories in the Venezuelan border town of San Antonio said their sales dropped 85 percent as a result of the smuggling crackdown. And Cucuta residents have all but stopped crossing the border, where travel documents are rarely checked, to shop for basics that thanks to Venezuelan price controls, cost half as much as goods in Colombia.

Isabel Castillo, president of San Antonio's chamber of commerce, told The Associated Press that about 40 stores have closed after authorities said they confiscated about 5,000 tons of contraband nationwide.

The central square in nearby Urena is nearly deserted, killing sales for street vendors.

"It's a conflict between those who are comfortable (Chavez and Uribe), but we're the ones who are paying," lamented Ofelia Sepulveda, who wonders how she'll feed her three children.

National Guard soldiers confiscated bags of flour and sugar from Sepulveda. She said she was taking it home to Colombia, but others cart the cheap food to neighborhood stores on the Colombian side, reselling it for a modest profit.

About 40 percent of cross-border trade passes through Urena and San Antonio, where many merchants accuse the Venezuelan guardsmen of selective enforcement — taking bribes to let tractor-trailer loads of contraband into Colombia, while taking sacks of food from people like Sepulveda.

Venezuela's 1,370-mile border with Colombia has always been more of a boon than a barrier to people on both sides. Thousands of Colombians live or work on the Venezuelan side and vice versa.

"Ninety percent of the cars here are Venezuelan," said Lt. Col. Jorge Ivan Florez, the regional police commander in Cucuta. They cost half as much as Colombian cars, and Cucuta residents are allowed to have Venezuelan plates.

Critics say Chavez's campaign to rally his countrymen against Colombia's U.S.-allied government is simply an effort to distract Venezuelans from domestic problems. The price controls on many basic food items — an attempt to rein in 23 percent annual inflation — have contributed to shortages of everything from milk to cooking oil in this petroleum-rich nation.

But the contraband controls will end up hurting Chavez politically, said Alejandro Garcia, an anti-Chavez councilman in Urena.

"There are 100,000 Venezuelans in Cucuta," Garcia said. "This is a whim of the president that's going to cost him votes."