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American Universities Field Staff Report - December
1971 On
the night of January 15, 1971 in Maracaibo, Venezuela, another tempest in
the already-tense relations between Venezuela and Colombia was provoked
when a detachment of the Venezuelan National Guard (the border and prison
police) descended upon a settlement of squatter shacks, “Barrio 24 de
Julio,” and arrested some 73 illegal Colombian residents (“indocumentados”)
who could not produce identification papers; the indocumentados were
placed aboard a bus and driven across the desert Guajira region to the
Colombian border town of Maicao. The Colombian press reported that the
merchants of Maicao, who specialize in a lively and fast-growing
contraband trade with Venezuela, took up a public collection to care for
the 15 men, 13 women, and 45 children who had been temporarily lodged in a
schoolhouse while trying to arrange their return to Venezuela. In
the recriminations that followed, the Venezuelan official who ordered this
police operation was never identified. Indeed, it seemed contrary to
present Venezuelan policy, which was to studiously avoid all sources of
conflict with Colombia while secret negotiations proceeded in a thus far
unsuccessful effort to settle an increasingly acrimonious territorial
dispute between the two nations over the oil-rich continental shelf under
the Gulf of Venezuela. The expulsion of the Colombian indocumentados, itself
an unusual procedure for the customarily tolerant Venezuelan police, was
never reported in the Venezuelan press until it became the object of
bitter comment in Colombian newspapers. In an editorial printed three days
later, El Espectador of Bogotá observed: “The press reports of
the attack of the Venezuelan National Guard, with bayonets and rifle
butts, are much more impressive than the constant discussion of the
problem of the thousands of our compatriots in the neighboring country.”
In an effort to show that the Colombian indocumentados had not been
mistreated, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry hastily invited a large group
of Colombian journalists to Maracaibo to investigate the matter for
themselves. At
a press conference, Governor Elio Suarez Romero of the Venezuelan state of
Zulia estimated that 200,000 Colombian indocumentados were living
in Maracaibo, roughly one-third of the city’s population, and another
100,000 were living in the rest of the state. “The question of this
great population from the neighboring country has presented us with a
major medica1-welfare problem, to the degree that the growing number of
Colombians receiving maternity and medical services in the hospitals of
Maracaibo has diminished the possibility of helping Venezuelans,”
Governor Suarez said, adding that the Colombians were the principal
organizers of urban land invasions and composed the major portion of the
inhabitants of the new squatter settlements surrounding Maracaibo. In
reply, the Colombian Consul in Maracaibo, Oscar Echeverria Mejias, told
reporters the next day that “the mere fact that 200,000 Colombians live
in Maracaibo indicates that such human conglomeration, an enormous
majority of it linked to the Zulian economy, would require a heroic effort
[‘obra de romanos’] to expel and would cause
incalculable traumas of many kinds. The expulsion of Colombians from the
Barrio 24 de Julio was so violent that many persons were taken to the
frontier in their underclothes. Many of them were forced to leave their
children behind. The most ‘fortunate’ were able to take their
children, but not their clothes and belongings. None of them wish to
remain in Colombia, because it is in Maracaibo where they have their
interests which the authorities have not enabled them to recuperate.”
However, the problem was explained in a much broader scope by
Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera in a press conference a week later: .
. . the hundreds of thousands of Colombians who dwell and work in
Venezuela—most of them without having filled the legal requirements for
entry into our country—are the best testimony before the world of the
cordiality and fraternity which we Venezuelans have always displayed
toward them. Nobody has ever thought of expelling these hundreds of
thousands of Colombians although juridically it would be unobjectionable
…. But the flow of those entering illegally has been until now
uncontrollable. If from 1960 to 1970 the number
of illegal immigrants, known as indocumentados, is
calculated at several hundred thousands, this means that tens of thousands
have come each year; and when one speaks of expelling 70 or 100 or 200 of
them that continue penetrating, there are those who pretend that Venezuela
is committing inhuman deeds. [These immigrants] come from very far, from
Colombia’s Pacific Coast, from the frontier with Ecuador, people who
have made long journeys and who create problems for Colombia, such as in
Maicao, such as when a group of illegal immigrants are returned there to
Colombian soil and public opinion is unduly stirred.... We are aware that
this is an economic question, that many Colombians contribute with their
labor and effort to our development process, but this also means the
sending of large quantities of money to Colombia that... contributes to
Colombia’s balance of payments. The
research for this essay began as a study of the impact of migrations on
the urban growth of Maracaibo, but widened in scope with the discovery
that the flow of Colombian indocumentados into Venezuela appears to
have become the largest human migration in South America’s history.
Essentially the present urban growth problems of Maracaibo are those
generated by the arrival of large numbers of Colombians. The impoverished
Northeast region of Colombia has revived its past role as an economic
hinterland to Maracaibo and western Venezuela, eagerly fulfilling a
heavily-urbanized, and ever-increasing Venezuelan demand for cheap food
stuffs and cheap labor. During a month of travel in western Venezuela and
in the coastal region of Colombia, I was able to interview a wide variety
of public officials, as well as many Colombian indocumentados in
the squatter slums of Maracaibo, in city jails in the rich banana region
south of Lake Maracaibo, on cattle ranches in the Perijá district that
lies between the lake and the mountain frontier with Colombia, and in the
Ticoporo rain forest on the plains of Barinas. Because of the clandestine
nature of these migrations, official statistics are largely meaningless
and estimates are subject to wide margins of error. Nevertheless, it seems
abundantly clear that these migrations, together with other factors, are
presently generating major political and economic problems between the two
countries. The
relations between the two countries have always been intimate and somewhat
ambiguous. The colonial province of Maracaibo, containing one of the
world’s richest reserves of petroleum, embraced large portions of what
is now Colombian territory and during most of the eighteenth century was
governed by a Viceroy in Bogotá. While Maracaibo and part of its Andean
hinterland supported the royalist cause during the Wars of Independence,
they subsequently became part of the short-lived Republic of Gran
Colombia, which incorporated the present territories of Venezuela,
Colombia, and Ecuador before disintegrating in 1830, after less than a
decade of tenuous republican life, under the pressures of regional and
leadership rivalries. (According to the Pombo-Michelena Treaty signed in
1833, large portions of what is now Colombian territory, including
Colombia’s access to the Gulf of Venezuela, would have been ceded to
Venezuela. However, while the Colombian Congress ratified the Treaty, the
Venezuelan Congress did not, thus leaving the way open for the present
territorial dispute over the oil-rich continental shelf under the Gulf of
Venezuela.) During the civil wars of the nineteenth century,
the frontier areas of Venezuela and Colombia served as refuges for
incipient and defeated factions in these frequent conflicts. Because of
the extremely difficult communications between Maracaibo and the
Venezuelan Andes on one hand and the rest of the republic on the
other—because of the primitive highway system, the most feasible way of
traveling between Maracaibo and Caracas until around 1950 was by coastal
steamer—several generations of youth from the Venezuelan Andes traveled
to the Colombian cities of Pamplona and Bogotá to be educated. In his
Venezuelan classic, Los Andinos en el Poder, Domingo Alberto Rangel
vividly describes this symbiosis as it flourished during the coffee
prosperity around the turn of the century: The
state of Táchira in the Venezuelan Andes was the navel uniting three
zones of undeniable importance. Along its western slope issue forth the
valleys of Cúcuta [Colombia], a kind of geographic staircase giving
breath to the Colombian Andes. Cúcuta is the only passage that can link
the great Colombian highlands—and their cities of Bogotá and Tunja—with
the coast of Lake Maracaibo.... Arriving in Táchira is a continuing
immigration of Colombians from the North of Santander Department. The
Colombian is a born colonizer. Few farmers are as adept as he in the
rudest tasks of the earth. Patient and ingenious, the Colombian knows how
to extract from the soil the best fruits and to elude the worst
difficulties. But the Colombian brought to Táchira, when he migrated en
masse in the middle of the nineteenth century, that commercial spirit
that inevitably shaped the character of Cúcuta. A frontier city, in the
midst of a tangle of valleys with openings that face Colombia’s
Magdalena River to the south and Lake Maracaibo to the north, Cúcuta has
been a kind of Polish corridor in the history of the relations between
Venezuela and Colombia. Its streets are the necessary crossroads of people
looking for something, the meeting place of merchants and adventurers. In
Cúcuta there developed a class of merchants very similar to those of
Maracaibo in their quick wits and deep greed. Today
the commerce between Venezuela and Colombia, most of it in contraband,
superficially resembles the economic relations between a developed and an
underdeveloped country. Colombia exports to Venezuela cheap labor, cattle
(roughly 300,000 head per year), coffee, potatoes, textiles, and finished
clothing. Venezuelan contraband flowing into Colombia is mainly in
consumer durables: refrigerators, television sets, washing machines,
radios, canned foods, medicines, and even canisters for compressed natural
gas. However, nearly all of these manufactured goods are either imported
into Venezuela or merely assembled there. While the legal trade between
the two countries is officially registered by their central banks at about
$15 million, the contraband traffic and remittances home of
Colombian indocumentados working in Venezuela probably total at
least ten times that figure. The smuggling of cattle, at roughly $110 per
head, is estimated to be worth around $35 million per year. If one adds
income from other kinds of smuggling and the money sent home by indocumentados,
a sum could be conservatively produced amounting to between 10 and 20
per cent of Colombia’s official 1970 export total of $750 million. Not
surprisingly, little of this cash ever flows through the Colombian banking
system. Venezuelan bolivars (US$1 = Bs.4.50) paid to Colombian
merchants and cattlemen for contraband goods are promptly converted into
dollars at bank windows in Venezuelan frontier towns, thus avoiding
Colombia’s strict foreign exchange controls. The two private banks in
San Antonio, Venezuela, which is just across the border from the Colombian
commercial center of Cúcuta, are reported to sell roughly $100 million
each year in this fashion. Likewise, most of the postal money orders sent
to Colombia by indocumentados working in Venezuela as farm hands
and house-maids are sold on the Colombian black market and later
negotiated in Venezuela in the same way. Indeed, the most common reason
given for both the contraband trade and the migration of indocumentados
into Venezuela is the ever-widening difference in value between the
Colombian peso and the Venezuelan bolivar. With such a
differential between the two currencies and between the levels of
consumption in the two countries, an illiterate Colombian girl working
illegally as a housemaid in Caracas can earn as much as a lawyer in her
home town and support her family in Colombia with her savings. Together
with the widely discussed disparity between the two currencies, a deeper
motive for the large-scale migrations of Colombians into Venezuela may be
seen in the different demographic extravaganzas in the two countries.
Venezuela’s population has grown at an annual average rate of 2.9 per
cent in the half-century since 1920, with the death rate declining since
1936 from 16.1 to 6.6 per thousand today. Since the 1936 census, Venezuela
has been transformed by its oil prosperity from a nation 65.3 per cent
rural to one officially estimated today at 77 per cent urban (persons
living in places of more than 1,000 inhabitants), one of the highest
urbanization rates in the world. The proportion of Venezuelans living in
cities of more than 20,000 inhabitants has risen, meanwhile, from 13 per
cent in 1936 to 58.2 per cent today, to the degree that 42.7 per cent of
its people are concentrated now in its 12 cities of more than 100,000.
Colombia began the present century with around four million inhabitants,
slightly less than twice the Venezuelan population at the time, and this
proportion has remained roughly constant until today, when Colombia is
officially estimated to have about 21 million people and Venezuela about
11 million. However, although it has an older and much more developed
system of medium-sized and large cities, Colombia has urbanized in recent
decades at a far slower rate than Venezuela. The urban population
(communities of more than 1,500 persons) grew from 29.1 to 52.8 per cent
of the total between the 1938 and 1964 censuses, while in 1967 only 34.4
per cent of the population lived in Colombia’s 17 cities of more than
100,000 inhabitants. Other indices of Colombia’s relative
poverty have been its death and infant mortality rates, which in recent
decades have been nearly twice Venezuela’s, while Venezuelan per capita
income in 1968 ($908) was more than triple Colombia’s ($280) in the same
year. The
greatest burden of this poverty has been borne by Colombia’s growing
rural population. Many observers have noted that Latin America, excepting
Venezuela, has never recovered from the Great Depression in terms of real
per capita income from exports. This has been especially true in the case
of Colombia’s coffee economy, which grew in exports by 5.6 per cent
annually between 1880 and 1930. The most eloquent index of the divergent
fortunes of the Venezuelan and Colombian economies in the four decades
since the Depression is the fact that, while in 1930 the Colombian peso
was worth five Venezuelan bolivars, today the bolivar is
worth five pesos. The peso was roughly at par with the
United States dollar in 1930; today it is worth about four cents. In his
essay on “Land Use and Land Reform in Colombia,” Albert O.
Hirschman wrote: “The Depression of 1929 had immediate and pervasive
effects. With the budget difficulties and, even more important, foreign
loans no longer obtainable, public works were severely retrenched and the
unemployed drifted back to their families in the country; but with coffee
prices declining precipitously, farm income shrank at the same time. Given
this double squeeze on per capita farm income, intensification of internal
migration and settlement was to be expected. However, most of the public
lands with an acceptable and familiar climate in the central portions of
the national territory had been taken up by this time; worse, some of
these lands had lost their fertility through erosion. As a result,
settlers increasingly occupied lands which they knew to be privately
owned.” Thus began a series of bitter conflicts over land that continue
until this day. Colombia’s Supreme Court in 1926 and 1934 ruled that
landlords must show proof of ownership to expel squatters from their haciendas,
a kind of impossible, “diabolical” proof in a society that had
functioned on the basis of de facto possessions for centuries.
Meanwhile, these conflicts over squatters’ rights were aggravated by
continuing disputes between landlords and their peons over whether
the unpaid farm hands could plant coffee on their subsistence plots ceded
by the landlord in exchange for free labor on the hacienda; planting
of coffee on these plots would not only give the peons an
independent cash income, but would make them more difficult to evict
because they would have to be compensated for these improvements. These
conflicts have led to successive waves of rural violence over the past
four decades, most recently the series of invasions of haciendas during
the past few months by landless peasants exasperated with the slow pace of
the Colombian agrarian reform. By far the most destructive of these
conflicts was the decade of violencia (1948-1958), a kind of
undeclared war between rural bands of the liberal and conservative parties
that cost an estimated 300,000 lives and has left Colombia’s traditional
political system a husk of its former self. Both
the internal violence in Colombia and the Colombian migrations into
Venezuela seem to be motored, at least in part, by increasing demographic
pressures on available land.’1 According to the 1966 CIDA (Comité
Interamericano de Desarrollo Agrícola) study of Colombian land tenure, 64
per cent of Colombia’s farm families are either landless or occupy
subsistence plots averaging 1.7 hectares (four acres); moreover, about 40
per cent of those occupying these tiny subsistence plots are either
squatters or renters. Berry notes that “between 1938 and 1951 the
increase in the agricultural population seemed to have been mainly in the
form of nonowners [according to the two population censuses].”
Strikingly enough, the greatest rural population increase between 1951 and
1964 was in the four Departments of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast
(Magdalena, Córdoba, Atlántico, and Bolívar), precisely the region from
which the heaviest Colombian migration into the Maracaibo area has
proceeded in recent years. The average annual rural population increase in
the 1951-1964 period for these four Atlantic Coast departments was 3 per
cent—an extraordinary rural growth rate for any country in this rapidly
urbanizing world—while all of Colombia’s other departments had rural
population increases of less than 2 per cent. Given this
demographic setting, the contrast in man/land ratios between the two
countries is especially dramatic. While Venezuela’s population has
tripled since 1941 and its land in crops has increased by roughly 85 per
cent since then, its rural population has actually declined in both
relative and absolute terms over the past three decades from 2.64 million
in 1941 to an officially estimated 2.53 million today. While Colombia’s
agricultural work force increased substantially from 1.76 million in 1938
to 2.65 million in 1960, Venezuela’s farm labor force declined slightly
from 724,000 in 1951 to about 700,000 today; it has declined even more so
if one considers that the present Venezuelan rural labor force contains a
large number of Colombian indocumentados. According to CIDA,
Colombia has roughly 1.3 hectares of land in crops for each member of its
farm labor force, Venezuela has proportionately twice that amount. With
Venezuela so heavily urbanized, with much vacant land in Venezuela, with a
desperate shortage of salaried labor on Venezuelan haciendas, and
with 60 per cent of the Venezuelan agricultural labor force over 40 years
of age, one can Scarcely wonder at the large-scale and sustained
clandestine migrations of young Colombian peasants across the unguarded
1,500-mile frontier into Venezuela, along what are known as the caminos
verdes (the green trails). The
caminos verdes are routes to many places in Venezuela. They lead to
banana plantations at the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo, to cattle
ranches in the Perijá District between the lake and the Sierra de los
Motilones, to whorehouses in the oil towns and roadside establishments
throughout western Venezuela, to the rancho squatter slums of
Maracaibo and Caracas, to the coffee farms of Táchira, to agrarian reform
settlements and to burning timber and clearing land in Venezuela’s great
national forest reserves, to work as gardeners and chauffeurs and
housemaids in the homes of leading politicians and businessmen in most of
Venezuela’s great cities. In an extraordinary series of 1969 reports on
these migrations, Gérman Carías of the Caracas newspaper El Nacional wrote
that along the caminos verdes “these pilgrims wear straw hats,
shirts and pants caked with dust, dung-stained rubber sandals that were
worn and frayed. On the dry grass is spread out their miserable luggage: a
cardboard suitcase, a smaller bag bearing a Bucaramanga label, four cloth
jackets, two paper bags and six hammocks.” When Carías interviewed
seven indocumentados in the process of entering Venezuela by the caminos
verdes, one of them told him: “In the municipio of Momil, my
home, there is much hunger. There a peon is paid only ten pesos [US$.50]
daily, without meals. In Venezuela there’s a chance to earn seven bolivars
a day [US$l.50], with the tres golpes [three meals] thrown
in.” On a cattle hacienda in the rich dairy district
of Perijá, a young indocumentado told me a few weeks ago: “I
entered this time via Cúcuta. I took the long bus ride from Ríoacha on
the coast south into the mountains to Cúcuta because I went with some paisanos
who had entered that way before, who knew the trails, so there were no
problems. You have to cross a river and pay the man who takes you in his
canoe ten pesos [US$.50]. Then you take another trail to avoid the
National Guard post, because if the National Guard catches you they will
take you prisoner or charge you 20 or 30 bolivars to let you pass,
whatever you have. I don’t dare to leave this hacienda at night
to go into town for a few drinks, because if they catch me they’ll throw
me into jail without my having done anything. In the month of January,
there was a roundup in Maracaibo and they were deporting Colombians. I
heard this on the radio.” The
most common estimate given by Venezuelan officials is that around 500,000
Colombians have entered Venezuela illegally during the 1960s, and that
Colombians and their children might amount to nearly 10 per cent of
Venezuela’s total population. When one considers that roughly 300,000
Europeans entered Venezuela legally between 1950 and 1961, it may be that
immigrants and their offspring may now constitute close to 20 per cent of
Venezuela’s population. Until the conflict over the Gulf of Venezuela
disturbed relations between the two countries in 1970, Colombians had been
entering Venezuela in large numbers on tourist cards and frontier passes
to stay illegally as residents. The same kind of tourism was practiced by
Colombians entering the United States after Congress in 1965 sharply
reduced Western Hemisphere immigration to America. In the two years
between 1965 and 1967, the number of Colombians entering the United States
on tourist cards rose from 25,489 to 69,943, most of them staying on
illegally. The New York Times reported with considerable alarm
recently that some two million aliens were residing illegally in the
United States after entering on tourist and student visas. If the United
States were to have proportionately the same problem that Venezuela has
with its Colombian indocumentados, there would be 20 million
instead of two million illegal aliens residing in America. Over
the past two years a new resentment and suspicion has suffused the
relations between Venezuela and Colombia because of the proportions
reached by the illegal migrations and the territorial dispute over the
Gulf of Venezuela. Some Venezuelan newspapers, most notably the chain
owned by Senator Miguel Angel Capriles, have charged that Colombian
peasants forming communities on Venezuelan soil are reservists of the
Colombian army and have been financed by INCORA, the Colombian agrarian
reform agency. During 1970 and early 1971 there have been troop
mobilizations on both sides of the frontier, and the armed forces of both
countries have been hastily purchasing new equipment abroad. In his
message to the state legislature earlier this year, Governor Suarez Romero
of Zulia spoke of “the negative action of Colombian immigration”
because of “the anarchic and disorderly exploitation by Colombians of
Venezuelan natural resources.” He gave three examples: In
the zone of the Guasare River, in the Mara District, bordering the
Valledupar region of Colombia, there is a program of timber exploitation
on Venezuelan territory that is stimulated by the Colombian government
which finances the colonists and builds penetration roads to remove the
production. The Directorate of Hydrolic Works of the Public Works Ministry
and the National Agrarian Institute possess information of this. On
Lake Maracaibo, an estimated 5,000 Colombians are engaged in fishing. Some
of these fishermen enter the lake through the Gulf of Venezuela and others
through the rivers south of the lake, progressively displacing native
fishermen. In
the Perijá District, along the new Machiques-Colón highway, a movement
of Colombians has appeared to settle in the new lands opened to
agricultural exploitation by the new highway. The
most widely publicized of these penetrations occurred in the rich Guasare
Valley, which is divided from the Colombian territory by a high mountain
range. On March 9, 1970, the newspaper Panorama of Maracaibo
reported that “the most fertile zones of Colón District along the
Colombian border are occupied in large areas by Colombian indocumentados.
From these invasions have emerged towns with lively commerce like Tres
Bocas, on the banks of the Tara River, in Venezuelan territory, and other
small settlements [caseríos] ruled by Colombian
authorities.” Much deeper into Venezuelan territory, an estimated 50,000
Colombian conuqueros (nomadic practitioners of slash-and-burn
agriculture) have denuded a large portion of the forest reserves in the
states of Barinas and Apure. In the Alto Guasare, a caserío of 108
Colombian families and a school with a Colombian teacher was discovered on
Venezuelan soil. A detachment of the Venezuelan National Guard was sent
there, and a Venezuelan teacher substituted for the Colombian teacher. But
the Colombian peasants were allowed to remain, since the Venezuelan
countryside has been so depopulated that no Venezuelan peasants are
available to send in their place. The Venezuelan government has begun a
crash program to build an economic infrastructure along its frontiers, but
it faces an apparently impossible task in finding Venezuelans to occupy
these remote areas. Meanwhile, most of the coffee, cattle, and banana haciendas
of western Venezuela have become utterly dependent on Colombian indocumentados
as the basic source of manpower for their fanning operations. This is
especially true of the cattle and banana plantations to the south and west
of Lake Maracaibo; most of this land was cleared by Colombian indocumentados
in the late 1950s after the opening of the Pan-American Highway in the
area. A Venezuelan lawyer who took me to interview indocumentados on
the dairy farms of the Perijá Valley explained the migratory process in
this fashion: Before
in Perijá many people came from the [heavily-Negro] Atlantic Coast of
Colombia. But now many come from the southern departments of Colombia,
from Tolima and even as far south as Pasto [with heavily Indian racial
stock]. Many are 17 or 18 year-olds who had no opportunities in the south
of Colombia, often accompanied by young girls of 15 and 16 years old,
sometimes pregnant, sometimes even with two small children, and they are
not married. There are also petty merchants called maleteros [baggagemen]
who live off the Colombian peons fellow-Colombians who sell the peons
rum and cheap merchandise smuggled from Colombia; the maleteros come
to the haciendas in groups of five or six and are fed by the peons
and trade with them in stuff that’s expensive here in Venezuela.
Also there are the women who arrive at the haciendas with the men;
the men go to the fields and the women stay in the kitchens and cook for
the peons. Things have changed greatly here from around 1956, when
this was an area of new exploration and exploitation. Now there is
electricity in Perijá and other improvements, so life is better here, but
there is much more immigration now into the banana region to the south of
Lake Maracaibo. While they are on the haciendas the National Guard
leaves them alone, and on Saturdays and Sundays you can see lots of
Colombians on the streets of small towns like Guayabo and Encontrados and
Santa Barbara. But if the National Guard finds Colombians in the towns
during the week they are arrested. The hacendados [planters] make
friends with the National Guardsmen, and often money changes hands. Often
there are small detachments of the National Guard where a sergeant of bad
character commits abuses. Incidents have occurred in which the hacendado
owing several months’ pay to a peon would denounce him to the
National Guard as an indocumentado and have him expelled from the
country. This occasionally has led to a number of bloody incidents of
revenge by the indocumentados, but mainly the Colombians stay among
themselves and when they fight they fight among themselves. In
1959, when a frontier agreement was signed between Venezuela and Colombia
to permit free movement of people in the frontier areas [the Treaty of
Tonchalá], it was said that Venezuela supplied the hospitals and Colombia
supplied the patients, and this is the truth. Medical services in Colombia
are very poor, because all they have are religious and charity
institutions without Government help. People who urgently need surgery get
their operations done free in the University Hospital in Maracaibo, which
at times has 60 per cent of its beds occupied by Colombians. When they are
sick, nobody asks their nationality. Colombians who are critically sick or
injured pass unchallenged through the Venezuelan checkpoints along the
border. In
Perijá and other zones there are Colombians who have had good luck and
have gotten rich and have haciendas but their haciendas have
been invaded by other Colombians. There are Venezuelan haciendas where
both the foreman and the squatters are Colombians and there have been
bloody clashes between them. What are denounced in the press as Colombian
towns in Venezuela are really caseríos [dispersed rural
settlements]. Take the case of Calle Larga, which is 60 or 70 per cent
Colombian in population. On Saturdays and Sundays all you see in the
streets are Colombians because they come there on weekends to drink. They
don’t live in the village of Calle Larga, but the surrounding haciendas
each have 20 or 30 or 40 Colombian peons. So on Sundays they
look like Colombian towns, but most of the businesses are owned by
Venezuelans, although there are Colombian proprietors too. There are also
many Colombians who occupy plots of land in the Venezuelan agrarian
reform, but they live with very little credit. They were given these
parcels by the Venezuelan National Agrarian Institute [IAN]. Their credit
is insufficient and the crop fails, and they wind up owing money to the
Agricultural Bank. What then happens is that they give their plot of land
to someone else, or just abandon it. Often their agrarian reform plot is
taken over by an Italian farmer who makes a success of it, collecting a
plot here and a plot there until they have what amounts to a hacienda. The
Italian has an agricultural tradition, while the Colombian and Venezuelan
peasants do not; all they can grow is plantains and yucca and potatoes,
while the Italian grows grapes on the same land and tomatoes for the
off-season market in Caracas. Thanks
to the oil prosperity of the past half-century and also to the
agricultural expansion near the lake over the last 15 years, the state of
Zulia has been increasing in population at the very high and sustained
rate of 5 per cent annually ever since 1920. In the 50-year period between
1920 and 1970, the population density of Zulia has increased more than
tenfold from 1.9 to an estimated 22.5 persons per square kilometer while
its share of Venezuela’s total population increased from 5.1 to 12.2 per
cent at the same time. This implies a population growth rate
roughly twice the national average for the past half-century. Only about
three-fifths of the increase of the past two decades was reproductive; the
great inflator of population growth was migration. Over the recent
half-century the Zulian birthrate was always above 4 per cent, reaching a
high of 4.85 per cent in the early 1950s, during the Korean War, when the
oil companies in the Maracaibo Basin embarked on an intensive program of
exploratory drilling that attracted large numbers of new migrants into the
area and a new surge of prosperity. At the same time, Zulia’s
mortality rate has declined even more dramatically than the national
average since the 1920s: Zulia’s death rate in 1926 (2.5 per cent) was
roughly 30 per cent higher than the national average (1.89 per cent) for
that year; after the oil companies wiped out dysentery and malaria in the
Maracaibo Basin during the 1920s, Zulia’s death rate dropped to well
below the national average. By 1946 it was 1.21 per cent (compared with
1.5 per cent for all Venezuela), and by 1967 Zulia’s recorded death rate
was down to .56 per cent, with the national average at .66 per cent.
Comparing the census figures of 1920 and 1961, which may not fully measure
the impact of migrations, one finds the number of persons born outside the
state increasing from 3,160 in 1920 (less than 3 per cent of Zulia’s
population) to 242,792 in 1961 (26.4 per cent). According to Professor
Dionisio Carruyo, the leading analyst of Zulian demography, 42 per cent of
the migrants to the state who arrived in the 1961 census year were between
15 and 30 years old, the optimum breeding age bracket. Although
the population of Zulia grew by only 35 per cent (from 88,498 to 119,458)
between the censuses of 1873 and 1920, it has taken impressive quantum
jumps ever since then, doubling every 15 years over the past half-century
to reach the present estimated population of 1.4 million, 88 per cent of
which is urban. This enormous surge in population began almost overnight,
in the brief period between 1922 and 1928, when Venezuela grew from an
insignificant producer of oil to the world’s leading exporter, second in
production only to the United States. Frightened by social revolution in
Mexico and the appearance of salt water in their Mexican wells, the big
oil companies moved their personnel and baggage south to drill in
Venezuela. On the great day of December 14, 1922, perforations made below
an abandoned well near Lake Maracaibo brought in a prodigious gusher,
Barroso Number 2, which “began at 2,000 barrels per day and increased
rapidly until it flowed wild at 100,000, destroyed the derrick, and blew a
column 200 feet into the air. It was a huge gusher, ‘the most productive
in the world,’ reported The New York Times.” During most of the
l920s, Venezuelan oil production doubled every year, increasing from one
million barrels in 1921 to 137 million in 1929. All the big oil companies
began drilling frantically at the fringes of their concessions to tap each
others’ deposits; Standard of New Jersey, which later was to control the
lion’s share of Venezuelan production, spent over $20 million in
drilling in western Venezuela alone, yet had failed to produce oil
commercially by 1929. During the same period, migrations in the Lake
Maracaibo region reached avalanche proportions. In the six years between
the censuses of 1920 and 1926, Zulia’s population grew from 119,000 to
204,000. According to Edward Lieuwen: The
industry gathered a docile, unorganized labor force. Since sparsely
populated western Venezuela had no surplus of workers, it was at first
difficult to obtain labor. Early attempts to bring men down from Caracas
and the Andean states failed, because they quickly contacted malaria in
the low, humid, hot Maracaibo Basin and returned home. The companies hired
what Zulian agricultural laborers they could and some local Guajira
Indians, but the shortage had to be made up by bringing in Negroes from
the West Indies.... Meanwhile, a long-range program to make the entire
lake region more sanitary got under way. Mosquito-infested swamps were
sprayed with crude oil, water supplies were purified, and sewage systems
were installed. Troublesome malaria was all but eliminated and dysentery
brought under control.... As news of the improved working and living
conditions spread, Venezuelans from all parts of the nation began
migrating to the oil fields.... Companies preferred the already acclimated
Margueritenos [from the island of Margarita, with a strong maritime
tradition, whose natives included many good swimmers suited for drilling
work in Lake Maracaibo] and handy Andinos… Petroleum’s economic stimulus thus gave rise to a migration
of far greater numbers than were actually employed by the companies. Campesinos
heard of the attractive wages and social benefits, and when they
failed to get employment in the industry, they found work in the towns
that sprang up around the camps. Migrants from all parts of Venezuela came
to swell the population of the little parasite towns that lived off
petroleum workers’ wages and company purchases. The municipality of
Cabimas, in which the La Rosa field was situated, increased its population
more than tenfold [from 1,940 in 1920 to 21,753 in 1936 (to roughly
150,000 in 1971)], and alike growth took place in the municipality of
Lagunillas. The
city of Maracaibo had prospered but did not grow much during the
nineteenth century. A French visitor in 1800 wrote: “Maracaibo is
situated on the western shore of the lake of the same name and six leagues
from the sea. Its earth base is sandy and without vegetation; its
temperature is all the more hot because the breezes are weak and
irregular, the land has no running streams and rains are rare;.. . the air
one breathes in summer feels like it is emerging from an oven.” After
some very difficult beginnings—the early settlements were destroyed
three times by Indians in the sixteenth century before a permanent colony
could be established, and the city was sacked several times in the
seventeenth century by Henry Morgan, L’Olonnais, and other pirate
chieftains— Maracaibo became the main shipping outlet for the wheat and
cacao grown in western Venezuela and part of the Colombian Andes. Of the
commercial flourishing of Maracaibo late in the nineteenth century,
Domingo Alberto Rangel writes: The
Maracucho merchants financed the coffee expansion of the Andean
state of Táchira during all of the nineteenth century. Maracaibo was
already, at midcentury, a most active port. A Bremen of the tropics, there
converged the products of a vast zone in search of an outlet to the sea.
Separated from the rest of Venezuela, the Venezuela of perpetual civil
wars, the port of Maracaibo suffered no interruption in its accumulation
of money. A commerce that was audacious and familiar with the techniques
of mercantile capitalism—the letter of credit, the joint stock company,
etc.—made Maracaibo the strongest financial market in nineteenth-century
Venezuela. For a long time, this city outranked Caracas in mercantile
influence and creative dynamism. The Maracuchos’ money flowed
toward Táchira, with short-term loans that mobilized plantations. The
Maracaibo merchant offered advances to small coffee-growers in the
foothills of the Andes.... Maracaibo dictated, with its credits, the rate
of expansion of the agricultural economy of western Venezuela. The cycle
began when the merchant houses of the Zulian capital established the
volume of loans and concluded when the canoes filled with coffee arrived
in the port of Maracaibo.... The rate of interest prevailing in Maracaibo,
the volume of currency issued by its banks, the price of gold in its
market were for the farmers and merchants of the Andes the Star of
Bethlehem for all their economic activities. The
expanding coffee economy exercised a progressive influence throughout the
Venezuelan Andes. “During the nineteenth century, the traditional
cultivation of wheat symbolized in politics the Conservative tendency,
while the recently expanding coffee agriculture expressed the Liberal
trend.” In 1891 the merchants of Maracaibo tried to formalize their
economic sway over the Venezuelan Andes by pressing for the joining of
Zulia and the three Andean states (now Táchira, Mérida, and Trujillo)
into a single administrative unit roughly corresponding to the old
province of Maracaibo. By this time the highly successful enclave of
European mercantile capitalism—its leading merchant houses were Breuer
Möller, Boulton, Van Dissel, Andressen, Logomaggiore, and Hard &
Rand—had installed in Maracaibo Venezuela’s first commercial banks,
its first electric plant (1889), its first public tramway (1883). The
pre-World War I coffee prosperity increased Maracaibo’s share of
Venezuela’s exports from 21.3 per cent in 1884 to 49 per cent in 1912. The
old Andean coffee economy declined rapidly with the Great Depression and
World War II, with much of its labor supply migrating into the oilfields.
The old Maracaibo merchant houses either went out of business or shifted
into other lines. Prior to the oil boom of the 1920s, despite its
extraordinary commercial success, Maracaibo grew very slowly in
population. Its population was 22,000, according to the census of 1801,
and only 28,165 in 1873; over the next four decades it increased at an
annual rate of roughly 1.6 per cent to the 1920 census total of 46,099.
But with the oil boom it doubled in the next decade, reaching 110,010, the
bulk of this increase coming in the years between 1923, after the Barroso
gusher was brought in, and 1930, when production began to decline under
the impact of the economic crash. During those boom years of the 1920s
Maracaibo’s population growth must have been more than 10 per cent
annually; following the Great Depression, in the 1940s and l950s the
increase was 7.63 and 6.03 per cent respectively. By 1971 the
population was estimated at around 700,000. The
Colombian indocumentados have played a major role in the continued
rapid expansion of Maracaibo, despite the economic recession of the early
1960s that followed the fall of the Perez Jimenez dictatorship in 1958 and
the cutback in exploratory drilling in response to the “no new
concessions” policy announced in the same year. According to municipal
officials, 148 new squatter settlements have been founded in the city
since 1958, an average of more than 10 per year, while the number of
linear meters of streets quadrupled from roughly 30,000 meters in 1961 to
about 120,000 today. The horizontal expansion of Maracaibo has fanned
outward from the old port and market at lakeside, with the proliferating
residential developments and shopping centers and squatter barrios all
connected by a system of parallel peripheral highways and elaborate
cloverleafs. Nearly all of the few tall buildings are of recent
construction and most are located along Avenida 5 de Julio, the new
commercial boulevard with its new stores and neon signs and gas stations
and hamburger stands resembling an American strip city in the tropical
heat. This voracious expansion over the past decade has left most of the
city’s streets unpaved, while 60 per cent of the city’s population
lives in the squatter colonies that cover most of this new ground. “The
Municipal Government is bankrupt,” a high official told me. It stopped
paving streets 10 years ago. It only has money to pay its employees.” According
to a survey carried out in 1968 by the Economics Research Center of the
University of Zulia, nearly one-fourth of all urban salaried workers in
the state were on the public payroll. Indeed, in 1970, 88 per cent of
Zulia’s population was officially estimated to be urban, leaving a hired
agricultural work force of only 29,536 to serve a rapidly expanding
agricultural economy. Despite a rate of unemployment and underemployment
(working less than 30 hours per week) together reaching above 25 per cent,
there seemed to be a lively demand for labor in both the city and the
countryside. Colombian indocumentados seem to be the only supply of
labor for such jobs as farm hands, housemaids, masons, carpenters, etc. A
leading Congressman who also owns a banana plantation on the southern
shore of Lake Maracaibo, a region which supplies half the country’s
plantains (a staple of the Venezuelan diet) and is developing production
of sweet bananas (cambures) for export, told me that local growers
are left desperately short of labor when their Colombian indocumentado farm
hands leave after a month or two on the hacienda; the growers
regularly send recruiters across the border to find more cheap labor. This
labor shortage has created a tolerant attitude toward the indocumentados
on the part of the Venezuelan authorities, some of whom seem to be
involved in different kinds of illegal traffic between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the enormous differences in income levels between the two
countries is drawing more and more immigrants into Venezuela. It is most
instructive, in this connection, to compare earnings of slum residents in
Maracaibo and Barranquilla, Colombia’s main Caribbean port which
functions economically much as Maracaibo did before the beginning of oil
production. According to the recent MERCAVI’ 70 survey of the
Maracaibo housing market, 31.9 per cent of the families living in squatter
barrios earn less than Bs. 500 (US$110) monthly, and are ineligible
for public housing, while another 39.2 per cent of the families living in ranchos
earn between 500 and 1,000 bolivars monthly. In Barranquila,
according to an unpublished study of the squatter slum of Carrizal (pop.
63,580) made in 1970 by the Departmental Planning Commission, the average
family income was 676 pesos (US$32) or roughly 136 bolivars monthly
at the current five-to-one exchange rate. This means that the average
family income in the Maracaibo slums is four or five times greater than in
comparable areas of Barranquilla. In the recently invaded Maracaibo
squatter barrio of Los Robles, adjacent to the city’s new
Industrial Park, I interviewed Julio Santos Melendez, who came to
Venezuela nearly two decades ago as an indocumentado from the
Barranquilla area, and who worked for many years in the banana fields
south of the lake and today as an electrician’s helper in Maracaibo
earns three times what he would earn in a similar job in Barranquilla.
“The Venezuelan doesn’t like to work with his hands,” Julio told me.
“He always prefers to work for the government. We Colombians come here
because we are needed. Every day more Colombians arrive. If the Government
expels 30, then 100 more will come in.” Across
the street from the new campus of the University of Zulia, in a squatter
settlement called Ziruma that originally was built on land allotted by the
municipal government to the Guajiro Indians but which now is inhabited
largely by Colombians, I taped an interview with a 37-year-old black
migrant who came to Venezuela many years ago from Colombia’s Atlantic
Coast. I reproduce a translation of his statement here because it appears
so representative of the land-clearing role of many Colombian migrants in
western Venezuela: I
was the type of guy who was full of aspirations. I went out exploring and
walking even in my own country. My two brothers are still working their conuco
[subsistence patch] in the Municipio of Maria la Baja, where we all
were born. As for myself, I wandered about the Departments of Magdalena
and Cesar and the Guajira about 15 years ago until I heard there was money
to be made in Venezuela. I entered through the wilderness trails, the caminos
verdes as they say, but I had no problems with the authorities as an indocumentado
because I always stayed in the countryside and they don’t bother you
there, if you like the countryside. The passports they were selling were
very expensive, 170 bolivars each, so I came in through the caminos
verdes. I founded eight haciendas in the Indian region of the
Motilones, in Perijá. I cut down trees and cleared the land and left it
in production, for someone else to cultivate, then I went to clear land
elsewhere. I had a good boss who took me to Maracaibo for the first time
in 1958. He trusted me with money for the payroll and for buying
provisions; I was almost a capitalist partner of his. But then I asked him
to pay me off because I wanted to make a hacienda for myself, near
the Santa Ana River, in Perijá. I planted rice, plantains, corn, and
yucca, and lived on this. Then I worked on contract for others to clear
land, to make farms out of wilderness, and with the money they paid me I
was able to improve my farm bit by bit. I was able to clear for myself
1,050 hectares [2,625 acres] in unused public lands, a latifundio with
two rivers running through it. Of this I had some 150 acres in crops. I
spent five years there, until I was expropriated by the Venezuelan
agrarian reform. It went bad for me because I was an indocumentado who
worked on his own with a certain aspiration, to rise from campesino to
hacendado, but this wasn’t possible. So then I got bored with the
countryside and came to Maracaibo. That was in 1963 or so. As I said, I
got bored with the countryside and came to Maracaibo because here at least
there are schools and electricity and other things. I began working for
construction companies for 18 bolivars (US$4] daily. Now it is no
longer possible for me to go to the countryside to work, because my kids
would be abandoned here and they would be stupid, uneducated. Nor could I
go back to Colombia after all this time, because I would be a foreigner in
my own country. The
pattern of Colombian indocumentados invading and clearing land,
often illegally, for the subsequent use of Venezuelans has become an
established custom both in the countryside and the city. Venezuelan
conservation officials complain that two of the country’s most important
forest reserves, San Camilo (1.1 million acres) and Ticoporo (530,000
acres) have been invaded over the past decade and destroyed in roughly 40
per cent of their total area by nomadic Colombian conuqueros practicing
slash-and-burn agriculture. “Both of these forest reserves are near the
Colombian frontier,” one official told me. “What often happens is that
the Colombian conuqueros enter into agreements with unscrupulous
Venezuelans who want this land, who take it over from the Colombians after
it’s been cleared, paying the Colombians for their ‘improvements’ (bien-hechurías).
In other cases, the Colombians find Venezuelan women, beget Venezuelan
children, become members and even leaders of the Venezuelan peasant sindicatos,
which makes it impossible for us to get them out of there without
paying them off. Hut if we pay them off, more Colombians will come over
from the other side to try for the same deal. Unfortunately, nobody cared
about what has been happening to the national forest reserves until the
dispute with Colombia over the Gulf of Venezuela became a public issue.”
By that time, the Colombian conuqueros in the Ticoporo rain forest
had acquired real political power in the plains state of Barinas. They
dominated the peasant leagues in the area, and both major Venezuelan
political parties actively wooed their support and facilitated their
fraudulent enfranchisement as voters. In
the city of Maracaibo a similar pattern of land invasion has created many
of the new squatter barrios. “There’s a desperate shortage of
public lands in Maracaibo because most of the ejidal [communal]
lands were parceled out during the Gómez dictatorship [1908-1935] to the
director’s friends,” one city official said. “The municipal housing
agency has to purchase land now because most of the city’s land was
stolen in this way. What happens now is that invading land in Maracaibo
has become a business, in which Colombians seem to play a major role. The indocumentados
have no legal status here, so they cannot keep the land they invade.
The organizers of a new invasion charge each family 50 bolivars for
‘settlement rights’ and 50 bolivars for ‘streets.’ But a
few months later each parcel of invaded land can be sold for Bs. 1,000 and
for Bs. 2,000 after public utilities arrive.” Visiting the squatter
settlements of Maracaibo, one is impressed by the luxurious size of these
house lots, and by the sight of large houses with two or three air
conditioners next to miserable shacks that seem to date from the original
invasion. This phenomenon was explained to me recently by a community
development worker in Barrio Símon Bolivar: This
barrio was founded five years ago. The first invaders of most barrios
in Maracaibo are Colombians. When they see that they have a chance to
sell their house lots at a profit, they sell them and either go back to
Colombia or move on to found new barrios. It turns out to be a good
business. In my case, for example, I was living in the center-city. When I
got married I needed a new house, so I found a man here in Simon Bolivar
who sold me the house I’m living in now for Bs. 1,000. He moved out and
is now living in another barrio, ‘24 de Julio,’ where the
National Guard came and expelled those Colombians last January. Here in
Símon Bolivar we have roughly 1,350 families, one-third of them
Colombian. But there were many more before the Colombians sold their lots
to Venezuelans. They are selling them now for Bs. 2,000 each for the
‘improvements,’ not the land, which they cannot sell. All they did was
put up four walls and a roof and clear the land of vegetation, which could
not have cost more than Bs. 300. Venezuelans buy up the lots, and there
are Venezuelans who now own three or four or five parcels in our barrio.
There is one building contractor who now owns six parcels, and is
buying up a whole city block. We have hacendados living here also.
But there are also garbagemen, mailmen, policemen, and National Guardsmen.
An aqueduct was installed here last year, and we already have electricity
and a school, and the streets are being paved right now. It’s very
peaceful here. Barrio Símon Bolívar has become a nice place to
live. Because
it is impossible to obtain reliable statistics on the number of Colombians
in Maracaibo, one cannot know exactly to what degree they have inflated
the demand for public services in the city. However, it does seem fairly
clear that the Colombian indocumentados have kept up the city’s
rapid rate of expansion over the past dozen years when, with the decline
in the oil companies’ investments in labor-intensive exploratory
drilling, the rate of migration to the area should have subsided somewhat.
In his study of the costs of urbanization in Venezuela, Professor Alberto
Urdaneta of CENDES reported that 44 per cent of Maracaibo’s
population lacked piped aqueduct water in 1965 and 81 per cent (400,000
people) lacked sewage facilities. Urdaneta estimated that it would require
an investment of US$75 million to supply these two public services by
1975. Officials of INOS (Venezuela’s sewer and aqueduct authority)
estimated that an investment of US$7 million annually is necessary to keep
Maracaibo’s deficit from growing; this year INOS is spending $47 million
in Maracaibo in an accelerated construction program that has reduced the
sewer deficit to 30 per cent and the aqueduct deficit to about 20 per
cent. In
education the escalation of expenditures is even more dramatic. In the
state of Zulia the population under 15 years of age has increased from 39
to 47 per cent of the total since 1936, which has meant a sixfold increase
from 110,895 to nearly 660,000 in this same 35-year period. In the years
following the fall of the Pérez Jimenez dictatorship, an enormous effort
was made to bring a greater number of children into the classroom. Between
the 1957-58 and 1961-62 school years primary enrollment alone increased by
62 per cent. In the decade following 1958 primary school enrollments more
than doubled, while secondary attendance has more than tripled. An
indicator of how much the demand for public services has increased in
Maracaibo is the fact that the municipal budget has more than quadrupled
between 1958 and 1971, increasing from Bs. 19.87 million to Bs. 85.02
million, while Venezuela’s national budget merely has doubled in the
same period. According to city officials, the amount of garbage collected
daily in Maracaibo has tripled in the decade since 1961, yet one-fourth of
the 148 new barrios are still without regular garbage collection
service. There
seems to be a community of interest between the increasing demand for
public services in Maracaibo, which is marginally augmented by the influx
of illegal Colombian migrants, and the political convenience of placing
more and more Venezuelans on the public payroll. The favorite sport of
radio announcers on news programs in most cities of the republic is to
denounce that this barrio is abandonado
by the authorities, and that barrio lacks police protection and
another barrio is without water and garbage collection. Indeed, one
is impressed by how promptly and cheerfully these services are supplied.
Venezuela’s national government revenues have doubled since 1963,
increasing by more than 20 per cent in each of the past two years, thanks
to rapidly rising oil prices. Venezuela’s population has slightly more
than doubled since 1950, but public employment has increased about
fivefold, absorbing today between 20 and 25 per cent of all salaried urban
employment. In Caracas, for example, public employment has almost tripled
between 1950 and 1966. While comparable data are not available for
Maracaibo, 38,000 of the 164,000 salaries urban jobs in Zulia in 1968 were
reported on the public payroll. There seems to be some logic,
then, to the economic formula of my friend, the Maracaibo lawyer, that
“we supply the hospitals and the Colombians supply the patients,” but
only as long as per capita oil revenues remain high enough to permit
expansion of the public payroll at the present rate. As
is common in most migrations of people from poorer to richer regions, the
role of the Colombian indocumentado has been to perform the kind of
jobs that no longer attract native Venezuelans, and for half or one-third
the pay that Venezuelans would earn in the same jobs. Venezuelan employers
in both the cities and the countryside thus have a double purpose: to
maintain the supply of Colombian laborers in Venezuela at a high level,
and to maintain unchanged their illegal status as indocumentados so
as to limit both the Colombians’ mobility inside Venezuela and the level
of salaries they can command. Both Venezuelan hacendados and
housewives have learned that, once their Colombian indocumentado farm
hands and housemaids legalize their status by obtaining a Venezuelan
identity card, they either demand higher pay or leave to find better
employment. With so many Colombians desperate to enter Venezuela and then
to legalize their status, and with so many Venezuelan employers equally
desperate to hire Colombian indocumentados, the lucrative business
of granting real or false legal documents has become a temptation for
minor Venezuelan officials. One Venezuelan immigration official told me
that 5,000 Colombians had received frontier permits and tourist cards at
the Venezuelan Consul in Maicao in the first nine months of 1971, and that
many times that number had probably entered the country illegally. He said
that before the international conflict over the Gulf of Venezuela focused
public attention on the problem of the indocumentados, the
Venezuelan consulates had issued many more permits to Colombians. “Since
the Venezuelan army began to intensively patrol the frontier in 1970
during the diplomatic crisis with Colombia,” he said, “the prices
charged by white slavers for delivering Colombian prostitutes to
Venezuelan bordellos rose sharply.” Carías reported in El Nacional in
1969 that “Colombian women, many of them minors, are brought from Puerto
Santander and Vilamizar to Encontrados and Santa Barbara, charging
commission up to US$100 per head to the owners of whorehouses who had
placed advance orders for them.” Early
in the 1 960s, the Venezuelan government tried to legalize the status of
the many Colombian indocumentados living in the country by issuing
identity cards (cédulas) to any Colombian who could prove that he
had Venezuelan children or had lived a certain number of years in the
country. The only proof required was a letter received at a Venezuelan
address, which could easily be predated by a friendly postal employee, or
a bank statement or health certificate that they had resided in the
country prior to 1961. Because of the many abuses committed under this
permissive policy, Venezuelan immigration officials began to restrict the
number of cédulas granted, creating heightened pressure by indocumentados
to regularize their status by hook or crook. A number of small
factories were organized in Colombia to produce forged Venezuelan
passports and identity cards, using the names and cédula numbers
of dead Venezuelans. A reporter for the Capriles chain wrote that one of
these forgers in Cúcuta had told him: “Our agents get the names and cédula
numbers of dead people from funeral homes and civil registers, and
once they are used we cross them off our list. Our cédulas are
good for five years, the life of a normal Venezuelan identity card, and we
renew them upon application.” More recently, the Venezuelan Consul in
Maicao, Manuel Atilio Meléan, charged publicly that Venezuelan
immigration officials had been selling frontier passes to Colombians at
500 bolivars (US$110) each. He made this accusation a
few days after immigration agents broke into a public relations agency
called “Andrea,” located in a Maracaibo shopping center and run by the
sister of a high-ranking military officer. Two weeks later a Colombian
woman walked into the office of the Maracaibo newspaper Panorama and
announced that she had paid 700 bolivars to the agency’s
go-between with the Immigration Department, a former immigration official
named Juan Segundo Caraballo Padrón, after she had been jailed for 19
days as an illegal alien. She said the money got her an interview with the
Maracaibo immigration chief, who said he would issue her a cédula, but
she feared that the cédula was false. Meanwhile, the
confiscated office records of the public relations firm mysteriously
disappeared from the court files, and all detainees in the case were
released. While
many minor functionaries have found immigration matters to be a gold mine,
senior Venezuelan officials have become greatly concerned that the large
influx of Colombian indocumentados may have greatly impaired the
Venezuelan government’s capacity to exercise sovereignty over its own
territory. While these officials discredit sensational press reports that
many indocumentados are in fact Colombian army reservists, they are
worried that to expel the hundreds of thousands of indocumentados would
provoke serious internal convulsions inside Venezuela as well as another
confrontation with Colombia. In internal discussions of this problem,
analogies have been drawn between the Colombian indocumentados and
the demographic pressures that have motivated the Salvadorean migrations
into neighboring Guatemala and Honduras, which provoked the brief war
between Salvador and Honduras in 1969 and thus wrecked the Central
American Common Market. The Venezuelan countryside, however, is so
depopulated that the Colombian migrations could have continued for some
time without causing any disturbance if it were not for the nagging
dispute over the Gulf of Venezuela. The Colombian territorial access to the Gulf of Venezuela through the semidesert and sparsely populated Guajira region was first established in a somewhat ambiguous arbitration decree in 1891 by the Princess Regent Maria Cristina of Spain, and then confirmed in a 1941 treaty between the two countries that more specifically defined their land frontier. During most of the 1960s the relations between the two countries were excellent, since many leaders of the ruling Acción Democratica party had lived in Colombia as exiles in the 1920s and 1930s from the long dictatorship (1908-1935) of Juan Vicente Gómez. When Carlos Lleras Restrepo visited Caracas in 1966 as Colombia’s President-elect (1966-1970), he was greeted by Venezuelan President Raul Leoni (1964-1969), who as a young political exile had earned his living by running a fruit stand in Barranquilla, with these words: “My friendship with the man who today is President-elect of Colombia began many years ago, when I arrived in Bogotá in flight from the persecutions of Gómez, and on the platform of the railroad station of La Sabana was a group of student leaders, among them Carlos Lleras.” However, the trouble over the Gulf began during Llera’s presidential term as Colombia began negotiating contracts with foreign oil companies for exploratory offshore drilling along the Guajira coast, which prompted the Venezuelan Minister of Mines and Petroleum, Manuel Pérez Guerrero, to make a hasty trip to Bogotá to protest that Colombia may be issuing concessions on a continental shelf that it does not own. Although the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry insisted that the Gulf consists of “waters that are traditionally and historically Venezuelan contained within Venezuelan coasts,” it has never denied Colombian claims to a share of the continental shelf. The two governments exchanged visits of Cabinet Ministers to quietly explore ways of reaching an agreement until 1970, when Lleras, in his last presidential message to the Colombian Congress, touched off renewed controversy in the press and parliaments of both countries when he declared that Venezuela could not claim complete possession of the Gulf. In the flurry that followed, both nations ostentatiously negotiated for arms purchases in Europe, while formal negotiations between themselves proceeded in Caracas last year, in Rome this year. Meanwhile, both nations have tacitly agreed to suspend exploratory drilling in the Gulf until an agreement is reached. The
present impasse over the Gulf of Venezuela, if it continues over the next
few years, is likely to place Venezuela in an increasingly difficult
position. While Colombia also badly needs new oil reserves, continued high
production is indispensable to Venezuela’s prosperity and political
stability, and the probable—though still unexplored—deposits in the
basin of the Gulf seem to be the most likely and easily accessible source
of new petroleum. The present Venezuelan government of President Rafael
Caldera (1969-1974), in the pre-election years of 1972 and 1973, is most
unlikely to expose itself to the political risks of making any concessions
to Colombian claims in the Gulf to reach a negotiated agreement. Nor is it
likely to depart over the next two years from Venezuela’s long-standing
policy of no more concessions and the reversion to the state of most of
the existing private concessions when they expire in 1983-1985. By then,
according to some projections by a number of petroleum economists and
geologists, oil production from areas now being exploited is expected to
decline by about 20 per cent. Moreover, by 1983 the Venezuelan
population is expected to grow by 60 per cent, according to official
projections, which would reduce per capita oil production from existing
fields by about 80 per cent. While it is widely believed that Venezuela
has vast, untapped oil reserves waiting to be explored, a political as
well as economic formula must be found to identify and exploit them.
Meanwhile, existing proven reserves have been declining steadily over the
past decade. Until
important new Venezuelan reserves are actually brought into production,
the recent Colombian migrations into Venezuela must be viewed in the
context of this uncertainty. It is largely because of Venezuela’s easy
and unearned oil prosperity that the Colombian indocumentados have
found their uneasy, illegal, but desperately sought place in the
hemisphere’s richest underdeveloped society, in a society that has
become hyperurbanized and an economy excessively dependent on government
employment and on continued high per capita oil income to keep the public
payroll expanding (in persons employed) at the present rate of about 6 per
cent annually. Economically speaking, the Colombian indocumentado is
just one more cheap imported commodity sucked in by the Venezuelan
economy’s extraordinary capacity to buy foreign goods. Politically, he
gains more influence as he strikes roots in Venezuela, obtains a fictional
or quasilegality, marries a Venezuelan or begets Venezuelan children, and
plays an increasingly important part in the Venezuelan economy. Ideally,
the two neighboring economies should be transformed from a concubinato to
a matrimonio, a formal economic integration that would embrace the
problems of both the Gulf and the indocumentado, and that would
provide more rational and dynamic employment for Venezuela’s immense
capital resources in a market that could be enlarged overnight from 11 to
33 million persons. But such a rational and oft-discussed development
policy has been blocked thus far by political obstacles.
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