Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro and his Venezuelan counterpart Delcy Rodriguez said Friday that their security forces will “consolidate” a joint strategy to combat organized crime on the border between the two countries.
Petro and Rodriguez made this announcement after a three-hour meeting at the presidential palace in the Venezuelan capital Caracas.
The high-level meeting was the first since the United States military kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The Colombian president and Rodriguez’s predecessor have been trying to come up with an effective strategy to curb illegal armed groups’ control over the border region since early 2025.
Throughout last year, the armed forces of both countries said they sent 25,000 troops to the border region to reimpose state authority in the historically neglected border region with a flourishing illicit economy.
At a joint press conference, Petro said that the latest attempt to impose control over the border is a “joint and coordinated effort to free the border communities from the mafias” that dominate the regional economy, mainly through drug trafficking.
Apart from the reinvigorated security offensive, the presidents agreed to also resume efforts to boost the legal economy on the border, mainly through the promotion of legal trade and regional integration.
Bogota and Caracas have been trying to restart the regional economy on the border since Petro took office in 2022 and Maduro decided to reopen the border that had been closed since 2019.
Since then, “trade between our countries has been gradually recovering, and today we can say that last year our trade volume reached $1.2 billion,” said Rodriguez.
Notwithstanding, levels of violence in the border regions remain high because of rivalry between illegal armed groups that vie for control over cocaine exports from Colombia and Venezuela and illegal gold exports from Venezuela and Colombia.
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