Mixed Feelings Next Door to Venezuela's Strife

www.nytimes.com By JUAN FORERO

CÚCUTA, Colombia, Jan. 21 — Jeremias Guerrero may not seem like a successful entrepreneur. He sleeps by the side of the road and awakens every morning at 3, covered in bug bites, to start the business of waving at passing cars with a rubber hose.

Drivers know that is the signal to stop and fill up from the five-gallon jugs of gasoline on Mr. Guerrero's makeshift stand. These days, with an eight-week strike crippling the oil industry in Venezuela, just a mile away across the border, gasoline dealers here are doing a steady trade.

By sunset, Mr. Guerrero, a 40-year-old father of two who has rarely held a steady job, counts up to $200 in earnings, half of that clear profit.

His customers pay nearly $2 a gallon — seven times the price at Venezuelan pumps before the strike started Dec. 2 — but are simply grateful that Mr. Guerrero and other dealers are willing to haul in the fuel from Colombia's interior.

"Thank God for Colombia," said Juan Pablo Rojas, 22, a university student from San Cristóbal, Venezuela, as he finished filling up the tank of his Dodge Dart and paid Mr. Guerrero before departing on a 90-minute journey home. "In my country, the lines at gas stations are 400 cars long, or 1,000, and you do not even know if they will still have gas after you wait."

Mr. Guerrero agreed. "If not for us, think of how Venezuelans would be suffering," he said.

But while those selling gasoline here celebrate, not everyone in Cúcuta (pronounced COO-coo-tah) is pleased.

This town of 800,000 was created for cross-border commerce, and has come to depend on increasingly affluent Venezuelans taking advantage of their stronger currency to cross the craggy canyons east of here to spend a day shopping.

While the sophisticates in the far-off Colombian capital of Bogotá would snicker that this was a backwater, Cúcuta in fact has a busy downtown with Miami-style fashion boutiques and elegant shoe stores catering to Venezuelans.

True, the Venezuelans also flocked to big Wal-Mart-like megastores on the city's outskirts to buy everything from appliances to mangos. But they also spent handsomely dining in the local restaurants and sleeping at city hotels, with the Caribbean lilt of Venezuelan Spanish becoming music to local ears.

Now, with business across the border hobbled and the currency plummeting in value, the flow of visitors has dried up.

"We live by the Venezuelans," explained Gerardo Raynaud, owner of a shoe factory and two outlet stores that have seen sales drop 40 percent. "We love them. When they do not come, we cry. Just imagine, 90 percent of my clients are Venezuelans."

Among the hardest hit are taxi drivers and trucking companies whipsawed by rising gasoline costs. Colombian coal produced in the outlying mountains is not being transported because the docks in Venezuela through which it is usually exported are shuttered.

"When you sum it all up, there are more losers than winners," said Alberto Santaella, president of the Chamber of Commerce. "Everything is down at least 40 percent — clothes, furniture, shoes. Today, those buyers have simply disappeared."

Downtown Cúcuta still appears normal — 10th and 11th Streets, chock full of boutiques, teem with passers-by.

But they are not Venezuelans, lamented Jorge Hernandez, a shoe store manager here, after a family of six walked in and out without so much as really browsing.

"Colombians," he explained, noting that December sales at the six outlets he manages dropped by half to $14,000 per store. "Those are our people. They do not buy. They do not have money."

Across the street, at Elegant World clothing, Pedro Arias waited listlessly for customers. Three employees stood motionless.

"You have to remember, Cúcuta just has too much commerce for its size," Mr. Arias said. "This was a city build for a frontier zone, and all the people who cross it."

The Venezuelan strike, which has closed businesses large and small across a country that is the world's fifth largest oil exporter, has fostered a cross-border trade in more basic goods than the hip-hugging jeans and other fashionable fare touted by Mr. Arias.

Marleny Peña helps her family run a small market just yards from the border, and is doing a brisk trade in soft drinks, beer, flour, beans, pasta and milk. Huge sacks of potatoes are piled in front of her store, and she has ordered 20 times as much Coca Cola and beer as the store normally stocks.

"We like to say this still feels like Christmas," she said with a laugh.