Colombian President Gustavo Petro and acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez agreed on Friday to cooperate militarily to fight crime along their shared border. Petro’s visit to Caracas was the first by a foreign leader since the US ouster of Nicolas Maduro.
They said the joint effort will aim to “free border areas from the mafias engaged in a range of illegal businesses, starting with cocaine, illicit gold, human trafficking and rare minerals.”
The Catatumbo region in northern Colombia on the border with Venezuela has been an epicenter of violence for over a year. Rival left-wing extremist groups there have battled for control of human trafficking, weapons trafficking, illegal mining, drug cultivation and the cocaine trade. Catatumbo is strategically important because drugs can be moved out of the country from the area.
“Both countries have undertaken the task of making…military plans, but also the immediate establishment of mechanisms for sharing information and for developing intelligence,” Rodriguez said.
The presidents also agreed to boost trade and work together to improve electricity supplies to blackout-prone western Venezuela. They discussed electrical interconnection and gas links, with Rodriguez saying it “makes no sense for Colombia or Venezuela to look toward other latitudes, another hemisphere, for what we can get in our own territories” and noting potential for joint gas exports.
Rodriguez assumed the role of Venezuela’s acting president after Maduro was kidnapped by US forces during a Caracas raid and taken to New York City to face criminal charges. The US administration backs Rodriguez’s interim government, which has opened Venezuela’s state-owned oil industry to US companies.
Petro denounced the US military operation, while US President Donald Trump has criticized Petro for not doing enough to combat drug production.
Relations between Colombia and Venezuela have long been fragile. In 2019, then-president Iván Duque severed ties with Caracas after refusing to recognize Maduro’s election. Full diplomatic relations were restored under Petro in 2022. Petro did not recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate leader after the disputed 2024 re-election but maintained diplomatic engagement between Bogota and Caracas.
A planned meeting in March in the Colombian border town of Cúcuta was abruptly canceled. The neighbors share a 2,200-kilometer (about 1,370-mile) border with deep historical and cultural ties; many families are binational. Some 3 million Venezuelan migrants have settled in Colombia in recent years after fleeing an economic collapse at home.
Edited by: Sean Sinico