(19 Mar 2015) The smuggling business is booming between Venezuela and its neighbour, Colombia.
Along the countries' western border, smugglers traffic food, petrol and other goods which they buy cheaply in Venezuela and sell at higher prices in Colombia.
The shipments can be anything, from boxes filled with rice and tomato sauce, toothpaste, flour or shaving blades to petrol containers.
Smugglers buy the items in Venezuela, which are sold there under government-controlled prices.
A kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of rice sold in Caracas at the government-mandated price of 26 bolivars (Venezuelan currency), the equivalent of 10 US cents at the widely-used black market rate, can go for 15 times that amount in Colombia.
In Tachira state, smugglers drive through the city of San Cristobal ahead of the cargo and hand out bribes to National Guard troops at each of 20 military checkpoints.
The goods are turned over to other smugglers in San Antonio, a Venezuelan town between Colombia and Venezuela.
From this point, it's a 15-minute drive across the shallow Tachira River into Colombia and a dusty barrio known as La Parada, a town in Colombia where markets sell the smuggled goods.
The Venezuelan government says that smuggling of between 50,000 and 100,000 barrels per day of petrol alone represents losses of more than 3 billion US dollars a year, or about 1.5 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) if taken into account what the same volume costs at international prices.
Venezuelan General Efrain Velasco, who is in charge of security for the western Andean region of Venezuela, said that in the last six months, authorities have seized some 12,000 tons of smuggled products along the border.
"Food smuggling has become a huge source of profit," Velasco said, adding that it's almost more lucrative than drug trafficking.
Velasco said he regrets that smuggling has become a way of life in San Cristobal, causing residents to all but lose the notion of an honest job.
The Venezuelan government has intensified its fight against the flow of contraband, creating a special task force to monitor the 1,400-mile (2,200 kilometre) border with Colombia.
Steps include closing the border at night, deploying more troops, and increasing jail sentences for anyone caught smuggling.
The government has also begun rolling out some 20,000 fingerprint scanners to ration the amount of any single product shoppers can buy in Venezuela.
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