Colombia–Venezuela border

The Spanish provinces’ old limits

When Spain’s American colonies became independent, they adopted the rule of uti possidetis juris of 1810: each new republic’s borders would be those of the Spanish provinces it replaced, so that no land was without an owner even where Spaniards had never been.^[2]

Colombia and Venezuela struggled to agree what that meant. A treaty signed in Bogotá on 14 December 1833 gave Venezuela the eastern half of the Guajira Peninsula and a huge plain between the Orinoco, the Meta and Brazil; Colombia ratified it in 1834, but Venezuela rejected it in 1840. Talks in 1844 agreed the line between the Arauca and Meta rivers but failed over the upper Orinoco, and later rounds in the 1850s and 1870s got nowhere.^[2]

Two arbitrations

The dispute went to the Spanish Crown, which gave its award on 16 March 1891. A convention of 30 December 1898 set out how to mark it, and mixed commissions surveyed and marked part of the line in 1900–01, but work stopped when the two countries broke off relations in 1901, for reasons unrelated to the border. Colombia wanted to occupy the land the award gave it as each part was marked; Venezuela held that nothing could change hands until the whole line was marked.^[2]

Under a compromis of 3 November 1916 they asked the Swiss Federal Council to decide. Its award of 24 March 1922 sided with Colombia: the 1891 award could be carried out in parts. Each side could take final possession of the Guajira sector and most of the others, and a commission of Swiss experts was to fix the remaining disputed stretches, near the Catatumbo and Zulia rivers, between the Arauca and the Meta, and around Yávita and Pimichín, by the end of 1924.^[2]

“l’exécution de la Sentence arbitrale rendue le 16 mars 1891 par la Couronne d’Espagne peut être faite partiellement”^[2]

Closed and reopened

Trade between the two countries reached $7 billion in 2008, before Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, froze it in protest at a military deal between Bogotá and Washington. In 2015 smuggling of cheap, subsidised goods from Venezuela into Colombia soared, and after three Venezuelan soldiers were killed, apparently by smugglers, President Nicolás Maduro closed the legal crossings. Diplomatic relations were severed in 2019.^[1]

After Gustavo Petro became Colombia’s president, the two governments announced plans to restore diplomatic relations, and on 26 September 2022 trucks crossed the Simón Bolívar International Bridge between Cúcuta and Táchira with cargo for the first time in seven years. The frontier has long had dozens of irregular crossings used for fuel and food smuggling and drug trafficking.^[1]