In the Caribbean shared by Colombia and Venezuela, there is wealth for all tastes: mountains and deserts, gulfs and rivers, oil and coal, islands and beaches, dozens of the most beautiful beaches in the world.
There is also poverty, especially in the shared Guajira desert, as well as drug trafficking, precarious services and roads and, in some corners, a certain feeling of abandonment by both States.
With 1,600 kilometers on the Colombian side and 4,200 kilometers on the Venezuelan side, this is the longest coastline in the Caribbean, even more than the coastline of Cuba, the region’s largest island, at 5,700 kilometers.
But since May 6, 1830, when Venezuela separated from Gran Colombia, these Caribbean coasts have been part of different countries, governed by different capitals and elites, and affected by particular economic and cultural processes.
There are border regions where the differences between Colombia and Venezuela are blurred, such as in Guajira, or in the Andean zone of Táchira and Santander, or in the Amazon.
But if we talk about their Caribbeans, the differences are notable, especially because of the role they played and are playing in each country and how they have been related to the area from Bogotá and Caracas.
Although both coasts have more or less the same geography, what is inside each country is different.
Colombia, crossed by three enormous mountain ranges, is a country of regions, fragmented; Venezuela, on the other hand, is generally more homogeneous, or has a more orderly spatial division.
“In Colombia there is a greater possibility of separative isolation between the regions,” says Alejandro Reig, a Venezuelan anthropologist and philosopher who lived in Colombia and was part of a group that founded a Museum of the Caribbean in Barranquilla.
“Venezuela,” he adds, “is a much more generalized, more uniform country, with a less rugged geography.”
In addition to the spatial distribution, the decisions of the rulers determined the future of the northern coasts of each country.
When Venezuela put its capital in the Caribbean, it tilted development in that direction, towards the sea. The boom was not only in Caracas, but also in Maracaibo, the oil capital, and in Valencia, the export and industrial headquarters.
Colombia, for its part, founded its capital at 2,600 meters above sea level, far from the coast and under premises that looked more towards the big European cities than its own geography.
That, according to Reig, had a political and cultural effect: Colombia considers itself an Andean country; Venezuela, on the other hand, Caribbean.
But, in addition, the regions in Colombia are conceived in opposition to the other, when in Venezuela “regional identities do not have the oppositional quality.”
As everywhere, in Venezuela there are the typical regionalist jokes: that the gochos (from the Andes, in the west) are rebellious and distrustful, that the maracuchos (from the thriving Maracaibo) are loud and coarse, that the Caracas people (from the cosmopolitan metropolis) are lively and enlarged.
But Colombia goes beyond mockery or stereotype: regionalism generated distrust and the discussion about whether the country should be centralist or federal generated a handful of civil wars in the 19th century.
The configuration of each Colombian region was a story in itself: in the Andes there was development driven by coffee, in the Afro-Pacific poverty excluded an entire territory and the northern Caribbean coast was connected to the world through ports and migration.
“Colombia has been marked by centralism and the vision that the elites of that political-economic center built on the rest of the regions,” says Patricia Iriarte, a Colombian writer expert in Caribbean studies who lived in Venezuela in her adolescence.
“Bogotá exercised on the regions a treatment of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination that in the relationship between Caracas and the rest of the country was not given in such an acute way,” he explains.
Colombia turned development towards the Andes and with Bogotá, more than a thousand kilometers from any coast, as a starting point. Venezuela was projected towards the sea and with its axis in Caracas and Maracaibo, which are a few tens of kilometers from the coast.
For this reason, among other things, it can be said that, historically, the Colombian Caribbean was poor and the Venezuelan, rich.
Iriarte argues that countries also differ “in the way they approached the modernization and exploitation of their vast natural resources and, consequently, in the way they manage and distribute that wealth.”
During the 20th century, Venezuelan oil generated more money than Colombian coffee.
But what made the difference between their economies, more than the amount of money available, was the way they managed their resources: in the Venezuelan case, they spread to the population with the intervention of the State, creating a relatively stable middle class; in Colombia from the beginning they were distributed privately and unequally.
Although in recent decades the situation has been reversed: Colombia empowered its Caribbean coast with hydrocarbon exports and signed a progressive Constitution in 1991 that little by little has been integrating its regional diversity into the national evolution.
Venezuela, on the other hand, entered an acute economic crisis that impoverished its middle class, triggered emigration and inequality, and economically and politically isolated the country. The two industries that enriched its Caribbean, ports and oil, declined precipitously.
Colombian Caribbeans have always complained about cachaco, or Bogotano, centralism.
“Colombia is a country that has one foot in the Caribbean and the other in the Andes, and the power is in the Andes,” said Colombian—and Caribbean—writer Gabriel García Márquez in 1981.
“I think that what Colombia needs is to be aware that it is a Caribbean country, that its destiny is dramatically linked to the destiny of the Caribbean and that it has to participate in the debates and solutions that are sought for the Caribbean,” he added.
In Venezuela, that complaint would have no foundation, because the Caribbean was the horizon of development.
But paradoxically, Iriarte points out, the image that each country exported to the world is contrary to what was happening within its territory.
“In Colombia, although the Caribbean region was stigmatized as hot, poor, unhealthy, far (from the center) and inhabited by lazy people, since the mid-twentieth century it also began to be a cultural focus of great influence on the rest of the nation. “, Explain.
Many of the symbols by which Colombia is recognized abroad—Gabo, the sombrero vueltiao, cumbia, Shakira—are Caribbean.
And in Venezuela the same thing happened, but in the opposite direction, says Iriarte: “The country’s center of gravity and economy has been on its Caribbean façade, but its identity trait before the world is given by the Llanos region.”
The joropo (dance), the chigüire (animal) and the liquiliqui (suit) are from that vast savannah that Venezuela, by the way, shares with Colombia. They are the llanera face of a Caribbean country towards the world.
There are several types of Venezuelan Caribbeans: the extroverted maracuchos, the insightful Caracas, the hospitable Margariteños. Colombian Caribbeans too: the bohemian Samario, the entrepreneur from Barranquilla, the musical from Cartagena.
But as Caribbean people they all share an inclination towards enjoyment, and enjoy the gift of speech, which spreads throughout the Caribbean, creating verses and prose and songs that go around the world. A physical and rhetorical magic, embodied in literary, musical and religious expressions, difficult to find in other parts of the world.
“Many people say that I have a great imagination,” García Márquez wrote in 1996. “But those who live in these Caribbean towns know that this imagination is the truth of that reality.”
In 1951, Gabo reported that, in Barranquilla, a cow in the middle of a street managed to turn a Tuesday into a non-working day. And in 1958, when he lived in Caracas, he wrote about a conspiracy of priests that succeeded in overthrowing a dictator with showers of leaflets and the pealing of church bells.
The reality in the Caribbean seems magical. And that is on both sides of the border.
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