On a peninsula jutting into the Caribbean, a fisherman sails under the cover of darkness to the nearby island of Aruba carrying everything from fish to flour.
In neighboring Guyana, miners and police officers drive vehicles fueled by contraband gasoline from Venezuela.
Driven by a deepening economic crisis, smuggling across Venezuela’s land and maritime borders – as well as illicit domestic trading – has accelerated to unprecedented levels and is transforming society.
Although smuggling has a centuries-old history here, the socialist government’s generous subsidies and a currency collapse have given it a dramatic new impetus.
As the formal economy tanks and businesses go under, more and more people have turned to myriad illicit schemes to trade food, medicine and gasoline. Criminal gangs, the poor, professionals and government officials are all cashing in.
The most eye-catching subsidy is for gasoline: filling a car costs just a few U.S. cents. A 40,000-liter tank truck can be filled for $10 at the black market rate and sold in Colombia for around $20,000 – a profit of nearly 200,000 percent.
For many facing recession and triple-digit inflation, it is a matter of survival.
“We’re obliged to engage in contraband,” said Alejandra, 41, who once raised chickens but now smuggles fuel across fields into Colombia to help feed her six children. She earns far more in a day than the roughly $10, at the black market rate, she used to in two weeks.
“Soldiers, teachers, engineers, doctors, dentists – all types of professional come here to sell gasoline because salaries aren’t worth anything,” added Alejandra, in the fields of Guanarito, meters from the border.
In interviews with scores of smugglers and visits to more than a dozen sites – from the western village of Boca del Grita to the eastern port of Guiria and the borders with Brazil and Guyana – Reuters saw evidence of widespread unchecked smuggling.
President Nicolas Maduro’s government says the illicit trade is worth more than $2 billion a year and is bleeding Venezuela dry with 30 percent of imported food, 40 percent of all goods and 100,000 barrels of oil per day smuggled out.