Loss of Contraband Trade Poses Hardship for Colombia Port

For decades, this dusty port on the Guajira peninsula’s desolate sands was a thriving nexus of contraband and criminals.

The Wayuu Indians native to the wild region didn’t complain. The smuggling brought money into the remote area and provided them with an opportunity to work.

Then the government declared Guajira a duty-free zone and dropped tariffs nationwide, lowering prices for imported goods throughout Colombia.

Now consumers in Colombia’s cities can find foreign products at good prices right around the corner, making a long, dusty trip to the desert peninsula unnecessary.

That has meant hard times for the Wayuu and other inhabitants of Guajira, which is about 560 miles northeast of Bogota, the capital.

Ships don’t dock as often in Puerto Portete’s wide bay, so fewer Wayuu are needed to unload the cargo--including whiskey from Scotland, fine Italian cloth and the latest in Japanese electronics.

Shops in Maicao, the peninsula’s commercial center, are empty.

“It’s a shame they legalized contraband because everything used to be much better,” said Bencelia Epieyu, a Wayuu woman who ekes out a living from her soft drink stand at the Puerto Portete docks.

“When the boats don’t come, the men don’t drink. If the men don’t drink, I don’t make money to eat,” she said, looking out at the dilapidated wood and adobe huts that dot the shoreline.

The Wayuu, Colombia’s largest indigenous group, are the grunt workers of the trade, unloading ships in Puerto Portete, transporting cargo and sometimes acting as “mules” to smuggle goods between Colombia and neighboring Venezuela.

Lebanese and Syrian shopkeepers run the trade from Maicao, a dust bowl town on the Colombian side of the border filled with air-conditioned shops and the sounds of bargaining in Spanish and Arabic.

Because of their indigenous status, the 130,000 Wayuu who live on Colombia’s side of the peninsula and the 170,000 in Venezuela are allowed to cross the border freely, making them ideal smugglers.

The Wayuu personify the toughness of the desert where they have lived for a thousand years.

The impenetrability of the land, scarceness of water and absence of gold allowed them to survive while other tribes were wiped out by Spanish conquerors. But the same factors have kept them on the margins of society.

There is little formal employment. Some Wayuu work a few months a year in salt mines, others unload cargo for about 8,000 pesos ($7.50) a day.

It was the isolation that brought the illegal traders.

At the turn of the century, black marketeers traded animal skins and pearls. In the 1970s, marijuana poured out of the peninsula destined for the United States.

Those activities produced a “Wild West” atmosphere in Guajira. Kidnappings, murders and robberies flourish. So many gangs rob merchandise that heavily armed guards ride on trucks carrying goods from Puerto Portete to Maicao.

Contraband hasn’t completely disappeared. Guajira gangs sell about 14,000 cars stolen from Venezuela each year, and some cocaine is smuggled out on ships and small planes.

Nevertheless, the 1992 tariff reductions deflated the smuggling boom that no government crackdown could tame.

“Why come here when you can get the same goods in Bogota, and sometimes cheaper,” said Jamal Mohammed, a shopkeeper who moved to Maicao in the 1970s to escape the civil war in his Lebanese homeland.

Retail sales in Maicao, a city of 110,000 people, have dropped from about $3 million a day in the 1980s to just $1 million now, said Nelson Amaya, who represents Guajira in Congress.

Merchants recently shut down Maicao with a weeklong general strike. They demanded more tax breaks and a crackdown on smuggling elsewhere in Colombia, a business worth about $2 billion to $5 billion a year.

Horacio Ayala, the national customs director, wasn’t sympathetic.

“It’s hypocrisy that a town which grew rich off lawlessness now demands special treatment and more customs control,” he said. “The business is ending, so they’ll have to learn to do something else.”

For merchants, the death of the once lucrative business that brought them to Guajira is devastating. For the Wayuu, it’s just another dry spell.

“We’ve always been here, and our situation never changes much,” said Cecilia Lindado, host of a Wayuu radio show. “With or without the contraband trade, with or without the drug trade, with or without the rain--we will always be here.”