THE recent border dispute between Venezuela and Colombia, accompanied by a crackdown on Colombian criminal gangs by Caracas, has been used as a yet another stick to beat the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro.

On August 17 Maduro announced the closure of the border with Colombia in south-western Tachira sate for 72 hours, in response to an ambush by a paramilitary criminal gang on a platoon of troops searching the area for smugglers, wounding three of them.

The police and army launched a “people’s liberation operation” (OLP), a combined mass sweep to root out gangs. Maduro extended the closure and declared a state of emergency in Tachira as hundreds of suspects were rounded up — mainly undocumented Colombian immigrants.

Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe called Maduro a “dictator” a few days later. As Uribe spoke at a demonstration outside the Venezuelan consulate, a supporter held up a placard behind him declaring Maduro a xenophobe, a fascist and a terrorist. Two days later Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos accused Venezuela of “ethnic cleansing.” The Western media lapped it up.

However, some hope remained for an amicable settlement. On August 26 the foreign ministers of both countries — Venezuelan Delcy Rodriguez and Colombian Maria Angela Holguin — met in Colombia. They agreed that the nations’ respective ombudspersons would meet to establish a protocol for deportations of criminal suspects.

But the next day Santos recalled Bogota’s ambassador to Venezuela, claiming that his ombudspersons had been denied access to the city of San Antonio de Tachira. Venezuela followed suit.

Apparently with no attempt at quiet negotiation, Santos had scuppered the deal brokered by his foreign minister — that was, after all, meant to be in the interest of Colombian citizens.

Maduro had up until then been careful to reserve his harshest criticism for Uribe, but now he had had enough. He hit back at Santos’s claims that Colombian immigrants were being victimised, revealing that three paramilitary leaders had been captured in Venezuela.

Santos called for emergency meetings of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) and the Organisation of American States (OAS) to discuss the issue — in effect to seek censure of Venezuela. But the OAS failed to reach the necessary majority in favour of a meeting and told the two countries to settle the dispute through diplomacy.

On September 7 the dispute escalated as Venezuela closed its border in north-western Zulia state and launched another OLP against Colombian paramilitary gangs there, killing seven of the notorious Los Urabenos gang and arresting eight.

What is the true situation between the two countries? About 1,400 Colombians have been deported from Venezuela since the OLPs were launched. The UN reports that another 18,000 have fled in fear of the crackdown, although many of those may have been lured by the promise of generous aid payments from the Colombian government.

But even so, 20,000 is a drop out of the ocean of 5.6 million Colombians living in Venezuela, making up a fifth of the country’s population of 30 million. Most of these have arrived in the last 16 years, a period which includes Uribe’s two terms in office — when his hands dripped with the blood of victims of the country’s civil war.

Hundreds of thousands of the Colombians in Venezuela have refugee status, having fled the right-wing paramilitary death squads that Uribe vowed to but did not disarm, but the vast majority have emigrated to escape the grinding poverty resulting from decades of neoliberal government.

Whatever their plight, all of them enjoy access to the socialist government’s “missions” — the series of social welfare projects in fields such as education, healthcare and housing launched by Hugo Chavez, the late president and architect of the Bolivarian revolution — named after 19th-century national liberation struggle leader Simon Bolivar. Foreign Minister Holguin herself acknowledged that “Venezuela has generously welcomed Colombians for decades.”

Indeed everyone in Colombia, up to and including Santos, benefits from Bolivarian socialism, since 40 per cent of consumer goods sold there are smuggled across the border from Venezuela, where staple foods and petrol — oil being the nation’s primary national product — are heavily subsidised. The border closure created a crisis in Colombia as the flow of contraband food and fuel was restricted, but more on that in my next article.

Venezuela’s generosity to refugees is not limited to its immediate neighbours, however. On September 7 of this year Maduro announced that the nation would take in 20,000 refugees from Syria — as many as David Cameron’s government says it will accept over the next five years.

The same death squads that have driven hundreds of thousands of Colombians into exile have, in recent years, found themselves redundant and turned to their natural sideline of organised crime. Many of these gangs followed their victims to Venezuela, where they set up shop. Maduro has accused them of hiring themselves out as muscle to unscrupulous opposition forces as a sideline.

These gangs were among the targets of the OLPs, a major crime-fighting offensive involving police and soldiers, in a country where violent crime is rampant following decades of neglect of the poor prior to Chavez’s election in 1998.

Of course Venezuela can never win in the narrow viewpoint of the West. Crime is blamed on the government, but its attempts to fight crime are condemned as assaults on civil and human rights.

But Caracas is perhaps long past caring: the decidedly dodgy Human Rights Watch had its Venezuelan staff deported in 2008 for contributing to the media campaign of misinformation against the government. More recently Venezuela has been forging new economic partnerships with the Brics nations, reducing its dependence on the US oil market.

The media offensive against Venezuela is designed to harden public opinion against the socialist government and justify sanctions — already applied by the US — and support for violent Maidan-style regime change attempts by the likes of recently jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. The left must be vigilant against these manoeuvres and reaffirm its solidarity with the popular government of Venezuela.