Bloomberg/Quint – A week after the Nicolas Maduro regime threw up barricades along the border, there are still no signs that truckloads of humanitarian aid will be allowed into Venezuela from their way station in eastern Colombia. That doesn’t mean food isn’t being shipped over — but it has been going in the other direction.
Market shelves in the scruffy Colombian town of Puerto Santander are loaded with Venezuelan maize flour, rice, cheese spread and more, heavily subsidized consumer goods smuggled by government officials and ordinary citizens alike and sold at big mark-ups.
Gasoline is ferried from Venezuela too, as people cash in on the arbitrage opportunities created by extreme price distortions.