A2 · Elementary
10 min
travelmigrationlatin americaconflict zonesborder culture
The Crossing City: Cúcuta, the Border, and the People Who Pass Through
La Ciudad del Cruce: Cúcuta, la Frontera y los Que Pasan
This week, gunmen opened fire at a commercial establishment in Cúcuta, Colombia, near the Venezuelan border. Fletcher and Octavio dig into why this city is one of the world's most significant border crossings and what that means for travelers and migrants alike.
Esta semana, hombres armados abrieron fuego en Cúcuta, Colombia, cerca de la frontera con Venezuela. Fletcher y Octavio exploran por qué esta ciudad es uno de los cruces de frontera más importantes del mundo y qué significa eso para los viajeros y los migrantes.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| la frontera | the border | Muchas personas cruzan la frontera cada día. |
| el puente | the bridge | El puente Simón Bolívar conecta los dos países. |
| cruzar | to cross | Las personas cruzan la frontera para comprar comida. |
| allí / ahí / aquí | there (far) / there (near) / here | El mercado está ahí, cerca. El aeropuerto está allí, lejos. |
| llevar | to carry / to bring | Las familias llevan sus maletas por el puente. |
| peligroso | dangerous | Algunos caminos en la frontera son muy peligrosos. |
Pull up a map of northern Colombia and zoom in on the Venezuelan border.
There's a city sitting right on that line, right where the two countries press against each other, and this week it was in the news for the worst reason.
Gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire outside a commercial establishment in Cúcuta.
Four people were killed.
And Cúcuta, for anyone who doesn't know it, is one of the most extraordinary border cities in the Western Hemisphere.
Sí.
Yes.
Cúcuta está en la frontera con Venezuela.
Cúcuta is on the border with Venezuela.
Muchas personas cruzan la frontera cada día.
Many people cross the border every day.
And when Octavio says many people, he means, genuinely, millions over the past decade.
This has become one of the busiest land crossings on the planet, mostly because of the Venezuelan migration crisis.
La frontera tiene un puente.
The border has a bridge.
El puente se llama Simón Bolívar.
The bridge is called Simón Bolívar.
Es muy famoso.
It is very famous.
The Simón Bolívar bridge.
Named after the man who liberated both countries, which is almost too on the nose.
And the stories that have played out on that bridge over the last eight years are just remarkable.
Mucha gente camina por el puente.
Many people walk across the bridge.
Llevan bolsas y maletas.
They carry bags and suitcases.
Van a Colombia.
They are going to Colombia.
And that image, families walking with everything they own in a bag, that became one of the defining images of the Venezuelan exodus.
At the peak of it, around 2018 and 2019, an estimated five thousand people a day were crossing that bridge on foot.
En Venezuela no hay comida.
In Venezuela there is no food.
No hay medicina.
There is no medicine.
La vida es muy difícil.
Life is very difficult.
Right.
And Cúcuta absorbed that.
The city became, almost overnight, both a waypoint and a destination.
Some people just passed through heading south.
Others stopped and stayed.
Cúcuta tiene mercados grandes.
Cúcuta has big markets.
Los venezolanos compran arroz, aceite, jabón.
Venezuelans buy rice, oil, soap.
The markets.
That's the thing that surprised me when I looked into this city properly.
Cúcuta had a market economy built on cross-border trade long before the crisis.
Gasoline flowing one way, food the other.
It was always a city that lived on the exchange.
Sí.
Yes.
Antes, la gasolina en Venezuela era muy barata.
Before, gasoline in Venezuela was very cheap.
Las personas la traían a Colombia.
People brought it to Colombia.
Venezuelan gasoline was among the cheapest in the world, practically free, because the government subsidized it so heavily.
So there was this entire informal economy where people smuggled cheap Venezuelan fuel across the bridge into Colombia.
And then the Venezuelan economy collapsed and that trade flipped.
Ahora la gente cruza para comprar cosas en Colombia.
Now people cross to buy things in Colombia.
El dinero venezolano no vale mucho.
Venezuelan money is not worth much.
Worth almost nothing.
At the worst moments of the hyperinflation, you needed wheelbarrows of bolivars to buy bread.
And that economic gravity pulled people physically toward Cúcuta and through it.
Es una ciudad difícil.
It is a difficult city.
Hay problemas con grupos armados.
There are problems with armed groups.
Pero también hay vida normal.
But there is also normal life.
That tension is the whole thing, isn't it.
And this is what I keep coming back to when I think about border cities in conflict zones.
I covered the Syrian-Turkish border in 2013, and that same duality was everywhere.
A restaurant with families eating lunch on one block, absolute chaos three blocks away.
En Cúcuta hay restaurantes venezolanos ahora.
In Cúcuta there are Venezuelan restaurants now.
La comida venezolana es buena.
Venezuelan food is good.
Of course there are.
The food always travels faster than the politics does.
What Venezuelan dishes are we talking?
Las arepas venezolanas son diferentes.
Venezuelan arepas are different.
Son más grandes.
They are bigger.
También hay pabellón criollo, con arroz y frijoles.
There is also pabellón criollo, with rice and beans.
Pabellón criollo.
I've had that.
It's rice, black beans, shredded beef, and fried plantains, and it's one of those dishes that hits like a meal cooked by someone's grandmother.
Which, I suppose, it usually was.
Los venezolanos en Cúcuta trabajan en los mercados, en los restaurantes.
Venezuelans in Cúcuta work in the markets, in the restaurants.
Trabajan mucho.
They work hard.
Seven million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015.
To put that number in context, that's roughly the same as the entire population of Bulgaria just, picking up and leaving.
And a large portion of those people moved through or to Colombia.
Colombia tiene muchos venezolanos ahora.
Colombia has many Venezuelans now.
Más de dos millones.
More than two million.
Es mucha gente.
That is a lot of people.
And Colombia's response to that has been, honestly, more generous than a lot of richer countries would manage.
In 2021, Colombia granted temporary protected status to about a million Venezuelan migrants.
Full work authorization, access to public services.
Colombia y Venezuela tienen una historia larga.
Colombia and Venezuela have a long history.
Antes eran amigos.
Before they were friends.
Ahora es diferente.
Now it is different.
The relationship goes back to before either country existed as we know it.
Both were part of Gran Colombia, the republic Bolívar created after independence from Spain.
They share a border of more than two thousand kilometers, family ties that cross it in every direction.
Muchas familias tienen parientes en los dos países.
Many families have relatives in both countries.
Una persona vive en Colombia, su hermano vive en Venezuela.
One person lives in Colombia, their brother lives in Venezuela.
Which makes this particular border crossing different from, say, a political boundary drawn by colonial administrators.
People were crossing that bridge to see their families long before the crisis made it an emergency.
Pero Maduro cerró la frontera en 2015.
But Maduro closed the border in 2015.
Las personas no podían cruzar.
People could not cross.
That closure.
Maduro accused Colombia of smuggling and said he was protecting the economy.
But the real effect was to trap millions of people.
Families separated overnight.
And Cúcuta, which depended on cross-border movement, was hit hard economically.
La gente cruzaba por otros caminos, por el campo.
People crossed through other paths, through the countryside.
No por el puente oficial.
Not through the official bridge.
The trochas.
That's what they called those unofficial paths.
And that's where a lot of the danger was, and still is.
Armed groups control those routes.
Criminal organizations that charge a toll, rob people, or worse.
Sí, las trochas son peligrosas.
Yes, the trochas are dangerous.
Pero muchas personas no tienen otra opción.
But many people have no other option.
And this is the thing about travel as a topic that I think people don't always sit with.
When we talk about travel, we usually mean people who choose to go somewhere.
Tourists.
Business travelers.
But for enormous numbers of people, movement is not a choice.
It's a survival calculation.
Tienes razón.
You are right.
Viajar es diferente para cada persona.
Traveling is different for each person.
Para algunos es vacaciones.
For some it is a vacation.
Para otros es una necesidad.
For others it is a necessity.
And Cúcuta holds both of those realities at once.
Because Colombia has also, genuinely, become a remarkable tourist destination over the last fifteen years.
Medellín won a prize for being the world's most innovative city.
Cartagena is on every bucket list.
Even Bogotá has a serious food scene now.
Colombia tiene montañas, mar, selva.
Colombia has mountains, sea, jungle.
Tiene muchos lugares bonitos.
It has many beautiful places.
It's genuinely one of the most biodiverse countries on earth.
More bird species than any other country.
And for years, people didn't go because of the security situation.
The transformation in perception since the 2000s has been dramatic.
Antes, Colombia era peligrosa.
Before, Colombia was dangerous.
Ahora muchos turistas van.
Now many tourists go.
Pero hay lugares más seguros que otros.
But there are places that are safer than others.
Cúcuta is not on the tourist trail.
It's not in the guidebooks the way Cartagena is.
And this week's shooting is a reminder of why.
The Norte de Santander region, where Cúcuta sits, is one of the areas where guerrilla groups still operate with real presence.
El ELN, un grupo guerrillero, tiene mucho poder allí.
The ELN, a guerrilla group, has a lot of power there.
Es un problema serio.
It is a serious problem.
The ELN, the National Liberation Army.
They've been operating since 1964.
That's over sixty years.
Long after the FARC signed a peace deal with the Colombian government, the ELN kept going.
And border areas like Cúcuta are exactly where they've dug in.
La frontera es difícil de controlar.
The border is difficult to control.
Es muy larga y hay mucha selva.
It is very long and there is a lot of jungle.
Two thousand two hundred kilometers of border, much of it through terrain that makes enforcement basically impossible.
And when you combine that with a collapsed state on the Venezuelan side, you get exactly the kind of power vacuum that armed groups fill.
Para los viajeros, la recomendación es clara.
For travelers, the recommendation is clear.
No ir a Cúcuta sin información.
Do not go to Cúcuta without information.
Es importante saber el lugar.
It is important to know the place.
Know the place before you go.
That's actually the principle behind almost all sensible travel in complicated regions, and it's something I spent years thinking about as a correspondent.
The journalists who got into trouble were almost always the ones who arrived without context.
El contexto es todo.
Context is everything.
La frontera tiene su propia cultura.
The border has its own culture.
Sus propias reglas.
Its own rules.
Its own rules.
And its own rhythms.
People who live in border cities develop this almost instinctive read on when to move and when to stay still.
That kind of knowledge doesn't make it into the travel advisories.
Oye, Fletcher, una cosa.
Hey, Fletcher, one thing.
Usé la palabra 'allí' antes.
I used the word 'allí' before.
¿Sabes la diferencia entre 'allí' y 'ahí'?
Do you know the difference between 'allí' and 'ahí'?
Honestly, I've always just used them interchangeably and hoped nobody noticed.
Which, based on your expression right now, was the wrong call.
'Ahí' es cerca.
'Ahí' is nearby.
'Allí' es lejos.
'Allí' is far away.
'Aquí' es muy cerca, como este lugar.
'Aquí' is very close, like this place.
So it's a distance scale.
Here, then nearby over there, then far away over there.
English just collapses all of that into 'there' and makes do.
Which, now that I say it out loud, feels lazy.
El inglés es simple a veces.
English is simple sometimes.
El español tiene más precisión.
Spanish has more precision.
Eso es bueno para el viajero.
That is good for the traveler.
More precision for the traveler.
I like that.
If you're asking for directions in Cúcuta and someone says 'allí,' that's very different information from 'ahí.' One means it's right around the corner, the other means start walking.
Good to know before I confidently head in the wrong direction.