Colombia's main airline has landed again at Maiquetía, the airport that serves the capital of Venezuela.
There were no water arches, a traditional rite of the airline industry when it inaugurates a route that fell into disuse due to sustainability issues, but Avianca operates its emblematic route between Bogotá and Caracas again starting this Thursday, after being suspended for seven years.
It thus joins the handful of airlines that have already reconnected two neighboring countries that share a porous border and are deeply interrelated.
A long-awaited milestone in the normalization of relations, despite turbulence and delays.
The Government of Gustavo Petro has meant a change of cycle with respect to Nicolás Maduro's Venezuela, after years of binational tensions that led to a total rupture.
The Colombian president included reestablishing the route between Bogotá and Caracas as one of the goals for his first 100 days, although the process has been slower than anticipated.
Connectivity was the most repeated word at gate A14 of the El Dorado International Airport, from which flight AV142 departed.
“Not only is it the restart of the Bogotá-Caracas route, but it is the possibility that anyone in Colombia, whether they are in Ipiales, San Andrés, Valledupar, Neiva or Popayán, can go to Caracas with a stopover.
No other airline has these levels of connection in all corners of the country,” says Felipe Gómez, director of institutional relations at Avianca – which is now owned by the British holding company Avianca Group.
There will be four weekly frequencies, operated on A320 aircraft with capacity for 180 passengers.
“We would like it to be a daily flight, and we are going to work to make it a daily flight,” he assured.
Next to him, the Minister of Transportation, William Camargo, stressed that the portfolio of flights between both countries today combines state and private airlines, as well as the importance of maintaining bilateral relations with Venezuela "that should never have been broken."
“They almost didn't take this flight,” says Ana María Montoya, a 35-year-old Colombian economist who frequently travels to Caracas, between impatient and excited.
Last year she went five times, all through Panama, which forced her to wake up at dawn to arrive at noon.
She bought this ticket without having any idea that she was going to board an inaugural flight.
“No joke, it changes my life,” she explains while she looks out the window of seat 7A.
Avianca flew uninterruptedly for 60 years between the two capitals, but it was one of the many airlines that left Venezuela starting in 2014 due to a string of problems that included the State's debts with the companies, political conflict, security and infrastructure problems, international sanctions on the Maduro Government and the coronavirus pandemic.
That trend is on its way to reversing.
The Simón Bolívar International Airport is a gigantic complex that at one time looked almost deserted.
This Thursday, its hallways decorated by the famous mosaics of kinetic artist Carlos Cruz-Diez looked busy.
Several international airlines have resumed operations.
Passengers arrive at the Simón Bolívar International Airport of Maiquetía, in Caracas. NATHALIA ANGARITA
In this context, the promised reactivation of air frequencies was postponed on more than one occasion.
The Petro and Maduro governments had initially agreed that the first flight between Caracas and Bogotá would be operated by the Venezuelan Conviasa, but Washington deployed its diplomatic power to stop it, which irritated Caracas.
That plane never took off, since US sanctions on the state airline, included in the so-called Clinton List, forced a change of plans.
The reopening of the air border was slower than the land border.
The first direct flight between Caracas and Bogotá in about three years, a charter from the Venezuelan Turpial – a private airline, but linked to the military of the Bolivarian Republic – landed in November 2022, with just 36 passengers, at the El Dorado of the Colombian capital.
Then came the first international operations of Satena, the Colombian airline that depends on the Ministry of Defense, but a direct flight between cities separated by 1,400 kilometers was complicated for the small planes with which it serves Colombia.
The commercial, operational and regulatory process has been long and complex for private companies.
Wingo and Latam have already begun operating flights between the two countries, but Avianca, founded more than a hundred years ago in Barranquilla, was missing.
The breakdown of relations, among many other consequences, left in limbo both the Colombians who settled in Venezuela a long time ago during the harshest times of the armed conflict, and the almost three million Venezuelans who have settled in recent years. years in Colombia, by far the main host country for a diaspora that has fled the political, social and economic crisis.
Of them, more than half a million live in Bogotá.
The flight is a milestone in Petro's purpose to recover the commercial flow in an extensive and porous border of more than 2,200 kilometers, which became the most active in Latin America.
At its peak in 2008, the exchange reached more than $7 billion, but plummeted to just $220 million.
In 2021 it began to increase, and by 2022 it rebounded to 728 million dollars, according to figures from the Ministry of Commerce.
By the end of the four-year period, on August 7, 2026, it plans to have recovered levels close to 4,000 or 4,500 million dollars.
However, the Avianca flight occurs at a delicate moment, when United States sanctions have returned to Venezuela after the disqualification of opposition member María Corina Machado for the presidential elections that should be held this year.
This veto threatens the international opening that the oil-producing country has experienced in recent months.
The National Anti-Drug Command of the Bolivarian National Guard searches passengers at the Simón Bolívar International Airport of Maiquetía. NATHALIA ANGARITA
Despite the obstacles still on the horizon, the reopening is underway.
Cargo transit through binational bridges has been reestablished, Petro and Maduro have held several meetings and “normalization” is advancing to leave behind the irreconcilable differences that characterized the period of Iván Duque, the most enthusiastic promoter of the failed “diplomatic siege” on the heir of Hugo Chávez.
Step by step, the old quarrels between neighbors are becoming a thing of the past, with a thaw that is symbolized by the Avianca plane parked in Maiquetía.
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