Without doors or windows, with a lawn that hasn’t been mowed for months and walls full of graffiti, the Venezuelan consulate in Bogotá is in ruins.
The house is located in the north of the capital, in an exclusive sector that is full of buildings and in which the abandoned infrastructure is disruptive, says the EFE agency.
There is hardly a policeman guarding the building and any passer-by who passes by the sides can sneak into the property, because where there should be windows there are only holes and in the places where the doors were there are just a few pieces of wood that are easy to move.
Already inside the land, the pastures measure more than half a meter and are full of debris, garbage and even a tire that someone discarded.
After seven years of crisis and ruptures, relations between Colombia and Venezuela enter a thawing phase with the arrival of ambassadors in Caracas and Bogotá to begin the reconstruction of political, economic, family and commercial ties between the two countries.
The turn in diplomacy is the product of the change of Government in Colombia, where the arrival to the Presidency of Gustavo Petro in August led to the reestablishment of relations, broken in February 2019 when the Administration of the Andean country under the presidency of Iván Duque left to recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
House in ruins
However, while the Colombian consulate in Caracas is very well preserved, as announced by the newly appointed ambassador, Armando Benedettithe Venezuelan in Bogotá has a very long way to go to be habitable.
Last April, the Government of Venezuela denounced a fire at its consular headquarters in Bogotá, the product of “permanent vandalization”, and demanded that the Executive of the Andean country, then chaired by Iván Duque, show “due respect and protection” of its bases. diplomats in the neighboring nation.
This statement occurred days after a fire was recorded inside the house, whose traces can be seen, mainly on the ceilings.
The internal walls of the building are also full of graffiti, clothing that apparently belongs to homeless people and there are even a couple of mattresses on which those who took advantage of the fact that the consular headquarters was abandoned slept.
The bathrooms are also broken and there is rubbish scattered around some of the rooms, as well as pieces of wood, including door frames, and bricks.
There is also no furniture, because since 2019 when it closed its doors —after the breakdown of relations between the two countries when Juan Guaidó tried to enter his country with a caravan of what the right called “humanitarian aid”— people entered at night and They were taking everything they could, from furniture and doors to aluminum window frames, among other objects
Precisely, when an EFE team was touring the facilities this Thursday, a delegation from the Venezuelan embassy arrived, saying that the intention is to carry out a structural review of the headquarters to start working on its recovery.
On Wednesday, the new Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia, Felix Plasenciapresented a copy of the credential letters to Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva, amid the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries that began this month, after three broken years.
After arriving in Colombia this week, Plasencia He assured that one of the first tasks he will have in office will be to rebuild the abandoned diplomatic headquarters, such as the consulate.
“We are going to rescue the spaces. Unfortunately, some were vandalized. We are going to rescue them. That is the job, that is the duty and here I am to do it », he expressed.
