“We’re just one boat, but boats like ours come almost every day,” said Leroy Williams, 23, as he and his crew dropped off dozens of dirty plastic barrels on a Mabaruma riverbank.

In Venezuela, it costs only pennies to fill a car tank because of huge government subsidies. Using the smuggled gasoline in Guyana is theoretically against the law. But in much of the rugged Essequibo region -- home to the country’s mining and timber industries -- the law goes almost completely unenforced. Instead of the dollar-a-liter paid at pumps in the capital, gas is sold for half that.

Guyana imported 4.9 million bbl of fuel in 2014. Officials declined to estimate how much is smuggled. For Venezuela, it’s problematic enough to give the gas away to its own people at a cost of $15 billion a year. But when it also seeps through borders to its neighbors, that cuts further into what the government could sell at full price in international markets to obtain much-needed dollars for an economy ravaged by shortages and soaring inflation.

For years the “border trade” as it’s called has sustained rural Guyanese outposts like Mabaruma, where Venezuela gasoline powers cars, motorboats and home generators. Locals and business groups say the policy is a lifeline to isolated areas the government can’t supply. Watchdogs, however, are critical of the practice.

“It sets the region, and by extension the entire nation, in a vulnerable position,” said Calvin Bernard, president of Transparency Institute of Guyana, a nonprofit devoted to exposing corruption. He says it risks making citizens more dependent on a neighbor than their own government -- at a time when Venezuela is renewing a centuries’ old claim to nearly two- thirds of Guyanese territory, including the border area. 

https://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/blog/2015/09/smuggled-venezuelan-gasoline-fuels-guyana-s-economy