Whenever a person goes to visit Venezuela, he asks acquaintances who live in the country if they are in need of anything.
So when less than a month ago I asked Rada, my driver and Venezuelan foster father, what he wanted, he told me a chocolate.
I brought him his favorite: a Hershey’s brand, cookies ‘n cream flavor. It was a product he came across in the 1990s, on his trips to Isla Margarita, when he earned enough as a messenger to go to Venezuelan paradises on vacation.
After arriving in Caracas, however, I realized that my question was out of date: the famous American chocolate bar is easily available.
However, for Rada, who receives a pension of $5 a month, chocolate remains, he says, “unattainable”: it costs between $1 and $2, double what I paid in Bogotá, Colombia.
That’s when I understood that the Venezuela where I lived between 2013 and 2017, plagued by lines to buy basic items, is no longer the same. The scarcity of products and price controls are left behind and the most used currency in the anti-imperialist country is… the dollar. Old and damaged $1, $5 and $10 bills have been generating a small boom economic.
And Hershey’s chocolates are on the shelves, but people like Rada, who make up the vast majority of the population, still can’t access the basics — let alone what they want.
The Venezuelans’ odyssey has gone from looking for a sack of flour, which they make their beloved arepas, to fighting for a few more dollars.
Popular neighborhoods like Catia and Petare in Caracas are full of informal vendors. In general, Venezuelans are making more money selling used food, parts and appliances than working in a formal business. The accumulation of jobs and odd jobs, the “tigrites”, soared like inflation and proliferated like the dollars.
Before, most Venezuelans did not have access to the products, and now that they are plentiful, they cannot afford them. So they work twice as hard if they can.
‘The Caracas we dream of’
The stores where Hershey’s chocolates are located are “bodegones”, something like “grocers”. They also sell body creams, almond butter, canned artichokes, among many other imported products that are the target of a certain amount of adoration.
Mas o boom coming up with the dollars not only involves the “bodegones” but also about 30 casinos recently opened in the country. They have already been banned by Hugo Chávez in the past, who considered them “haunts” that “only benefit the bourgeoisie”.
And in Chacao, a commercial district and stronghold of the opposition, an establishment was recently inaugurated which its creators called “the Caracas we dream of”. It’s called Mode. It looks like a food court, but luxurious. It’s like a small evocation of the old Venezuela of ostentation; a brand of the Fourth Republic, from the times before Chávez, but with the filter of the Instagram era.
Modo has four bowling lanes, five bars, three restaurants, an ice cream parlor, a nursery, a state-of-the-art wood-burning oven and a gallery that sells artwork for up to $3,000.
I spoke to one of the local clients, a self-declared man of “radical opposition”, who said: “This (the Modo) is something we needed in Caracas. It’s been so many years with no life, no nights out, no cultural options… This is one space of union, of overcoming the polarization that caused us so much damage.”
Five years ago, it was impossible to go a day without talking about politics in Caracas. Political posters gave the impression of a permanent election campaign. Relatives with ideological differences stopped talking. Politics was everyday.
Today, that scenario seems to be over. After years of frustration and economic crisis, apathy reigns. People not only abstain from voting, as was seen in the last regional elections, they even prefer not to mention the matter.
​More accentuated inequality than in Brazil and Colombia
In places like Modo, the humanitarian crisis we reported five years ago seems like just a memory. But it is not: according to the latest National Survey of Living Conditions, by the Catholic University, 95% of Venezuelans are poor, 70% are in extreme poverty and inequality is more acute than in Colombia and Brazil, among countries most unequal in the world.
In a nation that once had a consolidated middle class, inequality is now everywhere. I was at a restaurant where waiters were celebrating the $10 or $15 they earned as “tigritos,” while at the next table I heard businessmen boasting about $100,000 investments.
There are the hairdressers in the popular neighborhoods of Caracas, with cluttered seats and cracked mirrors charging $2 for a weekend haircut, and the barbershops in the affluent neighborhoods, where they charge $20 “with a complimentary massage and drink.”
Dollarization generated growth, some jobs, alleviated product shortages and eased pressure on the government. But none of the economists I spoke with was optimistic about that.
These processes have been informal and disorderly. The million-dollar investments, like the one made in the Modo space, are not generating taxes and their ownership is uncertain. Notaries cannot authenticate dollar contracts. Banks cannot extend credit.
Nor is it clear where dollar bills come from. Given the conflicts between Caracas and Washington, it is impossible for the amounts to be sent with the approval of the Central Bank of the United States. Perhaps they come from remittances sent by the nearly 6 million emigrants to their families; or from the sale of oil which, according to some expert reports, in Venezuela must be sold in cash to informal buyers.
Dollarization, experts explain, cannot solve problems that are the responsibility of the State and still unsatisfactory, such as the supply of water, electricity and gas. And pensions and subsidies, when paid in bolivars, are not able to help the poorest, as the official currency is devalued.
Many say here that “Venezuela has gone from socialism to savage capitalism”, but even the most accentuated capitalism has some regulation. Here, the government that supervised the entire economy eradicated controls, opened ports, dissolved taxes. Many imports no longer pass through customs control.
That’s why, instead of wild capitalism, experts like Benedicte Bull, Antulio Rosales, and Manuel Sutherland have recently described what’s happening in Venezuela as “bodegonero capitalism” (something like “grocery capitalism”), in reference to the shops that symbolize the renewed import economy amid deep opacity.
In just three years, one of the largest states in Latin America, the Venezuelan petro-state, has gone from ubiquitous to almost irrelevant; maintains subsidies and social programs, but in bolivars; it employs three million people earning no more than $10 and pays pensions no more than three chocolates.
My friend Rada may no longer need me to bring items that were once scarce, but any Venezuelan like him needs his income to be enough to buy them.
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