Venezuela: how the socialist paradise turned into debt and hyperinflation hell
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/05/21/venezuela-how-the-socialist-paradise-turned-into-debt-and-hyperi/
They call them bachaqueros. Venezuela’s army of black market shoppers descend every day at dawn outside Caracas’s biggest stores.
Named after the bachaco leaf-cutting ant that carries several times its weight, the men and women queue alongside hundreds of other Venezuelans for food, nappies, milk and other basic goods.
They stand for hours in the blistering heat, motivated not by hunger, but profit.
Half-empty shelves in most shops means goods bought at government-controlled prices can be sold at a significant mark-up.
supermarket queue
People queue to try to buy basic food items outside a supermarket in Caracas Credit: Reuters
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, has described them as “human beings turned savage”.
But in a country where hyperinflation is quickly making the cash in people’s pockets worthless, it has become the only way to survive.
Some – dubbed bachaqueros 2.0 by the government –even resell goods on the internet.
“It happens more frequently now,” sighs Juan Carlos Bacalhau, a marketing manager who lives in the Venezuelan capital.
“There’s a lady that I pay 1,500 bolivars a day to clean my house, but recently she told me she’d rather queue and buy and sell products than work for me.”
It wasn’t always this way. Diego Moya-Ocampos, senior political risk analyst at IHS, says the current crisis is the result of years of “economic mismanagement” by the ruling socialist party.
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Either way, the long-term outlook is far from rosy. “What they have been doing so far is depleting assets in order to make their payments – and that is clearly not sustainable,” says Arreaza.
He says a new regime could help the country back on its feet, with help from the IMF.
“If we have a new government that could imply multilateral support to manage a transition process [and] we could have a relatively market-friendly restructuring like that seen in Ukraine.”
For Moya-Ocampos, the government can only ignore the will of the people for so long. “I go quite often to Caracas and what I feel is that people are starting to lose fear.
They are realising that regime change is a possibility.” For Bacalhau, who has a Portuguese passport, the end game is in sight. He is waiting until the end of the year to see if there will be regime change, or he’s ready to emigrate.
“The truth is my children don’t have a future in this country. It’s changed so much,” he says.
“Ten years ago I used to go to the beach with my father to camp overnight. Now it would be suicidal. I live in hope for change, but after living here all my life it’s got to the point that if I leave I’ll never come back.”
