N pushing country to the brink
Sandra Londono, a 42-yearold hairdresser who charges clients food rather than money for doing their hair. She doesn’t have time to stand in line, she says. “We never had food shortages before Chávez and his people took power.”
Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, blames the country’s crisis on an economic war being waged by nefarious foreign powers against his government. He claims that Venezuela’s business elite – supported by the United States, Spain, Colombia’s former President Álvaro Uribe, and others – have deliberately cut back production of foodstuffs to create shortages, hoping to detonate a social crisis that would unseat him.
Opposition leader Henrique Capriles Radonski and others disagree. “The only guilty party for the Venezuelan economic disaster is the present government,” Capriles wrote in an oped on June 5 in Spain’s El Pais. “The mismanagement and inefficient use of the oil bonanza that has already concluded, and the dismantlement of the production and commercial apparatus of the country, as well as constant fighting with businessmen have resulted in an humanitarian emergency.”
Soaring inflation only makes matters worse. On May 1, Maduro raised the country’s monthly minimum wage by 30 per cent to 15,050 bolivars (about $1,500). That sounds like a big raise, but consider: Inflation is raging at more than 400 per cent. For perspective, the average family of four needs 256,146 bolivars (about $25,700) a month to buy just the essential foodstuffs, according to the Documentation Center for Social Analysis. That works out to over 17 times the monthly minimum wage. A kilogram of meat or cheese now costs about one-third of the monthly minimum wage. “These prices are killing us,” says Irene Lozada, a 56-yearold mother of four who spends five hours a day looking for food. “Each week prices are higher and higher. How can we survive?”
Lozada says she has no choice but to buy food on the black market from bachaqueros, people who illegally obtain food and resell it at steep markups. Although the government-established price for 1 kilogram of cornmeal is 190 bolivars (about $19), the black market price is 1,500 (about $150). Maduro, who could face a recall referendum this year, has sought to combat the bachaqueros – many of whom are his own supporters – and end food shortages by creating local committees to deliver food to the country’s population. These roughly 15,000 Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAPs), set up not by the government but by Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), obtain food from the government and sell it to households. The CLAPs were set up two months ago with the intention of helping to fight against the bachaqueros and shortages.
Under the program, participants can theoretically buy basic foodstuffs every two weeks at subsidised prices. “Our local committee asked us to pay 2,000 bolivars [about $200] upfront to guarantee us the first bags,” says Asia Loudres, a 47year-old mother of three, her face drawn and haggard from worry. “We are still waiting for the food. And it’s been more than a month. I have been feeding my children bananas and yucca for days.”
Opponents claim that Maduro and the PSUV are using the committees to feed their supporters at the expense of the rest of the population, especially as food shipments have been diverted from supermarkets to the committees. It’s a charge that some Chávistas don’t deny. “The [committees] are political organisations to combat the economic war,” Erika Farias, the governor of Cojedes, said at a pro-government rally on Wednesday. “The escuálidos” – Maduro’s upper-class opponents – “don’t belong.”
As the food shortage worsens, a wave of supermarket lootings and attempted hijackings of trucks carrying foodstuffs has soared. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, upward of 10 lootings or attempted lootings are occurring daily. There have been 254 cases of looting or attempted looting of supermarkets and stores since the start of the year.
Orlando Farias, the manager of a grocery store in the central industrial city of Maracay, knew there would be problems when a delivery truck pulled up to his store last week, fol- lowed by a group of motorcyclists. “The motorcyclists – supporters of the government – started pushing and shoving the others who had been waiting in line for hours, many of whom were elderly women,” Farias says. “They tried to get ahead in the line, and we had to call the police. “But when they arrived, the police made matters worse by insinuating that we were hiding food from the people who were waiting. We had to show the officers our storeroom before they would believe us. I thought for sure we were going to be looted, either by the police or by the people outside. I never thought I would see people so desperate, so hungry.”
That desperation has fed the protests against Maduro in recent weeks. On June 2, over 150 people from a working-class neighbourhood tried to reach the presidential palace to protest the shortage of food and the diversion of foodstuffs from the supermarket where they were waiting for the CLAPs. They were repulsed by security forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets.
“The food crisis is going to get worse in June and July,” Smilde says. “For the past year and a half the government has kept a lid on this by militarising supermarkets and quickly snuffing out altercations in line and cases of looting. But it’s not clear how long they can do this.”
That’s bad news for Maduro, whose approval rating is hovering around 25 per cent and who would surely lose in a hypothetical recall election. His weight isn’t helping. The plump Maduro – whom Chávez often chided for his weakness for fast food – continues to assure his countrymen that things are getting better.
“He’s fat; his ministers are fat so they have plenty to eat even though we don’t,” says Londono. “I can’t wait to vote against Maduro. He has to go.”