Venezuelans storm markets, food trucks

CARACAS, Venezuela — In the darkness the warehouse looks like any other.

But inside, workers quietly unload crates filled with merchandise so valuable that mobs have looted delivery vehicles, shot up the windshields of trucks and hurled a rock into one driver’s eye. Soldiers and police mill around the loading depot.

“It’s just cheese,” said Juan Urrea, a 29-year-old driver, as workers unloaded white Venezuelan queso from his delivery truck. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

The fight for food has begun in Venezuela. On any day, in cities across this increasingly desperate nation, crowds form to sack supermarkets. Protesters take to the streets to decry the skyrocketing prices and dwindling supplies of basic goods. The wealthy improvise, some shopping online for food that arrives from Miami. Middle-class families make do with less: coffee without milk, sardines instead of beef, two daily meals instead of three. The poor are stripping mangoes off the trees.

“This is savagery,” said Pedro Zaraza, a car oil salesman, who watched a mob mass on Friday outside a supermarket, where it was eventually dispersed by the army. “The authorities are losing their grip.”

Transporting the nation’s food means running a gantlet of need. On June 20, hundreds of protesters blocked a highway in an area called El Guapo, east of Caracas, paralyzing dozens of delivery trucks.

Drivers unloading cheese in Caracas, after a 15-hour journey from near the country’s western border with Colombia, said that trucks have been shot at and battered with rocks and that they must pay bribes in money or cheese at military checkpoints.

Some wealthier consumers have resorted to having food shipped in from the U.S., said Soraya Cedillo, owner of a courier company.