USA TODAY International Edition
Brewery buckles, leaving thirsty Venezuelans beerless
Residents say nation ‘ is just falling apart’
Farmer Luis Garcia has coped with many of the shortages that plague his economically distressed nation: toilet paper, shampoo, sugar. But the latest scarcity is more than Garcia can swallow: beer.
For as long as he can remember, Garcia, 43, has ended each day in this fishing village with a beer or two at his local tasca ( bar). That’s going to be impossible because the country’s largest brewery shut its operations and laid off 10,000 workers, citing a lack of malted barley.
“What are we coming to when we can’t even buy a beer?” griped Garcia, who said he can no longer support the socialist revolution started by President Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor, Nicolas Maduro. “This country is just falling apart.”
Cerveceria Polar, which produces more than three- quarters of the country’s suds, closed the last of its four domestic breweries in late April. The culprit, the company said, was the Venezue- lan government’s repeated delays in selling it dollars to import supplies it needs to keep operating.
Under Venezuela’s foreign exchange restrictions, initiated by Chávez in 2003, the government controls access to dollars, deciding which companies qualify for them. Polar’s beer division has been cut off from dollars, and the company claims its suppliers abroad froze its credit lines, demanding payment in dollars.
That is not going down well in this nation of 30 million who love their beer, especially given the hot, tropical weather.
According to statistics compiled by the Kirin Beer Univer- sity, Venezuela has the highest beer consumption in South America, 75 quarts per person a year. That places Venezuela 25th in global beer consumption, slightly behind the USA, which averages 80 quarts a person.
A bottle of Polar, which sports a polar bear on its label, costs 14 cents at the black market rate but $ 15 at the official exchange rate.
Empresas Polar, the company that owns the brewery, has had a difficult relationship with Maduro. The Venezuelan president has charged that the company and its chief executive, Lorenzo Mendoza, are waging an economic war against his government.