In Venezuela, the South American nation sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves, residents have found themselves having to queue for hours outside supermarkets to get their hands on the most basic of necessities, including toilet paper.
It’s another sign of a country in economic, social and political turmoil.
„What our country is going through is monstrously unique: It’s nothing less than the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States,” Venezuelan authors and academics Moises Naim and Francisco Toro write in The Atlantic.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has declared a 60-day state of emergency. Photo: Bloomberg
Inflation in Venezuela is rampant. It has led to a chronic shortage of food and goods, medicine and power, all of which is contributing to widespread unrest. An unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night, while patients are dying due to a lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals.
On Friday, President Nicolas Maduro declared a 60-day „constitutional state of emergency”, alluding to an American-backed plot against his regime. The declaration was necessary, he said, to quash what he described as a „coup” and confront „all the international and national threats our nation is facing”.
But his opponents say he and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, are squarely to blame for disastrous economic policies that have led to the country’s undoing.
A protester gestures in front of police during an opposition march in Caracas on May 11. Photo: Bloomberg
In an attempt to ease the strain on electricity disruption, the government has resorted to moving clocks forward by half an hour, closing schools on Fridays and assigning public servants two-day weeks, while Maduro has even asked women to stop blow-drying their hair.
ANATOMY OF A COLLAPSE
Leadership
Maduro, a former bus driver and Chavez’ hand-picked successor, was elected to a six-year term in 2013, a month after the more charismatic Chavez died. Recent polls have shown Maduro’s approval ratings have dropped as low as 15 per cent.
But opponents say the experiment with „21st-century socialism” as introduced by Chavez, a self-described champion of the poor, and continued by Maduro, failed spectacularly and tragically.
While many Venezuelans at first experienced better housing, subsidised food and higher wages when oil prices were high – oil accounts for about 96 per cent of Venezuela’s exports – the government „failed to build anything resembling a sustainable economy”, according to a damning editorial published in The New York Times this week.
The Atlantic agrees that the ruling philosophy of Chavez and Maduro, with its „breathtaking propensity for mismanagement”, is the real culprit.
Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions, introduced „nonsense policy making”, such as price and currency controls, while corruption proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families, The Atlanticreports.
Price controls have been applied to more and more goods including food, vital medicines, deodorant, nappies and toilet paper. The goal was to check inflation and keep goods affordable for the poor.
But, as The Atlantic said, prices were set below production costs, meaning sellers couldn’t afford to keep the shelves stocked. Official prices are low, but it’s a mirage: the products have simply disappeared.
The Economy
The International Monetary Fund said Venezuela’s economy shrank 5.7 per cent in 2015 and is expected to contract an additional 8 per cent this year. Inflation has skyrocketed, with the annual rate predicted to hit the 700 per cent range, while failing to meet its citizens’ most basic needs, IMF projections say.
The bolivar, Venezuela’s currency, is virtually worthless. Inflation is so high that the government cannot afford to pay for the paper on which the currency is printed.
Once the cornerstone of Venezuela’s economy and the source of funding for many of Chavez’ social programs, global oil prices have plummeted, leaving Venezuela in dire financial straits.
The New York Times said: „This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that prices have collapsed – they are around a third what they were in 2014 – the consequences are casting adestructive shadow across the country. Lines for food, long a feature of life in Venezuela, now erupt into looting.”
Queues for basic goods
Many Venezuelans wait for hours in lines outside supermarkets, hoping shelves won’t be emptied of basic goods by the time they are let in.
Shoppers queue outside a supermarket in Caracas. Photo: Reuters
The looting of staples throughout the country, amid empty shops and soaring black market prices, are an indicator of how desperate some have become.
In one of the latest riots, reported by Reuters, several hundred people looted a truck carrying kitchen rolls, salt and shampoo after it crashed and some of its load tumbled out. Fifteen people were injured, including six security officials trying to restrain the crowd.
The largest food and beverage company in Venezuela, the Polar Group, halted production of beer on April 30, saying government mismanagement meant it was no longer able to import barley.
Smartphone apps have been developed telling Venezuelans which shop might have toilet paper, which is now worth more than the currency.
Power outages
Blackouts are common in Venezuela, which depends heavily on hydro-electric power.
Maduro and other government officials blame the El Niño weather pattern and drought for prolonged energy outages. The water level at the Guri hydro-electric dam, which provides 75 per cent of Venezuela’s electricity, is at a record low. But opposition figures blame mismanagement and corruption for the problems.
The government has tried a variety of curious measures to curtail electricity use. Maduro reduced the public sector working week to just two days. Shopping malls close early. This year clocks were brought forward half an hour, meaning more daylight during the working day. Schools were closed on Fridays.
The President even asked women to blow-dry their hair only for „special occasions”, saying: „I always think a woman looks better when she just runs her fingers through her hair and lets it dry naturally. It’s just an idea I have.”
One Caracas resident told al-Jazeera: „If the President thinks that not blow-drying our hair is going to help, then the problem is far worse than we thought.”
The government last month imposed a formal rolling blackout program due to last at least 40 days.
Healthcare
The economic crisis in Venezuela has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans, The New York Times said.
In hospitals there are chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Blackouts shut down respirators, leaving doctors keeping ailing infants alive, when they can, by pumping air by hand. Gloves and soap have vanished, and, often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market.
At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table during a recent visit by The New York Times.
According to the Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela, the country is lacking about 80 per cent of the basic medical supplies needed to treat its population.
„This is criminal that we can sit in a country with this much oil, and people are dying for lack of antibiotics,” Oneida Guaipe, a lawmaker and former hospital union leader, told the Times.
Crime
Venezuela remains one of the most dangerous nations in the world for violent crime. Only Honduras has a worse murder rate than Venezuela, the United Nations said.
During the first three months of this year, 4696 people were murdered in Venezuela, the government said.
The government said Venezuela’s murder rate fell last year to 58 per 100,000 inhabitants, but local rights groups say it is higher than the official statistics, with one monitoring organisation putting it at 90 per 100,000 in 2015.
Violent crime remains a real worry for Venezuela’s 29 million people, especially in poor slums run by gangs loyal to the government.
Protests
Venezuela’s opposition said it has collected 1.8 million signatures to launch a recall referendum against Maduro. But the vote must be held before January 10 in order to trigger new elections, and the opposition accuses the electoral authorities of stalling.
The opposition has called for mass protests on Wednesday, local time, against the state of emergency and efforts to delay their recall referendum. It has prompted fears of bloody unrest in Caracas, the capital.
Opposition-led marches are to take place nationwide demanding electoral officials validate the referendum to oust Maduro.
Similar marches last week were met by riot police and tear gas.
„If Maduro wants to apply this decree he will have to bring out the warplanes and the tanks into the street, because he will have to apply it through force,” Henrique Capriles, Venezuela’s opposition leader, said.
„Venezuela is a bomb that could explode any minute. If you block the democratic path, we don’t know what could happen.”
He said the decree was a „barbarity – Maduro wants to put himself above the constitution, and he isn’t”.
The Washington Post reports that senior US intelligence officials believe Maduro’s government could be overthrown in a popular uprising this year.
„You can hear the ice cracking,” an unidentified intelligence official was quoted as saying. „You know there’s a crisis coming.”
http://www.smh.com.au/world/meltdown-in-venezuela-the-anatomy-of-a-monstrously-unique-economic-basket-case-20160517-gowqej.html
