Looting wave shakes Venezuela, there are 107 cases in eleven days

The desperation had already forced thousands of Venezuelans to rummage regularly in the garbage bags of the streets in search of some crumbs to eat, a practice that has become all too common in a country subdued by scarcity and hyperinflation.

But now the chilling face of hunger is leading hundreds of Venezuelans to take to the streets to loot shops and transport trucks, in an escalation of violence that is forcing businesses that still have products to close their doors and that a short space of time has already left an alarming trail of dead, wounded and detained.

In the first eleven days of 2018, Venezuela registered 107 cases of looting in 19 states of the oil nation, the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict said on Friday.

And the figures of the NGO do not include the multiple looting that was taking place on Friday in different Venezuelan states, which had to be contained by armored vehicles of the National Guard and that led to the arrest of dozens of people.

The looting is being accompanied by a high number of protests by citizens desperate for hunger. Between January 1 and 11, they have added 386 throughout the country, according to preliminary data from the observatory, an NGO that will formally present its report on Monday.

"The desperation, impunity and the serious humanitarian crisis that we live in Venezuela continues to deepen and is leading people to commit this type of crime [looting]," Marco Antonio Ponce, coordinator of the NGO, commented from Caracas.

"This situation continues to worsen throughout the country. Given the impossibility of replacing food, in the absence of import of products, and in the absence of national production, we are living a very critical situation of scarcity of the few products we still have in the country, "added Ponce.

And the frustration is increasing, since by not having real possibilities to meet the clamor of a hungry people, the only instrument that the regime of Nicolás Maduro has been using to deal with the situation has been repression, in a trend that has started to collect victims.

Group of Venezuelans loot a ranch and kill a cow
Carlos Paparoni, deputy to the National Assembly, published a video that shows a group of Venezuelans looting the Miraflores estate in the state of Mérida and killing a cow.

In Merida, state that is among the hardest hit by the scarcity of products, four people died and another 15 were wounded, in means of the attempts of the authorities to contain the riots that took place on Thursday in different localities.

Dozens of soldiers and police took some towns in the western state on Friday, where several businesses and haciendas have been looted in the last 48 hours and more than 100 people have been arrested, local media reported.

A similar situation occurred in the Bolívar state, in the south of the country, amid attempts to contain the looting that has been recorded almost daily in some localities of the mining region.

Local media also reported Friday the looting of transport trucks intercepted on the highway in the states of Zulia, Trujillo and Portuguesa.

Venezuela, which has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, is going through the worst economic crisis in its modern history, characterized by severe shortages of food and medicine and hyperinflation that closed 2017 with a rate close to 3,000 percent. .

If the radical change in the political and economic conduct of the country does not occur, the oil nation could register an inflation rate of at least 30,000 percent this year, although some economists fear that it could exceed 100,000 or 200,000 percent, due to that the only financing instrument that the regime is using is the printing of inorganic money.

The economic collapse has been gradually pushing the Venezuelan population towards famine.

"People are starving, there is no food," Felix Velásquez, a 64-year-old carpenter, told the AFP news agency that he must stretch a minimum wage of 797,510 bolívares (barely five dollars at the market exchange rate).

Velasquez made the comment while waiting for his turn to enter a supply in the east of Caracas. But in the end he returned home empty-handed, after going through four supermarkets without success.

The chilling face of hunger is leading hundreds of Venezuelans to take to the streets to loot shops and transport trucks, in an escalation of violence that is forcing businesses that still have products to close their doors and in a A short space of time has already left an alarming trail of dead, wounded and detained.

@communitynews