The Hunger Games If There Are

Scarcity hit more low and middle class, by the petrodependence and nationalization of companies.

Roselyn did not go to study last week. The girl, aged 14, got up early every morning, but to line up in Caracas supermarkets: there is no food at home.

While her mother was lining up in a downtown store, Roselyn stayed in a nearby neighborhood in her neighborhood. With luck, the one could buy rice, milk and feminine towels, and the other, flour, coffee and toilet paper, among other articles that today are a real luxury in Venezuela.

The shortage of food and medicine in Venezuela reaches 80%, according to private studies. What gives a dramatic tinge to the crisis, aggravated by the collapse in the international price of oil. In July 2008, the price of crude oil climbed to US $ 124 per barrel. Far from that dance of the millions, the price of US $ 38 today affects this country dependent on oil and imports. In addition, Venezuelans bear the highest inflation in the world: 180.9% in 2015 and the IMF projects it at 720% for 2016.

Maduro, with an unpopularity of 75% according to private surveys, attributes the crisis to the collapse of oil prices and to an economic war of businessmen and right-wing politicians looking to give it a coup, after almost 18 years of socialism inherited from Hugo Chavez.

They have us going hungry, but we are rested (firm) with the legacy of the commander Hugo Chávez, say pro-government officials like Elías Pedraza.

Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher at the Observatory of Venezuelan Affairs of the Universidad del Rosario, attributes this shortage to a political and economic model that limited access to goods and services, because the State became the big importer. In Venezuela there are few private importers, as in a free market economy such as Colombia.

In addition, he cites the scheme of the exchange rate that Venezuela adopted in 2003, to avoid corruption and capital flight: that they no longer give them the dollars with a preferential price to private importers, but that the Government began to centralize the process

The expert explains that today the salary of Venezuelans has no real value, because there is a fictitious economy. People have to use more electronic payment and not cash because to buy any product, they have to take out large amounts of money. The highest denomination ticket is 100 bolivars and its real value is less than $ 2,000 in Colombia, illustrates Rodríguez.

The Venezuelan government alleges that the country has the highest minimum wage in Latin America, 8503 bolivars, which according to them, amounts to US $ 1533 per month, but in real terms it is less than US $ 30. Even in illegal markets they say that it does not even come to that, but only to US $ 13. And living with US $ 30 a month, it is very difficult, you can have access to government products, because they are subsidized, but if that same Venezuelan is going to buy it in the real market, he can not, he says.

For Óscar Eduardo Medina, from the International Affairs area of ​​the Eafit University, the situation in Venezuela is very serious and the process of stock-outs is very high.

If you go to a supermarket of what is stratum 6 here, find everything, not with much variety, but there are; the problem is for the middle and lower classes, he says. Proof of this, he says, is what has happened since the reopening of the border, where more than 1.7 million Venezuelans have entered Colombia to date, 49,000 Venezuelans a day on average, according to Migración Colombia. They come to buy food and medicine, especially sugar, toilet paper and flour, Medina said.

In short supply

Sunflower and corn oil, rice, olives, oats, cookies, chocolates, compotes, eggs, condensed milk, lentils, beans, tuna, mayonnaise, mustard, ham bread, white bread and whole wheat bread, pasta, peas, cheese, sardines, juices. Infant milk (maternized): This can generate a very large long-term setback, because it will be a generation very poorly nourished, beyond if you get rice or flour, says Rodriguez. Syringes, antibiotics, levothyroxine, contraceptives, antihistamines, anti-inflammatory, deworming, gauze, scalpels, paracetamol, sedatives, chemotherapy.
Another problem is that Venezuelans lost confidence in their economy. People wanted to hoard many products before the uncertainty of not seeing them again and the Government could not sustain their import. To complete, delivery to drop account and in a targeted manner, politically ideologized from the Clap, organizations that deliver home-to-home markets only to those who sympathize with that political project, denounces Rodriguez.

Barter, 2 lit. (liters) of oil for a mixed plate, the slate claims in the Tizoncito, Mexican food restaurant in Caracas. Its owner, José Antonio Vidal, appealed to the ancestral practice. Chávez told us that we had to start bartering to get things and benefit the economy, says Vidal sarcastically.

The subsidized oil would cost about a thousand bolivars (US $ 1.5) per liter. I can not get it because I can not get up at 4:00 in the morning to make huge queues, I have to resort to the bachaqueros (resellers), and buy it five times more expensive, says this 67-year-old man.

Driven by necessity, Venezuelans have created groups on social networks and digital platforms to post their offers or denounce the shortage with the hashtags #NoHayComida and # AnaquelesVacíos. Everyone does it. I have exchanged flour for rice or sugar, says Juliana Godoy, a 38-year-old lawyer in whose urbanization the neighbors trade on WhatsApp.

For Rodriguez, the government buys products of first necessity, but does not make them available to all Venezuelans immediately, but only to those who show loyalty. If added to the great shortage there is, the little that arrives is given to them in this way, it is a coercive logic because it is playing with the hunger of the people, he says.

The underlying problem, he continues, is access to medications, since they lack acetaminophen for pain, even treatments for cancer or HIV, diseases difficult to manage. The Government and the WHO refuse to provide figures on the state of health of Venezuelans, but the country will have a significant delay because diseases that are easy to control in other countries have become very complicated there, he says. Rodriguez and tells that his colleagues, even pro-government, have used social networks in search of medicines for their families

For Medina, the serious problem is the policy of nationalization of the means of production. Venezuela has not stood out for having a very large industry, but for having an economy that is different from oil, does not have a large amount of production and has always lived with food and imported products and in the absence of foreign exchange, because they can not import

This, added to the low competitiveness of the companies taken by the State and the pressure to which it has not been able to nationalize, such as Polar food for example, more than 800 audits in 2015, about 3 per day, decreases that competitiveness.

Some fell into ineffectiveness, are almost closed, foreign investment went out running, including the Colombian, and the money of Venezuelans, not just foreigners, began to leave the country, says Rodriguez.

He adds that Freddy Bernal, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and director of the Clap, recognizes that it was a mistake to have nationalized so many companies and overburdened the State with functions that are not its own. Because, what does a State distribute milk in the stock market, as in Venezuela, says Rodriguez.

And Luis Florido, of Foreign Policy, pointed out that if the Summit of the Non-Aligned was only eleven delegations, that Maduro listens, it is a message sent to him by the world, which knows that in Venezuela the right to life is violated because there is no access to food and medicine, he said.

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