16 December 2014
When I arrived in Caracas it immediately struck me how calm
and secure it seemed compared with how I remember it from five years ago, let
alone when I first arrived in 2003.
There are lots of
the new national police force on the streets. They speak politely to the people
and appear to be trusted. This is new: one of the reasons for the high level of
crime in Venezuela was, and is, the incompetence and corruption of all the
local and regional police forces. You can add a political reason: some of them
were led and administered by the opposition.
Anyway, the
street where I am staying is full of people enjoying themselves until late in
the evening; it used to be empty by nine o’clock.
Another obvious
change is all the new housing—beautiful new blocks right in the centre of the
city. The established middle-class residents complain about the fall in their
property values and about the riff-raff moving in next door having nicer flats.
The long-promised housing programme is going ahead at great speed throughout
the country.
President Maduro
got a timely propaganda boost from the US Senate, which declared sanctions
against Venezuela. This coincided with the fifteenth anniversary of the
Bolivarian constitution. A few hundred thousand people marched down to the
centre of town from four different starting-points to show their support for
the constitution (every Chavista has a copy of the little blue book) and for
the president. What he said was excellent.
There are still
terrible problems with the money and with the tricks business people get up to.
The economist Manuel Sutherland describes one of their methods as follows. An
importer applies to the state for dollars with which to import, say, 100 kg of
meat at $100, for which he pays 600 bolivares. He then imports 50 kg for $50
and sells the remaining $50 worth on the black market. He exports some of the
meat clandestinely to Colombia, where he will get a much higher price. He will
end up with about 6000 bolivares.
The government
has taken some measures to counter these practices, especially to counter the
smuggling in the western provinces, adjoining Colombia. Paul Dobson, a young
Scotsman who lives in Merida, tells me this has been successful, and now people
can find the produce in the supermarket—showing that the shortages were the
result of the smuggling and the speculation; the food was being produced.
Manuel Sutherland
proposes a government monopoly on foreign trade to stop this speculation and
fraud. He estimates the flight of capital at $100 billion since the election of
Hugo Chávez. Chávez. suggested setting up a state import-export agency but
didn’t get around to it.
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