Two years ago, shoppers in Venezuela would pay fruit sellers like Jose Pacheco with boxfuls of 100 bolivar notes — then the currency’s highest denomination. Now, thanks to rampant hyperinflation, even those are useless.
“It’s crazy to accept notes of 100, 500, or 1,000 bolivares,” said Pacheco, a wiry 61-year-old whose humble stall clings to the fringe of one of the major markets in Ciudad Guayana, a city in Venezuela’s southern Bolivar State.
He now only accepts newly minted 100,000 bolivar notes, which due to demand are hard to come by.
Illustration: Lance Liu
“Otherwise it’s a box [full of notes] that afterwards we have to take to the bank,” he said.
Inflation in the embattled South American country could reach 1 million percent by December, the IMF said this week, reflecting an economic crisis comparable to Germany’s after World War I and Zimbabwe’s at the beginning of the last decade.
Venezuela, which has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, is in the middle of a five-year crisis that has left many of its people unable to afford food and medicine, with shelves bare in supermarkets.
Crime rates continue to set records, with local residents fearful to leave their houses at night.
Alejandro Werner, the head of the IMF’s western hemisphere department, elaborated on the grim prognosis.
“We expect the government to continue to run wide fiscal deficits financed entirely by an expansion in base money, which will continue to fuel an acceleration of inflation as money demand continues to collapse,” he wrote in a blogpost on Monday night.
For ordinary Venezuelans, everyday life has become a struggle to survive.
“We are millionaires, but we are poor,” said Maigualida Oronoz, a 43-year-old nurse who earns the minimum monthly salary of 5 million bolivares — barely enough to buy a kilogram of meat to feed her children. “We can just about eat, but if some health emergency happens, we’ll die because the prices of medicines are sky-high and rise every day.”
Many blame the country’s woes on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who in turn has said that Venezuela is on the receiving end of an “economic war” waged by the US and Europe.
Despite spiraling hyperinflation, Maduro has continued to tighten his grip on the power he inherited from former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the late leader whose charisma carried him through tougher times.
Maduro, who lacks his mentor’s charm, won a second six-year term in May elections, although opposition politicians and many countries have said the result was illegitimate.
Maduro has said that private bankers are smuggling cash into neighboring Colombia as part of an elaborate conspiracy to sabotage the economy, and he has rejected calls to lift currency controls.
One of Maduro’s plans to alleviate inflation is to issue new banknotes with the last three zeros lopped off, although economists have said that would do little to help.
“It’s a cosmetic solution that won’t do anything,” said Asdrubal Oliveros, director of Ecoanalitica, a Caracas-based economics consultancy. “With inflation this wild, in a few months we’ll be back in the situation.”
Unlike in 1920s Germany, people in today’s Venezuela are not carrying wheelbarrows of cash to buy groceries. Instead, they have turned to electronic transactions.
However, 40 percent of Venezuelans do not have bank accounts, while others are unwilling to use credit cards or cryptocurrencies to pay for for smaller items, so bartering has become common.
“The paradox is that this is a country undergoing a deep inflation crisis and yet nobody actually has any cash,” said Geoff Ramsey, assistant director for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank. “You’re seeing wealthy people pay for parking with granola bars.”
Hit particularly hard are pensioners who receive their monthly payments in cash.
Saul Aponte, a 73-year-old retiree, currently buys half a carton of eggs with 20 100,000 bolivar notes.
“At the end of the year, if they pay the pension in cash we will have to go with a wheelbarrow to buy the same half a carton,” he said outside a shopping mall in Caracas’ city center.
Fed up with economic despair, masses of Venezuelans are simply fleeing.
More than 1 million have traveled to Colombia, where, in the border city of Cucuta, some entrepreneurial Venezuelans have begun weaving valueless banknotes into handbags that sell for 20,000 Colombian pesos (US$6.90).
In Ciudad Guayana, Elisa Gonzalez, a homemaker, relies on handouts sent from a sister that moved to Peru.
“I don’t know how much longer we can survive like this,” Gonzalez said, adding that she has to put two daughters through school. “With or without a job, what you earn isn’t enough to pay your kids’ school fees and feeding yourself is mission impossible.”
Some analysts are hoping that the dizzying inflation rates could precipitate an end to Maduro’s regime.
“History tells that the governments that bring us inflation aren’t usually the ones to get us out of it,” Oliveros said.
“Venezuela is regrettably headed for a lot of economic and political instability, even towards ungovernability, but there could be a political transition at that point,” Oliveros said. “It would be very disorganized, of course, but in the end it would be a transition.”
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