Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday urged supporters to use Twitter to blow the whistle on currency speculators and announced that police raids on illegal traders would continue as the government tries to defend the embattled bolivar.
The socialist leader asked Venezuelans to send messages identifying illegal traders. He described them as “thieves” who must be punished for currency speculation, which he blames for rapidly rising inflation.
“My Twitter account is open for you to denounce them,” Chavez said during his weekly radio and television program. “We’re going to launch several raids. We’ve already launched some raids, thanks to the complaints from the people.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
Venezuelan authorities began raiding currency trading offices last week and arrested a man who posts black-market rates for currency on the Internet. Jaime Renteria, 52, is apparently the first person arrested for illegal currency trading under Chavez’s new crackdown, which has been prompted by a sharp decline in the free-market value of the bolivar.
Renteria is the registered administrator of notidolar.com, a Web site that offered visitors a chance to exchange Venezuela’s currency, according to a version cached by Google.
His downtown Caracas office was one of four raided on Friday night, the government’s Bolivarian News Agency said. There was no answer at Renteria’s phone number on Sunday.
The crackdown on traders and threats to punish Web sites that report the bolivar’s decline on the black market has alarmed economists, who predicted on Sunday that the measures would backfire.
“It’s a Draconian system,” said Asdrubal Oliveros, an analyst at the Caracas-based Ecoanalitica think tank. “Unfortunately this new scheme is going to end up increasing inflation, bringing about shortages of products and creating more distortions in the currency market.”
Oliveros believes the bolivar’s slide is largely caused by uncertainty over the government’s efforts to control trading of US dollars on Venezuela’s black market and in the bond market previously dominated by brokerage firms.
Friday’s raids were prompted by Chavez’s demands for officials to halt regulated trading. Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores said investigators “gathered criminal evidence” at the offices of informal exchange businesses, so prosecutors can “determine criminal liabilities of the owners of these establishments.”
Chavez joked last week that he could attempt to capture illegal foreign currency traders himself, posing as a potential buyer on Internet sites only to apprehend the dealers later.
“I’m going to grab a computer and begin to buy those dollars ... but it’s to capture them,” he said.
He urged authorities to get tough with Web sites that violate long-ignored laws against publishing the black-market rate. Within hours, three popular blogs that offer currency trading services or publish the value of the bolivar against the dollar vanished from the Web.
The bolivar has been steadily sliding on the unregulated market, increasing in recent weeks to about 8.20 bolivares to the US dollar — almost twice the official rate of 4.30 bolivares applied to nonessential goods.
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