Shop owners accused of causing queues face military occupation
National guardsmen and state price adjusters fanned out across Venezuela to impose a military-style occupation with an unusual goal: making sure shoppers can buy enough sugar.
National guardsmen and state price adjusters fanned out across Venezuela yesterday to impose a military-style occupation with an unusual goal: making sure shoppers can buy enough sugar.
The South American country's socialist administration temporarily took over the Dia a Dia supermarket chain as part of a crackdown on the private businesses it blames for worsening shortages and long lines.
Embattled President Nicolas Maduro says right-wing owners are purposely making shopping a nightmare by hoarding goods and removing check-out stations. He has promised to jail any business owner found to be fomenting economic chaos.
Two executives of Venezuela's largest chemist chain, Farmatodo, were detained over the weekend as part of an investigation by price-control authorities.
Many economists blame price and currency controls for causing the economic distortions plaguing the country at a time when falling oil prices are battering its revenues. Analysts see this week's moves against business owners as an attempt to drive home Maduro's counter-narrative that the right-wing is waging an economic war.
"The government is starting to prepare for a social explosion," said Diego Moya-Ocampos, an analyst with the London-based consulting firm IHS Global Insight. "They're trying to channel all the social discontent against the private sector."
Many Venezuelans agree with Maduro. Even Dia a Dia branch manager Carlos Barrios said it was possible that his bosses were hoarding. He'd seen the photos government workers had posted outside his store of pallets of sugar, cornflour and toilet paper apparently sitting at the chain's central warehouse.
The administration has a history of temporarily taking control of private enterprises. Just ahead of a key 2013 election, Maduro ordered electronics stores to begin selling goods at give-away prices. But this latest crackdown may reverberate among the business class, because it has added the threat of prison to the always present possibility of expropriation, Moya-Ocampos said.
Adding to the government's woes, some former loyalists are starting to loudly criticise the administration's handling of the shortages. In an interview published Monday, former economy chief Jorge Giordani said the government's refusal to acknowledge the mounting crisis is turning the country into the "laughingstock" of Latin America.
