Sobremesa chronicles
(For this week’s sobremesa, Rodrigo chimes in re. the “morality” of selling your dollar allowance) In Venezuela you get a yearly dollar allowance. If you use your allowance, nothing happens. If you sell your allowance, you could face jail time, and also be considered traitor to you Fatherland. But is it morally wrong to sell what the…
Land of confusion
“Venezuela is the only country in the world where street vendors sell you both a copy of the Transit Law … and a nice, cold beer.” Laureano Márquez’s riff began what was a major theme in the discussions we held in Austin about our country – about Venezuela being a land of confusion, a country…
The whys and wherefores of the $20,000 iPhone
(A guest post from reader/journalist Arnaldo Espinoza) The Whys and Wherefores of the $20,000 iPhone Arnaldo R. Espinoza (@Naldoxx) Prices in Venezuela stopped making sense a while ago, and nowhere more so than at the Apple Store. Long gone are the days of Dame tu PIN and the bidding wars between carriers. It’s become pricey…
Quico and Dorothy embarrass the government
Yesterday, to commemorate “Chávez Day,” the government spent countless dollars on ads in several of the world’s newspapers. The version that came out in Canada’s The Globe and Mail contained the typo “the peoples” in its main title, a huge embarassment for the government. As if to put salt on the PR wound, today our founder Quico…
What is a dollar worth? Depends on who you know
Venezuela today has four different prices for the dollar – three of them official, one of them not. For basic imports (chavista code for “available only to Godgiven and his cronies”) a dollar costs BsF 6.3. For not-so-basic imports and for traveling (chavista code for “let’s throw a bone to the middle classes so they won’t…
An announcement about nothing
The Expectation-Disappointment cycle around Venezuela exchange-mechanism announcements is so well established by now, we barely get our hopes up any more. Today was no different. There was little about today’s press conference that the public didn’t already know or that wasn’t already so. Much like that well-loved sitcom, today’s event with Rodolfo Marco Torres and Nelson…
The Sound of 1.1 Trillion Pennies Dropping
People are starting to put 2 and 2 together. This Reuters report finds that 40 major U.S. companies have big-time exposure to the Venezuelan shitshow, in the form of at least $11 billion dollars worth of paper profits in bolivars that are going to vanish in a puff of logic the second the Bs.6.30:$1 fiction –…
Maduro’s stealth devaluation
It’s easy to be dispirited by Maduro’s address last night. The three-hour rant was only occasionally peppered with substantive announcements, and none of them were clear enough to really know where the government is headed. But even if we take the most optimistic of views about the substance of what he said – and this note…
Money for baseball (and trips for free)
Before the baseball season began back in October, the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League (LVBP) publicly thanked government currency distributor CENCOEX for handling their requests right on schedule. But now it looks like the relationship between the state and the LVBP has reached an unprecedented level of intimacy. According to El Universal’s political correspondent Pedro Pablo Peñaloza, the central…
Venezuela’s encripted devaluation
An obscure document was published yesterday by Venezuela’s Central Bank (BCV), allowing PDVSA to sell the dollars it makes via oil exports to the BCV for deposit into an undeclared, secret fund at a more comfortable rate. Up until now, the rate that PDVSA got for its hard-earned dollars was the cheapest of the four…
Things you find in your septic tank
Over the years, we’ve been hard on traditional Venezuelan media outlets. Sometimes, we’re really hard on them. So it came as a refreshing surprise to read the latest reportage from El Nacional’s Siete Días, written by the paper’s investigative journalism unit. (Sorry, in Spanish) The folks in charge of the piece went through the painstaking…
When did freedom die?
Last night, Nicolás Maduro announced that all purchases at every supermarket, convenience store, and mom-and-pop abasto would have to be verified through a fingerprint scanner in order to prevent people from purchasing too much – an electronic rationing card. The cadification of the Venezuelan economy is complete. Listen, about ten years ago, some distant relatives from Venezuela…
The Ripping-The-BandAid-Off-Sloooooowly School of Devaluation
Today, International Air Travel was “switched to the SICAD II rate” – a wonderfully euphemistic way of saying the bolivar was aggressively devalued in the international air travel sector. In for-dummies terms, the cost of airline tickets for bolivar holders just went up about five-fold. And, just like that, one of the most cherished chavista…
Curious in Bogotá
As you may remember, I (Anabella) decided to bid on Sicad II the same day that I handed in my Cadivi folders. The trámite was due to my need to go to Bogotá for my sister’s wedding. The second I put a foot in Colombia, I had the urge to register some of the anecdotes of what…
Caracas Chronicles 