Tag Archives: Venezuela

Venezuela’s opposition revives push to end Maduro’s rule

Protesters in Venezuela hold sign that reads "Let us vote"

By Diego Oré and Anggy Polanco

CARACAS/SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela (Reuters) – Offering prized bags of flour to police and hurling empty medicine boxes on the floor, Venezuelan opposition protesters launched a new push on Monday to force President Nicolas Maduro from power and end 18 years of socialist rule.

Turnout for the opposition’s first rallies of 2017 was not massive, reflecting disillusionment over last year’s failure to bring about a referendum to recall the 54-year-old leader and successor to Hugo Chavez.

But those who did march in a string of rallies around the country turned creative in their complaints about the South American OPEC nation’s unprecedented economic crisis.

In the politically volatile western state of Tachira, long a hotbed of anti-Maduro sentiment, some demonstrators proffered flour – an increasingly scarce and expensive commodity during the nation’s three-year recession – to police, witnesses said.

In Caracas, where several thousand opposition supporters marched, some threw empty medicine cartons on the floor to symbolize shortages afflicting the health sector.

Security forces fired teargas in Tachira to stop protesters from reaching an office of the National Election Council, while in Caracas they used tear gas against people blocking a highway.

With many of Venezuela’s 30 million people skipping meals, unable to pay soaring prices for basic goods and facing long lines for scarce subsidized products, Maduro, who won a 2013 election to succeed Chavez, has become deeply unpopular.

Polls showed a majority of Venezuelans wanted a referendum last year which could have brought his rule to an early end and sparked a presidential vote. But compliant courts and election authorities thwarted the move, alleging fraud in signature collections.

“This government is scared of votes, and the election council is the instrument they use to avoid them,” said housewife Zoraida Castro, 46, during a march to the election council’s office in southern Ciudad Bolivar city.

The opposition Democratic Unity coalition is demanding dates for regional elections that are supposed to happen this year, and also urging Maduro to hold a new presidential ballot.

“It’s a day of struggle in Venezuela,” said coalition secretary general Jesus Torrealba, in Barquisimeto town to show solidarity with a Catholic archbishop whose residence was recently attacked after he criticized the government.

Maduro’s six-year term is due to end in early 2019.

Red-shirted government supporters, who accuse the opposition of seeking a coup with U.S. connivance, were also marching on Monday, a politically significant day for Venezuelans: the anniversary of the 1958 fall of dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.

They gathered at the National Pantheon building to honor leftist guerrilla Fabricio Ojeda, who was murdered in 1966.

(Additional reporting by German Dam in Ciudad Bolivar, Anggy Polanco in San Cristobal; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer and Paul Simao)

Deep in the jungle, Brazil struggles to battle drug trade

Brazil army soldiers on border with Colombia to combat drug trade

By Alonso Soto

VILA BITTENCOURT, Brazil (Reuters) – In an isolated army outpost deep in the Amazon jungle, Felipe Castro leads 70 soldiers on the frontline of Brazil’s fight against its biggest security threat: the drug trade.

Castro’s platoon patrols a 250 km (155 miles) stretch of the border with the world’s top cocaine producer Colombia in a bid to stem the flow of illegal drugs and arms that is fuelling a war between criminal gangs in Brazil.

“It’s a difficult job but not impossible,” said the gaunt 29-year-old, his face covered in green and black camouflage.

Watching from the bank of the murky Japura river, Castro directs his men as they use a metal speedboat to practise intercepting drug shipments on its fast-moving waters.

The river marks only part of Brazil’s porous border that stretches for nearly 10,000 kms, three times the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

After years of fragile truce, Brazil’s drug gangs have launched a battle for control of lucrative cross-border smuggling routes that has spilled into the country’s gang-controlled jails, sparking the bloodiest prison riots in decades.

More than 130 inmates have been killed so far this year.

In the vast state of Amazonas, the North Family gang has for years dominated the smuggling of cocaine that is shipped to Europe or sold in Brazil’s inner cities in a business believed to be worth $4.5 billion a year.

Brazil is the world’s biggest consumer of cocaine after the United States, according to United Nations data.

Machete-wielding North Family gangs decapitated dozens of inmates of the rival First Capital Command (PCC) in a New Year’s prison massacre that has sparked revenge killings across penitentiaries in northern Brazil.

President Michel Temer’s government is worried the prison violence could spill onto the streets of major cities such as economic hub Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, a major tourist destination.

Temer has vowed to improve military surveillance along the border, but senior commanders acknowledge drugs and arms will continue to flow in.

“Not even the United States has been able to stop drug trafficking along its border with Mexico,” said General Altair Polsin, head of the army’s ground operations command. “You have to tackle consumption to put an end to this.”

The military plans to increase its patrols on the Solimoes River, one of the main smuggling routes, and share intelligence with officials in neighboring Colombia and Peru.

Officers are putting their hopes in a technology upgrade to use infrared sensors and drones for border surveillance.

For this year, Brazil plans to nearly double its budget to about half a billion reais to finance a border technology program known as SISFRON, according to Defense Minister Raul Jungmann.

Updated technology is crucial for the 1,500 soldiers in the 24 garrisons posted along the Amazon border who divide their time searching for drugs with raids on illegal miners, loggers and hunters.

Other Brazilian security agencies fighting drugs and arms trafficking in this isolated swath of the jungle are also stretched.

Amazonas needs an extra 7,000 civil and military police to keep up with the increase in drug activity, according an internal report by the state security secretary.

“We are 30 officers overseeing an area the size of France,” said Marcos Vinicius Menezes, the federal police chief in Tabatinga, a city washed by the Solimoes that borders Colombia and Peru.

“If fighting the drug trade wasn’t enough, we also have to look after the world’s biggest tropical forest.”

(Editing by Daniel Flynn)

In Venezuela, lynchings kill one person every three days

A graffiti that reads "Get ready, thief, here we burn you. Regards, Kerdell" is seen at a residential block in Valencia, Venezuela, August 21, 2015. When a man they believed to be a thief sneaked into their parking lot in the Venezuelan city of Valencia, angry residents caught him, stripped him and beat him with fists, sticks and stones. They tied him up and doused him in gasoline, according to witnesses, in one of what rights groups and media reports say are an increasing number of mob beatings and lynchings in a country ravaged by crime. REUTERS/Alexandra Ulmer

By Andreina Aponte

CARACAS (Reuters) – Roughly one person is being lynched in crisis-ridden Venezuela every three days as frustrated residents take revenge on suspected criminals, a monitoring group said on Wednesday.

The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), which monitors crime, said mob killings have become a generalized phenomenon across the country, with 126 deaths reported in 2016 versus 20 last year.

“Due to being repeated victims of crime for more than a decade, and the feeling of not being protected, many people have decided to take justice into their own hands,” the OVV said in its latest annual report.

In the past, it said, lynchings of suspected murderers and rapists were relatively uncommon, but this year angry crowds have increasingly attacked petty criminals too, with police often turning a blind eye.

Venezuelans have long suffered alarming levels of violent crime, in part because of the widespread availability of guns, inadequate policing and a bribe-riddled justice system.

A crushing economic crisis has compounded crime.

The OVV, a group of academics who compile data from police sources and the media, said Venezuela, with an estimated 28,479 homicides this year – or more than three killings per hour – was the world’s second most murderous nation after El Salvador

That would represent 91.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants this year, up from 90 in 2015, it said. The OVV put the homicide rate at more 140 per 100,000 people in Caracas, making it one of the murder capitals of the world.

El Salvador had a rate of 116 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016, according to the Institute of Legal Medicine in El Salvador.

President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government rejects the OVV figures as inflated for political reasons. The last official murder rate it gave was 58 per 100,000 inhabitants for 2015.

Another researcher has also disagreed with the widely cited OVV data, criticizing its methodology and putting the 2015 figure at 70 murders per 100,000 people.

Whatever the right statistics, crime remains an all-pervasive worry for Venezuelans, especially in poor slums that are run by gangs and rife with guns. Numerous state security plans and disarmament drives have failed to curb the problem.

“Violence is killing the future of our country,” opposition leader Henrique Capriles said during a visit on Wednesday to rescue services in the Miranda state, which he governs.

“The government has spent 17 years without resolving the problem,” he added, referring to Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez’s rule since 1999.

(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Ford halting Venezuela production until April, executive says

Ford logo

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co <F.N> halted auto production in Venezuela last week and will not resume it until April, a company executive said on Tuesday, in another blow to the crisis-wracked country’s manufacturing sector.

“It is a measure to adjust production to demand in the country,” Lyle Watters, Ford’s president for South America, told reporters at an event in São Paulo, adding that the plant affected by the shutdown employs 2,000 workers.

Watters said the production freeze would not affect Ford’s consolidated results as operations in Venezuela are reported separately. Beginning in the first quarter of this year, Venezuela became the only wholly owned Ford unit with operating results that are excluded from the full company’s income statement.

In January 2015, Ford took a charge related to its Venezuelan operations that cut fourth-quarter net profit by $700 million. Ford is the only automaker still mass producing cars in Venezuela, even on a limited scale.

Vehicle production in recession-hit Venezuela is less than 8 cars a day, according to figures provided by the national automakers organization Cavenez. Ford produced 2,253 units out of a paltry national total of 2,768 in the year through November.

It takes less than two days for Ford at one of its larger U.S. plants to make as many vehicles as the company has made in Venezuela so far in 2016.

Ford in 2014 halted production for about a month due to a lack of foreign currency to import parts for assembly.

In mid-2015, Ford’s major U.S. rival, General Motors Co <GM.N>, stopped making vehicles in Venezuela altogether. GM had one plant in Venezuela.

(Reporting by Alberto Alerigi and additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Caracas, writing by Ana Mano; Editing by Tom Brown and Alistair Bell)

‘Santa Claus isn’t coming,’ recession-hit Venezuelans tell kids

A child walks in a toy store in Caracas, Venezuela, December 1, 2016.

By Andreina Aponte

CARACAS (Reuters) – As a harrowing economic crisis makes food scarce for millions of Venezuelans, many families cannot buy their children Christmas presents, decorate their home, or even host a holiday dinner.

The oil-rich country is suffering the third year of a recession that has sparked product shortages and galloping inflation. With a recent currency depreciation pumping up prices even higher, some parents are simply canceling Christmas.

“Last year I bought everything for my daughter,” said Dileida Palacios, a 40-year-old hairdresser dressed in black to mourn her son killed in crime-rife Venezuela a few weeks ago.

“This year I had to tell her everything is tough and Santa Claus isn’t coming.”

Like Palacios, about 38.5 percent of Venezuelans think this Christmas will be worse than last year’s, and 35 percent think it will be the worst ever, according to a poll by consultancy Ecoanalitica and Catholic University Andres Bello.

Several days of unrest over a national cash shortage have added to the grim national mood.

Once merrily decorated during the holidays, Caracas looks shabby. Many stores are empty, closed or selling cruelly expensive toys, Christmas trees, and holiday treats like “hallacas,” a cornmeal dish wrapped in plantain leaves.

Eight-year old Helen Ramirez, who lives in Caracas’ sprawling Petare slum, asked Santa for food for her family and pink roller skates from the Disney show “I’m Luna.”

But those skates are far out of reach for Ramirez’s family at about 400,000 bolivars, roughly $100 at the black market rate and about 14 times the monthly minimum wage.

“This year we didn’t decorate the house or anything,” said Ramirez’s grandmother, Nelys Benavides, during a charity-organized present giveaway in Petare. “We have nothing.”

President Nicolas Maduro’s leftist government accuses businessmen and rival politicians of seeking to stoke anger and ruin Christmas.

State media has feted the arrival of 200 containers of toys and food in Venezuela’s otherwise largely deserted ports, and Maduro lit a cross on Caracas’ Avila mountain in November to usher in early holidays.

His government confiscated 3.8 million toys from importer Kreisel, accusing the company of hoarding and price gouging.

Two Kreisel executives have been jailed, and Socialist Party committees have been distributing the toys to children.

“That’s what you call a reinforcement for Father Christmas, right?” the president laughed, stroking his mustache during a recent speech on state TV. “Saint Nicolas without a beard; Saint Nicolas with a mustache!”

(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer and Lisa Von Ahn)

Hundreds arrested in Venezuela cash chaos, vigilantes protect shops

People clash with Venezuelan National Guards as they try to cross the border to Colombia over the Francisco de Paula Santander international bridge in Urena, Venezuela

By Andrew Cawthorne and Corina Pons

CARACAS (Reuters) – Security forces have arrested more than 300 people during protests and lootings over the elimination of Venezuela’s largest currency bill, President Nicolas Maduro said on Sunday.

The socialist leader pulled the 100 bolivar note this week before new bills were in circulation, creating a national cash shortage on top of the brutal economic crisis overshadowing Venezuelans’ Christmas and New Year holidays.

After two days of unrest over the measure – including one death and dozens of shops ransacked – Maduro on Saturday postponed the measure until Jan. 2.

That helped stem violence, though there were still reports of more lootings in southern Ciudad Bolivar on Sunday.

The detainees include leaders and members of the opposition Popular Will and Justice First parties, Maduro said on state TV, accusing them of following U.S. instructions to incite chaos.

Venezuelan National Guards clash with demonstrators in La Fria, Venezuela

Venezuelan National Guards clash with demonstrators in La Fria, Venezuela December 17, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Eduardo Ramirez

“Don’t come and tell me they are political prisoners … They are the two parties of the ‘gringos’ in Venezuela,” he added, accusing President Barack Obama of wanting to engineer a coup against socialism in Venezuela before leaving office.

From Venezuela’s southern jungle and savannah to the Andean highlands in the west, groups of hundreds of protesters have been burning bolivar notes, cursing Maduro and decrying scarcities of food and medicines.

The worst looting was on Friday and Saturday, especially in El Callao and Ciudad Bolivar in the southern state of Bolivar, and police have used teargas to control crowds in some places.

Chinese-run shops have been particularly targeted, witnesses say, and a 14-year-old boy was shot dead in El Callao on Friday.

The governor of Bolivar state said there were 262 arrests there, with lootings from food shops to science laboratories. The local business group said 350 businesses had been ransacked in Ciudad Bolivar, including 90 percent of food outlets.

In Santa Elena de Uairen, near the border with Brazil, shopkeepers and inhabitants formed vigilante groups to join police and soldiers after six shops were ransacked on Saturday.

“We’re not lowering our guard, we’re forming protection brigades,” said local business group leader Gilmer Poma.

Food prices were reduced in some establishments in Santa Elena as a way to defuse tensions.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks next to children toys during his weekly broadcast "En contacto con Maduro" (In contact with Maduro) at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks next to children toys during his weekly broadcast “En contacto con Maduro” (In contact with Maduro) at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela December 18, 2016. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

‘CRUEL JOKE’

Maduro, a 54-year-old former bus driver and foreign minister who replaced Hugo Chavez in 2013, has seen his popularity plunge during a three-year recession. He justified the currency measure as a way of suffocating mafia on Venezuela’s borders.

But opponents say it is further evidence of disastrous economic policy in a nation reeling from runaway prices and shortages of basics. They want him to resign.

“The only person guilty of the chaos and violence of recent days is Nicolas Maduro,” the Justice First party said, accusing intelligence agents of taking advantage of the situation to frame opposition leaders with false evidence.

With the 100 bolivar bill originally out of circulation from Friday, many Venezuelans had found themselves unable to purchase food or fill up cars in the busy run-up to Christmas.

“As if we don’t have enough to cope with anyway, now they inflict this craziness on us,” said a grandmother in Caracas, Zoraida Gutierrez, 74, who spent a day lining up under the sun to deposit cash she had under her bed.

“It’s like a cruel joke.”

Despite Maduro’s suspension of the measure on Saturday, some businesses were still refusing the notes on Sunday.

Maduro has been urging Venezuelans to use electronic transactions instead of cash where possible, but 40 percent of the country’s 30 million people are without bank accounts.

State TV showed a plane arriving on Sunday afternoon with a first batch of new currency notes. Central Bank Vice President Jose Khan said they were 13.5 million 500 bolivar bills.

The government is introducing larger bills of up to 20,000.

With many people already skipping meals to get by and forced to sacrifice traditional Christmas food and presents, this week’s confusion has further exasperated many.

Maduro’s popularity recently hit a record low of under 20 percent, according to local pollster Datanalisis.

But Venezuelan authorities thwarted an opposition push this year for a referendum to remove him. That put Maduro on track to finish his term in early 2019 but increased the potential for social unrest due to the lack of an immediate electoral outlet.

(Additional reporting by María Ramírez in Ciudad Bolivar; Editing by Mary Milliken)

Pockets of protests, looting in Venezuela as cash dries up

Venezuelan National Guard members control the crowd as people queue to deposit their 100 bolivar notes, near Venezuela's Central Bank in Caracas, Venezuela

By Anggy Polanco and Maria Ramirez

EL PINAL/CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela (Reuters) – Small protests and looting broke out in some Venezuelan provinces on Friday due to lack of cash after the socialist government suddenly decreed this week that its largest banknote would be pulled from circulation in the midst of a punishing economic crisis.

President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday gave Venezuelans a few days to ditch the 100-bolivar bills, arguing the measure was needed to combat mafias on the Colombia border despite warnings from some economists that it risked sparking chaos.

Venezuela’s opposition says this latest measure is further evidence that Maduro is destroying the economy and must be removed. Authorities have blocked a vote against the leftist leader, however, leaving social unrest as a possible wild card in the volatile country.

With new bills, originally due on Thursday, still nowhere to be seen, many Venezuelans on Friday were unable to fill their car tank to get to work, buy breakfast, or get gifts ahead of Christmas.

Many cash machines were broken or empty, shops struggled to be paid, and tips vanished.

“We feel this is a mockery,” said bus driver Richard Montilva as he and some 400 others blocked a street outside a bank in the town of El Pinal in Tachira state near Colombia.

Maduro held up the new bills during a televised broadcast on Thursday night and said they would come into circulation soon. But there was increasing nervousness on the streets that the notes were not ready.

The circulation of the new notes “is a mystery to us too,” said a source at the central bank, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Outside the central bank in Caracas on Friday, thousands of Venezuelans queued up to swap their 100 bolivar bills before a final Tuesday deadline under the watch of National Guard soldiers. One orange and avocado vendor offered to buy them up for 80 bolivars.

Maduro’s shock decision is stoking anger among weary Venezuelans who have for years already stood in long lines for food and medicine amid product shortages and triple-digit inflation.

Six businesses in the isolated Bolivar state were looted on Friday after stores refused to accept the soon-to-be defunct bills, said the mayor of El Callao, Coromoto Lugo, who belongs to the opposition.

Maduro blames the crisis on an “economic war” waged against his government to weaken the bolivar currency and unseat him. Critics scoff at that explanation, pointing instead to state controls and excessive money printing.

“I want a change in government. I don’t care about changing the bills; they’re not worth anything anyway,” said Isabel Gonzalez, 62, standing in line at the central bank on Friday.

She said she had just enough cash to get a bus home.

(Additional reporting by Girish Gupta and Alexandra Ulmer in Caracas; Editing by Mary Milliken)

Some poor Venezuelan parents give away children amid deep crisis

Emmanuel Cuauro, 4, plays with a ball next to his parents Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, and Maikel Cuauro, 30, in their house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela

By Girish Gupta and Mircely Guanipa

PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela (Reuters) – Struggling to feed herself and her seven children, Venezuelan mother Zulay Pulgar asked a neighbor in October to take over care of her six-year-old daughter, a victim of a pummeling economic crisis.

The family lives on Pulgar’s father’s pension, worth $6 a month at the black market rate, in a country where prices for many basic goods are surpassing those in the United States.

“It’s better that she has another family than go into prostitution, drugs or die of hunger,” the 43-year-old unemployed mother said, sitting outside her dilapidated home with her five-year-old son, father and unemployed husband.

With average wages less than the equivalent of $50 a month at black market rates, three local councils and four national welfare groups all confirmed an increase in parents handing children over to the state, charities or friends and family.

The government does not release data on the number of parents giving away their children and welfare groups struggle to compile statistics given the ad hoc manner in which parents give away children and local councils collate figures.

Still, the trend highlights Venezuela’s fraying social fabric and the heavy toll that a deep recession and soaring inflation are taking on the country with the world’s largest oil reserves.

Showing photos of her family looking plumper just a year ago, Pulgar said just one chicken meal would now burn up half its monthly income. Breakfast is often just bread and coffee, with rice alone for both lunch and dinner.

Nancy Garcia, the 54-year-old neighbor who took in the girl, Pulgar’s second-youngest child, works in a grocery store and has five children of her own. She said she could not bear to see Pulgar’s child going without food.

“My husband, my children and I teach her to behave, how to study, to dress, to talk… She now calls me ‘mom’ and my husband ‘dad,'” said Garcia.

FOOD

Every day at the social services center in Carirubana, which oversees Pulgar’s case, more than a dozen parents plead for help taking care of their children in this isolated, arid corner of Venezuela with a shaky water supply and little food.

Last year, the rate was around one parent a day.

“The principal motive now is lack of food,” said Maria Salas, director of the small and understaffed center, echoing colleagues at two other welfare groups interviewed by Reuters elsewhere in the country.

Salas added that her organization – the Council of Protection for Children and Adolescents – lacked the resources to deal with the situation and had asked authorities for help, even just a dining room, but had no luck.

Not far from Salas’ office, long supermarket lines under a hot sun help explain why parents are finding life so tough, a scene repeated across the country of 30 million people.

Venezuelans suffer shortages of the most basic goods, from food to medicine. Millions are going hungry amid triple-digit inflation and a nearly 80 percent currency collapse in the last year.

The government blames the United States and Venezuela’s opposition, yet most economists pin the responsibility on socialist policies introduced by former president Hugo Chavez, which his successor Nicolas Maduro has doubled down on even as oil prices – the economy’s lifeblood – plunged.

Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The Caracas municipality of Sucre, which encompasses Petare, one of the region’s largest and poorest slums, has seen an “exponential” increase in parents needing help, say officials.

“The parents come in crying,” said Sucre welfare director Angeyeimar Gil.

“It’s very dramatic to see parents’ pain when saying they can no longer look after their child,” she said. “We’re seeing a lot of cases of malnutrition and children that come to hospital with scabies.”

Two-thirds of 1,099 households with children in Caracas, ranging across social classes, said they were not eating enough in a survey released last week by children’s’ rights group Cecodap.

ABANDONED

In some cases, parents are simply abandoning their kids.

Last month, a baby boy was found inside a bag in a relatively wealthy area of Caracas and a malnourished one-year-old boy was found abandoned in a cardboard box in the eastern city of Ciudad Guayana, local media reported.

Gil said that she had helped find places in orphanages for two newborns recently abandoned by their mothers in hospitals after birth.

There are also more cases of children begging or prostituting themselves, according to welfare workers.

Abortion is illegal in Venezuela and contraception, including condoms, is extremely hard to find.

Back in Carirubana, Pulgar was relieved that her child was being looked after properly by her neighbor.

“My girl has totally changed,” she said as another son clambered over her, adding that even her manner of speaking had improved.

She said she would love to take the child back one day but does not see her situation improving.

“This is written in the Bible. We’re living the end times.”

(Additional reporting by Liamar Ramos and Andreina Aponte in Caracas and Leonardo Gonzalez in Punto Fijo.; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer, Christian Plumb and Kieran Murray)

Venezuela floods shops with unaffordable goods ahead of Christmas

Venezuela's people looking for affordable groceries

By Fabian Cambero

CARACAS (Reuters) – Topping off a year of economic crisis that left many Venezuelans hungry, the country’s socialist government is flooding shops with products ahead of Christmas, at prices that most cannot afford.

Thousands of containers of festive food and toys are on their way, say authorities, and while supermarket shelves appear fuller, prices are ludicrously high for people earning just tens of dollars a month at the black market exchange rate.

“If you’ve got money, then of course you’re happy,” said Geronimo Perez, selling newspapers in the center of Caracas. “But if not, you’re left empty-handed.”

A 1.8-kilogram (4 lbs) carton of powdered milk costs the equivalent of $20 in Caracas at the black market exchange rate. That’s more than two weeks’ work at Venezuela’s minimum wage.

The country is undergoing major economic and social problems, as a decade and a half of currency controls, price controls and now low oil prices have left the government and businesses without sufficient hard currency to import goods.

This means supermarkets are empty of basics from rice to chicken, let alone Christmas gifts.

“AT LEAST THE CHILDREN”

Queues at supermarkets that stock regulated goods can run into hundreds or thousands, many of whom are left disappointed.

President Nicolas Maduro blames the problems on an “economic war” waged against the country and his government has promised that supply will be “sufficient” in December.

The bolivar currency has weakened some 40 percent against the dollar at the black market rate in the last month alone. One dollar buys nearly 1,900 bolivars on the street, compared to just 10 bolivars at the government’s strongest official rate.

This means that importers bringing products in on the black market are paying even more and passing those costs onto consumers, fueling inflation that the IMF says will surpass 2,000 percent next year.

Anger is mounting and hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in recent weeks hoping for change. Some though, are pleased with the festive respite.

“It’s better that at least we can celebrate a little amid all these problems, at least the children,” said Karina Mora, as she left a supermarket in the center of Caracas with her two small children.

(Writing by Girish Gupta; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Venezuela crisis enters dangerous phase as Maduro foes go militant

Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro shout slogans as they gather outside the National Assembly building during a session in Caracas, Venezuela

By Andrew Cawthorne

CARACAS (Reuters) – In a curious convergence of events on the same day last week, four Venezuelan provincial courts issued identical rulings, state governors quickly hit Twitter to celebrate, then the election board emailed a short but bombshell statement.

Opposition hopes for a referendum to recall President Nicolas Maduro were dashed, on grounds of fraud in an initial signature drive. The vote was off.

For many in the opposition, that settled a years-old debate about the nature of Venezuela’s socialist government, uniting them in conviction they are now fighting a dictatorship.

Their new militancy heightens the risk of unrest as the South American OPEC member of 30 million people grapples with a dangerous economic and political crisis.

“Can anyone in the world now really doubt that Venezuela is living in tyranny?” said housewife Mabel Pinate, 62, dressed in white among thousands of protesters who took to the streets against Maduro on Wednesday.

“We are sick of this. It’s time to toughen up and do what we must to save Venezuela,” added Pinate, whose husband was fired from state oil company PDVSA by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez and whose two children have gone abroad.

After pinning its hopes on a referendum this year – which could have triggered a presidential election and put them in power after 17 years of leftist rule – the enraged opposition Democratic Unity coalition has taken its gloves off.

It is holding a symbolic political trial of Maduro in the legislature, organizing daily street protests, and shunning talks with the government that had been announced by the Vatican for this weekend.

Recalling tactics that led to a short-lived coup against Chavez in 2002 and a shutdown of the oil industry, the coalition has also called for a general strike on Friday and a march to the Miraflores presidential palace next week.

“We’ve reached the limit,” said Henrique Capriles, a usually moderate opposition leader, calling the government “Satan.”

“Does the opposition have anything to negotiate with the government? Nothing. Why does the government want dialogue? Because the water has risen to its neck,” he said.

Some hardliners, most notably veteran activist Maria Corina Machado and jailed protest leader Leopoldo Lopez’ wife Lilian Tintori, are calling for Gandhi-style civil disobedience.

‘I FEAR NOBODY’

The government is vowing an iron fist.

It says well-known troublemakers, who were behind the 2002 putsch, are again seeking a coup against an elected government, with the help of the United States and compliant foreign media.

“I fear nobody and nothing!” Maduro told red-shirted supporters at one of his daily rallies and TV appearances this week.

The ruling Socialist Party’s No. 2, Diosdado Cabello said any companies heeding the strike call would be seized by workers and the military. “We’re not going to allow craziness.”

Long proud of its democratic credentials after winning numerous elections under Chavez, the ruling Socialist Party says it is the opposition flouting Venezuela’s democracy given that independent institutions shot down the referendum.

Officials also argue that the very existence of protests and virulent public criticism of Maduro prove democracy is alive and well in Venezuela.

Maduro insists the referendum decision was made by independent judges and electoral officials based on technical criteria, and denies the Socialist Party had any sway over the result. But critics say both the judiciary and electoral council have long been in the government’s pocket.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly shot down legislation  passed by the opposition-dominated Congress while interpreting the constitution to favor the executive branch and limit the reach of lawmakers.

And the elections council has steadily shifted the requirements for requesting the recall vote.

Maduro would have faced probable defeat and removal from power if the referendum had gone ahead.

His challenge now is to contain street protests and respond to deep anger among all Venezuelans at the dreadful state of the economy.

Food shortages, long shopping lines and runaway prices have eroded the ruling “Chavismo” movement’s popularity among the poor and seen Maduro’s ratings slide to just over 20 percent.

But as unhappy as they are, disaffected former “Chavistas” are not yet ready to throw their lot in en masse with coalition leaders they still view with suspicion.

“They are all from privileged families. How can they represent me?” said Orlando Diaz, 47, a mechanic and father of four from a slum in western Caracas who has seen work dry up and income tumble during a nearly three-year recession.

“Do I hate Maduro? Yes. He has betrayed the comandante (Chavez), he is a fool. Will I join these people in their crying and marching? No way. Frankly, I don’t know where to turn. I don’t see a future, I just have to find bread for my family today and tomorrow. That’s all I think about.”

The opposition’s challenge is how to incorporate people like Diaz and his neighbors from the gritty hillside Antimano “barrio”, into their street push. On Wednesday, they drew hundreds of thousands nationwide, but students and traditional supporters remained at the vanguard.

Scores of people on both sides were killed during anti-Maduro protests in 2014 and there was new violence on Wednesday, with dozens of injuries and arrests. A policemen was shot dead in an incident the government blamed on demonstrators.

“A recall referendum in 2016 would have meant the automatic exit from power of ‘Chavismo’,” said local pollster Luis Vicente Leon. “Eschewing democratic codes and values, the government preferred to assume … the risk of a popular reaction.”

The next presidential election is due at the end of 2018 and most Venezuelans assume another candidate will emerge from within “Chavismo” instead of Maduro. But given the events of recent days, opposition supporters are beginning to wonder if that election will even take place.

(Reporting by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Kieran Murray)