The lack of food, the shortage of medicines, the deterioration of their quality of life, the speculative routing or the recurrent idea of leaving the country. These are just some consequences that citizens suffer in their daily lives.
"Look, send me the ...
The lack of food, the shortage of medicines, the deterioration of their quality of life, the speculative routing or the recurrent idea of leaving the country. These are just some consequences that citizens suffer in their daily lives.
"Look, send me the proof of transfer to WhatsApp first and then I'll look for it," a Caracas taxi driver tells his potential client by phone.
The taxi drivers of the Venezuelan capital have not known for some time what a cash payment is because nobody has so much money in their pocket to pay for a short race: it can cost around 100,000 bolivars, or what is the same, the tickets collected after ten days of visit to the ATM to withdraw the maximum amount of 10,000 bolivars per day.
The kiosks, the peddlers' stalls and even the street vendors of chicha (a popular Venezuelan drink based on rice or pasta) accept bank transfers or debit cards to trade products that, two or three years ago, could be easily purchased with the remainder of the portfolio, with a 'simple', as they say in Venezuela. History repeats itself to a greater or lesser extent in all commerce.
The economic crisis that crosses the South American country is palpable everywhere: empty shelves, rickety cars, untapped pharmacies, stores with very few inventories, fast prices. On the street, the faults are distributed wholesale, almost always to the government and, to a lesser extent, to the opposition. However, few people speak of a silent and external official who has imposed severe sanctions on the country under the argument that they would only affect "corrupt officials" of the government of President Nicolás Maduro. But is it really like that?
The "help" of the USA
In 2015, the decree of former President Barack Obama, who called the country an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to US security, set a precedent for a frontal policy against Venezuela that has been continued by Donald Trump in the White House.
After that decree, the inclusion of high-level Venezuelan officials - including President Maduro - began on black and gray lists of the US government and multilateral institutions with the aim of laying the foundations for a financial "blockade". The mechanism? Use this data as a measure of coercion for international companies to force them to rescind or not sign contracts of any kind with Venezuela.
Washington's action had the backing of the Venezuelan opposition and its leaders, especially the opposition deputy Julio Borges, who undertook an international tour that led him to meet with US Vice President Mike Pence to ask him sanctions and the total isolation of the Venezuelan economy. The action of the antichavism leader included the sending of more than a dozen letters to financial organizations to ask them not to lend money to Caracas, although the economic crisis was starting to worsen.
That action unleashed the debacle of the oil country's finances. Public service mails began to arrive at notifications of the unilateral cancellation of correspondent banking contracts and interruption of operations in international banks, the legal and administrative "buts" of international companies to delay or prevent the payment of memberships to multilateral organizations, as well as the blocking of financial assets.
A report from the Ministry of Finance, to which RT had access, reveals that today there are still limitations and refusals for financial transactions of international banks from and to Venezuela, which are frequent delays in operations, and that excessive rigor in documentation and millionaires cost increases for brokerage services are the order of the day.
The closing of the fence
In April 2016, the international bank informed the Venezuelan institutions that they were prohibited from paying them in dollars, unless they kept accounts in the big US banks.
The German Commerzbank was the first to close the accounts that had the main Venezuelan banks of the State: Bandes (development); Banco de Venezuela (universal) and Banco del Tesoro (fiduciary), as well as those of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
In July of that same year, the measure was imitated by Citibank, which ceased unilaterally the correspondent service and only left active the accounts used for debt service payments that are held with the National Treasury Office of the United States. , a decision that has severely restricted Venezuela's ability to make payments in North American currency.
To overshadow the situation, in August 2016 the Portuguese Novo Banco notified Venezuela that it could not carry out operations in dollars due to external pressures from correspondent banks.
Just as the simple operation of paying a taxi with tickets in Caracas is almost impossible for most Venezuelans, the option of Venezuela making purchases normally or meeting creditors on time is unimaginable. The sanctions limit not only the capacity of the country's response abroad, but severely affect the quality of life of Venezuelans because they prevent the government from acquiring food, medicine or raw materials to cover their domestic consumption.
Threatens allies
Yes in 2016 USA he dedicated himself to surround Venezuela abroad with his unilateral actions, the Trump government in 2017 strengthened the strategy with measures designed to put pressure on the allies of Caracas.
The regulations of the US Department of the Treasury and pressures from the Government of Panama caused the Bank of China (BOC), based in the Central American country, to report in August last year that it could not carry out any operation in foreign currency to Bandes or in favor of Venezuela.
Those same restrictions prevented the completion of transactions between Venezuelan and Russian banks in August of last year. Some time later, Caracas tried to withdraw its collection accounts from the Development Bank of China, but the bank correspondent in New York did not process the operation because it was in "revision" and it took more than three weeks to make it effective.
In October 2017, Deutsche Bank closed the correspondent accounts of the Citic Bank of China bank for having processed payments to PDVSA, the industry that generates more than 90% of the currencies that Venezuela receives.
Asphyxia to PDVSA
Although the diplomatic tone between Caracas and Washington has always been caustic, until the arrival of Trump the possibility that the US frontally attacked the Venezuelan economy seemed distant. However, in August of last year that threshold was crossed: the US president restricted the tradability of the bonds of the Republic and PDVSA in international markets.
The measure had a clear purpose: to prevent the Venezuelan government from resorting to the oil company to obtain liquidity and thus paralyze the negotiations that the country had advanced with financial institutions to seek credit alternatives. The decision of the White House was taken just after Maduro achieved an electoral triumph over the opposition with the Constituent process.
Washington's argument to justify the financial suffocation of PDVSA, at a time when oil prices were beginning to recover, was that the "Maduro dictatorship" deprived Venezuelans of "food and medicine" and that is why the Trump government he preferred to apply measures "carefully calibrated to deprive" the Venezuelan government "of a fundamental source of financing" and "to avoid being complicit in corruption in Venezuela and the impoverishment of its population, and to allow assistance for humanitarian purposes." In that communiqué, rhetoric through, the US he admitted openly that he was going to prevent Venezuela from using his own resources and then, of course, he intended to offer him a "rescue". Cudgel and carrot.
The attack on PDVSA by the US It happened almost on par with a move by Euroclear, the company in charge of guarding the bonds of the Republic. In August of last year, that firm decided to retain more than 1.2 billion dollars from Venezuela, without allowing the mobilization of these assets, to affect the availability of resources to Caracas. The reason? Pressures of the Office of Control of Foreign Assets (OFAC) North American.
"The Treasury Department of the administration of Donald Trump has told all these institutions, which are a way of dictatorship of the world capitalist system, to find a way to drown Venezuela," Venezuelan communications minister Jorge Rodríguez said. at the end of last year. Maduro called Euroclear's action a "kidnapping."
How does it affect Venezuelans?
Imports of raw materials such as soybean cake, essential for the production of balanced feed for animals, have been paralyzed in recent months with the sole argument that they have been made by Venezuela. The US sanctions They have been effective in instilling fear in entrepreneurs who want to sell a product to the country.
Fear has a handle. Between December 15 and 28 last year, more than 29.7 million dollars were paralyzed by banks in Europe because they were destined to payment to food suppliers. At the end of 2017, 23 operations were also returned, amounting to about 39 million dollars, because the intermediary banks did not want to receive resources from Venezuela.
The US bank JP Morgan, meanwhile, retained more than 28.1 million dollars that would be used to pay a ship with food. The result is in sight: the long lines in Venezuela to get the products of the basic basket are getting longer and the alternatives to fill the most inaccessible pantry; the items in the basket are sold at speculative prices, based on a "parallel dollar" that is traded 700% above the official Dicom rate.
The health landscape is not more encouraging. The company Euroclear has retained more than 1,300 million dollars, of which 450 million were for the payment of food and another 40 million for medicines.
In the particular case of the importation of insulin, it has been possible for Venezuela to comply with the payment schedule because the US bank Citibank refuses to receive funds from Venezuela. The situation is repeated in the sport, with the refusal of the banks to process money from the country for the athletes of their national team; in agriculture, by making it impossible to purchase seeds for the planting plan; and, in short, it translates into the financial instability of the nation: if the country can not honor its commitments in time due to obstacles in the banking system, it incurs an induced default.
In November of last year, for example, Venezuela made a transfer of 27.6 million dollars to Citibank to pay a bond from one of its public companies, but the operation became effective a week later: a delay of the bank that involved the statement of 'non-payment' even though the money was there.
As the market is implacable, although the delay in the payment of this bond has been due to causes attributable to the financial institution and not to the nation, the bank does not lose: the action ends up punishing Venezuela with the increase in country risk and the increase in interest rates so that it is not feasible to request financing.
The promise of the White House "to economically isolate" Maduro has been fully complied with. "We will not sit still while Venezuela falls apart," reads the August statement of last year, in which Washington says its only wish is that the country hold "free and fair elections." The funny thing is that minutes after the government announced the presidential elections for next April 22, the 'Uncle Sam' was the first to oppose a clear threat: "we will continue to press the regime."
Venezuelans know what the US talks about when it threatens to exert more "pressures" because they are the first to suffer the consequences of the financial blockade: the lack of food, the shortage of medicines, the deterioration of their quality of life, the speculative run-away, the recurrent idea of leaving the country. Even the taxi driver, who can not buy the spare parts for his car because he does not have the money or even the money, knows what's coming. He knows it although his name does not appear by mistake in the 'select' lists of the OFAC.
Nazareth Balbás
