Caracas Chronicles

#NowWhatVenezuela keeps you informed about what’s happening deep inside la patria—from headline-making events to underreported stories that provide the clearest picture of our reality. This digest is published weekly.

Join our official channel through this link.

With every hammer blow, another déjà vu

The government is once again putting price controls on the table—this time “agreed” with private businesses—while unleashing violence against currency-exchange platforms and social-media accounts that track unofficial rates. The emblematic target is El Dorado, a marketplace for trading stablecoins with national currencies (including the bolívar), and its young founder Guillermo Goncálvez, who graduated from Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas in 2017 and now lives abroad. Últimas Noticias, the print mouthpiece of the crackdown on the parallel dollar, reported that the National Bolivarian Police (PNB) raided Goncálvez’s properties.

On Telegram, Canal Patria Digital posted a blacklist of ten organizations accused of “manipulating the value of the dollar” (even though it is the bolívar that keeps devaluing). The list ranges from peer-to-peer sites and U.S.-registered remittance companies to Instagram accounts. Police have also begun arresting people they claim use or promote the unofficial dollar rate. In Maracay, El Pitazo reported that agents stormed Inversiones Orange in a shopping mall; when they could not find the owner, they took his 19-year-old daughter, who is now jailed on terrorism and money-laundering charges.

Chavista lawmaker Ramón Lobo—a forgettable Central Bank president during the hyperinflation era—says a new “price scheme for essential goods” is coming soon. In the past, chavismo justified controls as a way to fight “flagrant abuses of monopolistic power and business cartels.” Now it talks about setting “reasonable prices” in negotiation with those same businesses, yet the fear these measures inspire feels a lot like 2011 or 2014.

Diosdado Cabello is in charge of hunting dollar “mafias,” while Delcy Rodríguez boasts that she has already fixed new prices for chicken, eggs, and cooking fats and praises Farmatodo for keeping “a safe space in the economy” by sticking to bolívar pricing. She claims not to know who owns Venezuela’s most successful pharmacy chain, although the same president and operations VP she now shields on live TV were arrested in 2015 over long queues outside a Caracas store. How the tables have turned.

Reuters reported this week that Maduro is raising taxes on the private sector and hiking public-service fees, though the government has yet to comment. The motive, of course, is falling oil revenue, which forces the state to squeeze more money out of citizens and tighten inspections. Yesterday, for instance, the official tax unit jumped from 9 to 43 bolívares.

Multi-purpose hells

Nothing illustrates the state’s sovereignty of terror better than Venezuela’s prisons and the many functions they now serve the regime. Colombia’s current vice-foreign minister—hardly an enemy of left-wing dictatorships—met with relatives of Colombian inmates held in El Rodeo, who have been kept in isolation for over a year, according to El Tiempo. Efforts to free them have stalled. Meanwhile the ELN guerrilla rests comfortably on Venezuelan soil, and President Gustavo Petro has on his desk an extradition request for four Tren de Aragua members coveted by Maduro (one is co-founder “Larry Changa”; another is wanted in Chile for trying to dispose of Lt. Ronald Ojeda’s body in Santiago).

Prisons also remain dumping grounds for abandoned detainees—those without anyone to bring food or medicine. This week Rangely Hernández, a 26-year-old woman, died in Uribana prison. For the military world, jail is a scare tactic. Torture and ill-treatment can be even harsher for soldiers. CLIPPVE reported the possible disappearance of sergeants Geomer Martínez and Andrés Paredes, jailed in Ramo Verde since they tried to mutiny at a National Guard post in Cotiza in January 2019, two days before Juan Guaidó was sworn in. Their families have had no proof of life for more than three weeks.

More news and recommended reads:

While chavismo’s big three—Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and Jorge Rodríguez—tour the country to back new and incumbent governors, Elvis Amoroso announced mayoral elections for 27 July, one day before the first anniversary of the electoral theft from Edmundo González.

El Pitazo reports that residents of El Morro (Sucre state) protested after police entered several homes, allegedly searching for Colombian mercenaries and weapons trafficked from Trinidad and Tobago.In this Efecto Cocuyo piece, the CICPC launches an anti-suicide hotline, which hints that the state has data on rising homicide rates that the rest of the country cannot see.