CARACAS, Venezuela — National guardsmen and state price adjusters fanned out across Venezuela Wednesday, implementing a military-style occupation with an unusual goal: Making sure shoppers can buy enough sugar.
The socialist South American government temporarily took over the Dia a Dia supermarket chain as part of a crackdown on 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 checkout stations. He is promising to jail any business owner found to be fomenting economic chaos.
Two executives of Venezuela’s largest drugstore chain, Farmatodo, were detained over the weekend as part of an investigation by price-control authorities.
On Monday night, Congress President Diosdado Cabello said officials had arrested Dia a Dia’s owner and taken over its 35 stores “for the protection of Venezuelans.” By Tuesday morning, armed soldiers were overseeing lines for bags of sugar at a Dia a Dia location near the presidential palace.
Many analysts blame price and currency controls for causing the economic distortions plaguing the country at a time when falling oil prices are battering its revenues, and see the takeovers as an attempt to drive home the government’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 it was possible that his bosses were hoarding. He’d seen the photos government workers had posted outside his store of pallets of sugar, corn flour 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 more widely among the business class, because it has added the threat of imprisonment to the always present threat of expropriation, Moya-Ocampos said.
Even some longtime loyalists are starting to criticize the government, however. 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. A close adviser to late President Hugo Chavez, Giordani was fired by Maduro last summer.
On Tuesday, government workers limited the patrons who could enter Dia a Dia using a system based on government identification numbers. Unlike Farmatodo, which serves patrons across the class spectrum, Dia a Dia caters to lower income shoppers, the bedrock of Maduro’s shrinking base of support.
Shoppers who were able to enter the store praised the takeover and new rationing system.
“It’s a good policy; people need to learn to consume less,” said Eli Asar Martinez, who works as an electrician for the local government.
Those on the outside were more pessimistic.
“Now you’re going to have to wait in line for everything. And I still haven’t gotten any sugar,” Estephanie Ferrera called out as she passed by, prompting cheering from those milling around on the corner.
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