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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

In Venezuela, ‘millionaires’ too find it hard to make ends meet

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Maria Isabel Sanchez -


Elizabeth Torres is outraged, but as a Venezuelan she takes the affront in her stride. “We are a country of millionaires,” she says ironically, eyeing a carton of eggs in the market. Price? Three million bolivars.


“You are a millionaire because you have to pay that much, and for that you get 36 eggs, but the minimum salary is 2.6 million! With what you get every month, you can’t buy them,” she says.


It’s the great irony of the country’s cruel decline. Sitting atop the world’s largest reserves of crude, Venezuela — once Latin America’s richest country — is now a state of millionaires, but the millions are in bolivars and practically worthless.


According to the country’s leading universities, 87 per cent of the population is now officially poor.


In the market in the eastern Caracas suburb of Chacao, Torres, a 64-year-old retired accountant, isn’t the only one to grumble.


Between stalls of vegetables, meat and imitation leather shoes, people complain loudly about the cost of living.


Torres’ salary is equivalent to $32 at the official exchange rate and barely one much-coveted black market dollar.


Venezuelans have to pay seven-or-eight digit sums to buy staples like flour, rice, bread or some other reasonably nutritious and filling carbohydrate.


Carmen Machado, 57, was fired a few days ago from her job at an office cleaning company. They gave her 5.8 million bolivars as severance pay after four years of service, she said. Enough to buy a kilo of meat.


Venezuelans are forced to keep up with crazy prices that rise two or three times a week.


The accumulation is staggering. The opposition-majority parliament says hyperinflation was nearly 25,000 per cent in the last 12 months, meaning the price of an item now costs 250 times’ what it did a year ago.


At a pet shop Olga Aviles, 53, is torn between buying a tin of food for her cat and a kilo of meat for the family.


“There always has to be a certain quota of sacrifice. If I spend on one thing, I don’t spend on the other.”


“In Venezuela, we are not living, we are surviving,” she said.


In 2017, Maduro announced a new 100,000 bolivar bill, which would now no longer buy an egg. Now, the highest value will be 500 bolivars, which might buy you a coffee.


For Elizabeth Torres and many like her, it’s a surreal, unfunny joke.


“We are millionaires of lies. What we are is poorer.” — AFP


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