CRABS, BIRDS, EROTICA
Blaming smugglers for worsening scarcity, Maduro last year closed crossings into Colombia and around 2,000 suspects were rounded up.
Authorities nabbed two men smuggling 14,000 crabs to Trinidad, one man taking 57 tropical birds to Italy, and the owners of a sex shop trading “dangerous erotic products”.
On a larger scale, Venezuela’s navy detained a state-owned oil tanker smuggling fuel.
Much of the smuggling stems from subsidies, intended to help the poor, on an array of goods from flour to fuel.
Rice, for example, is officially priced at 16 bolivars per kg, worth just two U.S. cents at the black market rate. On Venezuela’s streets, it sells for 30 times that, and even more abroad.
Smuggling reduces the goods available to Venezuelans, thus worsening shortages. Frustration over shortages and the broader economic chaos led to a sweeping opposition victory in legislative elections last month and even some socialists are clamoring for policy changes.
“I don’t mean the state has to renounce transferring subsidies to the poor, but the way it’s done promotes and creates the conditions for smuggling,” Temir Porras, former aide to Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez, told Reuters.
Vast differences between Venezuela’s multiple exchange rates also fuel smuggling. There are three official rates: the strongest is 6.3 bolivars per dollar but on the black market the dollar sells for around 900 bolivars.
Dozens of smugglers said that officials are often themselves on the take or turn a blind eye. At smuggling points, soldiers and policemen routinely fail to intervene as traffickers pass by.
“We pay the National Guard a few thousand bolivars to get across, depending on what we have in the truck,” said one smuggler in the downtrodden western border town of Paraguachon, who moves food into Colombia in his pickup.
The government acknowledges some rotten apples in its ranks, but blames the chaos on an “economic war” by business groups and the opposition.
Neither the National Guard nor government responded to requests for comment.