Smuggling soars as Venezuela’s economy sinks

‘BACHAQUEO’

A year ago, smugglers would openly walk into Colombia carrying pasta, flour and vegetable oil, or drive across to have fuel siphoned out of their vehicles.

Since the crackdown, they work surreptitiously, wading across rivers, using hidden tracks or paying discreet kickbacks along the 2,300-km (1,400-mile) border.

“It’s impossible to block the border. These are two countries which need each other, like husband and wife,” said shopkeeper Luis Olarte, 38, in the Colombian town of Puerto Santander, across a river from Boca del Grita. He buys all his goods – from toothpaste to eggs – from smugglers.

Hundreds of miles to the east, in the Guyanese jungle town of Mabaruma, gasoline, flour, shampoo and other goods are brought across by boats. Flour marked only for sale in Venezuela is available in the markets of Guyana’s capital Georgetown.

In the northeastern Venezuelan state of Sucre, fishermen sell gas on the high seas. They pay less than a cent at the black market rate for 60-liter jerry cans and then sell them for around $10 each to seafarers who scurry them off to nearby islands.

“They have to because a poor fisherman with a family doesn’t earn enough to survive,” said Manuel Gonzalez, 70, president of the local fishing association, in a beachside bar.

On top of products smuggled abroad, price-controlled goods are also bought up and hawked internally for many times their official price.

It is so common that a new word has entered Venezuela’s lexicon: “bachaquero,” named after a leaf-carrying ant. “Bachaqueros” line up time and again to buy subsidized goods for resale, mainly to the middle classes.

“We have contacts inside the supermarket and colleagues working at other locations who tell us what is arriving, when and where,” said a 24-year-old “bachaquera” outside a supermarket in the poor Caracas district of La Yaguara.

“No one wants to line up for eight hours,” she said.

So profitable is “bachaqueo” that many Venezuelans have given up formal jobs to do it full time. The number of informal workers is set to rise a third to 40 percent of the workforce this year, local think-tank Ecoanalitica says.

“(Smuggling) is very much a double-edged sword: subverting the formal economy and nurturing corruption yet also an important coping strategy that helps people survive difficult times,” said Peter Andreas, whose 2013 book “Smuggler Nation” charts the importance of contraband in U.S. history.

Exchange rate spreads have also created some white-collar schemes. Bond traders, for instance, boasted huge profits a decade ago when some were able to obtain hard currency at preferential rates.

Hundreds of years before today’s “bachaqueros” and bond traders, smuggling flourished in this former Spanish colony.

In the 18th century, Spain’s Royal Guipuzcoan Company was the sole legal buyer of Venezuelan goods from coffee to coconuts. However, enterprising locals, using the same routes as today’s illicit traders, would smuggle them out for higher prices than the Spanish paid.

Today’s enterprising locals also see bypassing the state as the best way to stay afloat.

At Las Piedras village on the northwestern Falcon peninsula, a 25-year-old fisherman recently prepared to smuggle fish, mayonnaise and butter to the island of Aruba.

“This is the best work you can get in Venezuela!”

(Additional reporting by Anggy Polanco in Boca del Grita, Mircely Guanipa in Las Piedras, Isaac Urrutia in Paraguachon, Jackson Gomez in Rio Caribe, Yesman Utrera in Caracas, Neil Marks in Mabaruma, Guyana, and Sailu Urribarri in Oranjestad, Aruba; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Kieran Murray)

Article Appeared @http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-smuggling-insight-idUSKCN0UY1IT

 

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