'Millionaires are poor': Venezuelans struggle to survive as inflation spirals

As a five-year crisis continues, people are unable to afford food and medicine – even as Nicolás Maduro tightens his grip on presidential power

By Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá and María Ramírez in Ciudad Guayana @ TheGuardian.com, July 25

[....] Unlike in 1920s Germany, people in today’s Venezuela are not carrying wheelbarrows of cash to buy groceries. Instead, they have turned to electronic transactions. But 40% of Venezuelans do not have bank accounts, while others are unwilling to use credit cards or bitcoins to pay for for smaller items, so bartering has become common.

“The paradox is that this is a country undergoing a deep inflation crisis and yet nobody actually has any cash,” said Geoff Ramsey, assistant director for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America, a DC-based thinktank. “You’re seeing wealthy people pay for parking with granola bars.”

Hit particularly hard are pensioners who receive their monthly payments in cash. Saúl Aponte, a 73-year-old retiree, currently buys half a carton of eggs with twenty 100,000-bolívar notes. “At the end of the year, if they pay the pension in cash we will have to go with a wheelbarrow to buy the same half a carton,” he said outside a shopping mall in the city centre.

Fed up with economic despair, masses of Venezuelans are simply fleeing. More than a million have arrived in Colombia, where, in the border city Cúcuta, some entrepreneurial Venezuelans have begun weaving valueless banknotes into handbags that sell for 20,000 Colombian pesos (approximately £5). [....]