In the last week 20 people have been arrested in Venezuela related to web pages that served as a reference to set the price of the dollar in transactions outside the official market. Fiscal has also deployed since this Monday throughout the country to inspect that merchants are setting prices according to the official rate, whose value is determined by the Central Bank of Venezuela. The hardest times of change control in the Caribbean country seem to have returned in the middle of
Before the exchange crisis that has been reported since last year, when the price gap between the official dollar and the parallel began to grow, Chavismo has launched a police offensive with Minister of Interior and Justice, at the head. “We have been doing a little job for days with these who have platforms to say that the dollar is worth I don’t know how much the first one already fell, the first structure has fallen. 20 detainees are of them. An investigation as things should be done, in silence, without outrage of any nature. We grabbed them and presented them before the Public Ministry, the courts,” said the official.
The Government has imprisoned the administrators of the Monitor Dollar website, which publishes the reference price to the parallel market in which the demand for dollars that fall short in the officer is supplied. This imbalance, a consequence of the scarcity of currencies has led to the difference between the types of changes reaching 38% as it is currently. The platforms that Venezuelans use as a reference for their daily transactions only express the behavior of supply and demand.
The Public Ministry has accused those arrested for terrorism, legitimation of capital, undue collection, deceptive offer and association to commit crimes. According to the authorities, the publication of the parallel dollar is a “deliberate attempt of economic and social destabilization.” They have called to denounce the businesses that charge at a different rate than the officer. The arrests have led some of these exchange platforms to suspend their operations, while uncertainty among Venezuelans grows that to preserve their money against the devaluation of the Bolívar.
It is not the first time that Chavismo takes these measures. One of Maduro’s first promises when he came to power more than 10 years was to “spray” the parallel dollar, typical of economies with change controls. Then he left against other websites such as Dollar Today, which published the reference value of the black market and dozens of web domains were digitally blocked. Even so, the Bolívar continued to devalue – with two official conversions of the currency in 2018 and 2021 – and the government itself was forced to allow an informal dollarization of the economy, as an “escape valve,” Maduro said at the time. The pursuit of pages that serve as a reference for transactions between currencies, warn analysts, will only lead people to look for others such as the cryptocurrency market.
For a while, the government’s policy to contain the increase in the price of the dollar was focused on the injection of the currencies product of the sale of oil to the official market to supply the demand. For months, however, and now more in a possible scenario of revenue reduction due to the elimination of the United States oil licenses, the difficulties in satisfying the thirst for dollars have increased. The Government has responded with a growth of monetary liquidity to finance public spending, which has increased 42% in which it goes a year.
In other words, the Central Bank of Venezuela is broadcasting more and more bolivars to pay their accounts in the public sector, of which people quickly get rid of dollars. The greater the circulation of bolivars there is more demand for dollars. In scenarios such as these, Venezuela has already lived what economists begin to predict these days: an acceleration of inflation, a possible return to shortage of shortages and the creation of new black markets of goods and services, such as the bachaqueo.
