Nair Granado ran to buy food as soon as he received his US$60 salary.
She knew it wouldn’t be enough to fill the pantry in her home on the eastern edge of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. Still, he feared that, in a short time, his earnings would not be enough to even cover the basics.
“Prices go up every day,” said Granado, 33, a laboratory receptionist who lives in a sprawling working-class neighborhood with her two children. “It’s completely out of control.”
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After more than a decade in crisis, Venezuela is no stranger to food shortages, high prices and economic suffering.
But the U.S. military operation that removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has plunged the South American country into a chaotic new chapter of political and economic uncertainty, triggering a new wave of inflation and currency problems that is pushing basic grocery items out of reach for many Venezuelans.
Granado, on a recent weekday, was still able to buy flour and half a carton of eggs. But I didn’t even consider buying meat — at more than US$9 (R$48) for a kilo, the price almost doubled in just a few days.
“You really need to find ways to save, to make your paycheck pay off,” Granado said. “It’s getting harder to buy things.”
Economic turbulence now threatens to deepen a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for years in Venezuela, where more than 70% of people live in poverty, according to research by a group of leading universities in the country.
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The new affordability crisis hits Venezuelans especially hard because many have already lived on the brink of famine for years, said Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research organization, who has lived in Venezuela for more than two decades.
“They sold everything they could, tightened their belt until there was no hole left,” Gunson said. “Then there’s nothing left to lean on.”
At the heart of the sharp rise in food costs is Venezuela’s dependence on the US dollar, which is widely used in everyday transactions because it is generally less volatile than the country’s currency, the bolivar.
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When the Venezuelan economy, once the richest in Latin America, sank further into crisis in 2019, driven by government mismanagement and worsened by United States sanctions, many people began to save, spend and charge in dollars.
As a result, although the country’s economy is not formally dollarized, Venezuelans today depend on the dollar for their daily spending. Merchants usually buy from suppliers in dollars and, therefore, link prices to the currency. And, in general, they charge higher amounts if payment is made in bolivars.
New US sanctions over the past year have also forced Venezuela to sell less oil on the global market, which has reduced the volume of dollars circulating in the economy and made the currency more valuable.
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Now, anxiety over the country’s economic future has caused the value of the dollar to soar, practically doubling local prices for basic items like meat, cheese and milk.
The Central Bank of Venezuela sets an official exchange rate, but most people rely on an unofficial rate, the parallel dollar, which reflects the value at which the dollar is actually traded on the streets.
Last week, the unofficial value of the dollar reached double the official rate. (It has since stabilized, but remains well above the official value — and supermarket prices have not fallen at the same rate.)
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At the same time, the income of Venezuelans, who mostly receive in bolivars, “went up in smoke” with the devaluation of the currency, said José Guerra, economist and professor at the Central University of Venezuela.
“So we have the case of an economy that is facing extremely high inflation and, at the same time, may be entering a recession,” he added, estimating that inflation could reach 2,000% this year. (The Venezuelan government does not publish official economic statistics and has persecuted economists who track inflation.)
As Venezuela’s interim government focuses on its new, almost client-like relationship with the Trump administration, many Venezuelans are simply trying to figure out how to make their dwindling purchasing power pay off.
Johana Paredes, 30, said she was already used to rationing the month’s purchases for her family of four. But the new jump in food prices has made it difficult to buy even essential items that were recently within reach.
“This last week, we haven’t been able to make any purchases,” Paredes said, showing off the few supplies in his tin-roofed house in Los Teques, an hour from Caracas. “That’s why there aren’t even any potatoes,” he added. “Before, we were rich and didn’t even know it.”
President Donald Trump has outlined grandiose plans to revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry, promising to close a series of deals that would bring American investment to the sector. The main driver of the economy has deteriorated after years of mismanagement.
And while there are early signs that these plans may be starting to come to fruition, it remains unclear whether this financial lifeline will actually materialize and fix Venezuela’s broken economy in the long term.
Many Venezuelans have long lost confidence in their government’s ability to improve their lives.
“Will these oil deals that are being negotiated ‘really benefit Venezuela’?” asked Gunson, the analyst. “Only time will tell,” he added. “Right now, all we have is Trump saying he’s going to take the oil and sell it.”
As leaders in Caracas and Washington fight over Venezuela’s future, Paredes said she still harbors hope that real transformation will soon begin to reach people like her.
“We try to stay positive, believing that things will really change,” he said. “Because, honestly, we don’t see any improvement. Everything just keeps getting worse.”
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