The Faces of the Crisis

Everywhere the nodes of the great network of effects produced by the Venezuelan crisis spring up, which by 2018 is progressing unchecked. Some were foreseeable, others totally unexpected and even implausible. We will make an effort to inventory these phenomenal manifestations of the crisis, to illustrate those who, although not living in the country, seek to understand the daily life of the crisis, for those living in our territory in a placid or deceptive bubble, and for the leadership that although it lives in our country, they prefer to ignore and omit the calamities that the people face.

In Venezuela prices go up every day, or in a matter of hours in many cases. The town starts the day in a frantic search for the less and less merchandise that can be obtained for the increasingly difficult reproduction of life. The detective work to find the lowest prices reveals that from one place to another the prices of the same product can vary up to 200%. The same happens when it comes to the form of payment, if you pay with the scarce cash, the prices can be up to 150% cheaper than if you pay with the card. Then appears on the one hand, the business of the points of sale; there are those who have several and rent them, others charge a percentage for the use of the same, and on the other hand, the lucrative business with the sale of paper money, which after successive transactions, and despite the banking negligence offered at sumo 100 thousand in cash at the box office, ends at the Colombian-Venezuelan border feeding the smuggling of extraction and the business of the remittances that are captured in this conflictive territory. The border looks like a great magnet that attracts all Venezuelan products that generate thunderous profits to their smugglers. From gandolas of gasoline to packages of paledonias they end up crossing the border with the chrematistic consent of the national guard. Informal merchants enjoy breaking the old 50Bs bills that no one receives. While all this is happening, the merchants are waiting, with intelligent in hand, for the bank transfers to fall, another of the mechanisms that allow the purchase and sale of merchandise, and which leads to bitching the internet service every time that the page is not opened. from the bank. The boxes and bags of food, which eventually reach the hands of the communities, manage to temporarily alleviate the situation.

But for another segment of the population, beneficiary of remittances, income in foreign currency, trade, speculation and contraband, the situation is not so complex. It is enough to visit these new establishments called markets, small shops full of highly expensive products, or simply articulate with bachaqueros to access the greater what for salaried employees, pensioners and bonuses is practically impossible to buy retail.

In order to go out to work and to buy, the poor people have no choice but to resort to the so-called "public" transport; Collapsed and cramped, he seeks a stampede at each stop. The few buses that circulate are joined by the famous kennels, trucks 350 in which people fight to the death to get up trying a mix of gymnastics in a fixed bar with free climbing. This situation provokes that the real state public transport does not support the demand of the service, and ended up crowded between kilometric queues, blows, robberies and an accelerated deterioration of the units that provide the service. Transportation enjoys the almost total extinction of transit prosecutors, deteriorated roads and traffic lights with their own lives. At five in the afternoon the cities look desolate, with passers-by who desperately walk to get to their homes before the night falls. The vehicular traffic discovers less and less queues, by the amount of family vehicles and taxis that are stopped, for that reason of the oil, the rubbers, the batteries and the spare parts that are incomprables. Not to mention the almost extinct motorcycle taxi line. The same does not happen with gasoline, which is a recurrent joke because of the "unreal" price, although what is really astounding is the merciless price increase of the rest of the merchandise. And when you have the audacity to travel to another state, the transfer becomes an odyssey, between damaged units that crash at all times, harassment suffered by cash-hungry carriers to sell at the border, and systematic action of bachaqueros who claim fortunes with the surcharge of the tickets; and if you opt for air transport, the drama is not less to acquire tickets through a system that is already controlled by mafias, which have gone so far as to collect tickets in dollars or at exorbitant prices. Paradoxically, the emission of greenhouse gases is suffering a fall, our planet is grateful.

At the end of the afternoon, the representatives of the segment of the population that does not even have a salary or bonds to survive appear; After kicking the city begging and stealing to eat, they begin the day of dissection of the garbage bags, fighting with the few famished dogs that are left to collect the edible waste that covers the calories needed to spend the night. Lidian also with the many people who in a street situation now suffer from the withdrawal syndrome because they can not access drugs or alcohol.

The garbage dawns scattered on the sidewalks of the cities. The stinking smell receives the workers who get up early to get to their place of work. Every day a new place is opened to deposit garbage, given the incompetence of the collection and disposal of solid waste, which only has the relative advantage of each day having to collect less, because less is the amount of things that they can be bought, and the greater is the amount of things that are repaired, reused and recycled. The health situation involves a people that is not only feeding poorly, exposed to daily anguish and fear, but that when they get sick they must face the catastrophic calamity that runs through the health system.

If someone becomes ill, the restlessness immediately invades the family group of the convalescent. The desperation forces family and friends to embark on a journey through the search for medicines that looks more like a lottery. Calls, chains of messages by famous groups, trades, telephone calls to attention services, more trades, nursing favors, contact with stretchers, medical help, calls to public officials, barter and you know how many more things they are worth to arrive running to the hospital with medicine in hand, and to give it to the less and less doctors or nurses who, with abuse and stubbornness, end up applying the treatment to the patient. Not to mention laboratory tests, plaques, tomographies, resonances, etc., which in most cases, in the face of the lack of reagents, spare parts and supplies, ends up forcing families to surrender to the inclement arms of clinics and laboratories private that end up bleeding, this time, the pocket of the people, who has to pawn everything, scrape the credit cards, get into debt to the soul to ensure the life of the inconsiderate who came to get sick in these times.

Fuente

It is commonplace to compare the wage income disparagingly with any other commodity, such as the egg, which represents the preferred commodity for the exercise of comparison. An employer, with just a few days of earnings can cover the monthly salaries of his entire payroll. However, the crisis leaves less and less space for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs (in favor of large monopolies and oligopolies) that end up with petty stores below, or at best, migrating from economic activity, preferably to that related to the sale and distribution of consumer goods, especially food. So we see shoe stores, clothing stores, appliances, furniture, etc., becoming food stores: banana, cheese, bread, etc. The broken companies end up leaving at the mercy of the ones who can save thousands of workers.

A good friend commented that workers are in a situation of indirect dismissal due to precarious salaries, which has meant that every day, hundreds of people, especially from the public sector, assume the condition and end up deserting their jobs. work, to be incorporated into everyday survival through trade, bachaqueo, contraband, financial speculation, migration or teleworking, the latter desirable for transnational corporations that see in the Venezuelan labor force one of the cheapest in the world. world. In this way, companies and strategic institutions of the Venezuelan state decompensate dramatically with the loss of qualified personnel, which impacts on the efficiency of their activities and, therefore, on the national income. Because of this, and other causes, which are also blameworthy for the crisis, the US sanctions and the negligence in managerial management, oil, agrifood, metallurgical, and manufacturing production have been falling, as well as recurrent problems in the provision of electricity, drinking water, telecommunications, etc. All this situation reported makes the work schedules in the public administration change in fact, reducing not only the working hours for each day, but even reducing the number of working days, causing a negative attitude and indolent to responsibilities labor, limited by the lack of resources, the political blindness of the managements and institutional directions accustomed from the past to direct with abundant financial resources.

The workers of the educational sector face with panic not only the teaching, administrative and teaching desertion, but the progressive abandonment of students, who choose to migrate to other countries or dedicate themselves to pursue the necessary resources to collaborate in the family maintenance. Universities look desolate, controversial admission tests are omitted after little demand. Careers that in the past enjoyed an abundant demand today falter in the face of an imminent technical closure. The laboratories, libraries, dining rooms and recreation spaces suffer from the resources necessary for their normal performance.

All this complex panorama leaves fertile ground for the installation of mafias, entrenched in institutions and companies that end up negotiating with everything, fertilizers, seeds, boxes clap, spare parts, passages, passports, tickets and whatever merchandise is at your reach. But the most serious aspect is the whiff of privatization that pervades dangerously the companies and institutions of the state, which pale in the face of the vortex of the crisis.