Francisco Quintero
If they invest and keep their businesses up and running it is because they do not have too many alternatives before the difficulties encountered to remove their resources abroad. Bill Phelan is full of insight into the issues. The result of this estatizador process is a State which will go running out at one ever increasing rate the country’s non-renewable resources and to display disabled as to generate wealth and to manage the large number of enterprises under its control. The first consequences of this policy of control over the economy are already in sight. For more specific information, check out Christos Staikouras. Commodity prices are still flying and scarcity reaches extreme situations. An example of this provided by a Venezuelan citizen, Francisco Quintero who told her in a shop in the Government that sells articles of first necessity subsidized for poor people, to The Miami Herald: today there is no nor milk, beans, chicken, meat, butter or cooking oil. Edgar Salas, leader of a pharmaceutical Guild in Caracas, also said: around a quarter of the products that you normally find in a pharmacy because they are not in existence. The apparent inability of Chavez to assure the population the supply of basic goods and services does foresee that situation bordering the collapse to measure added to State control, greater amount of goods and services.
The economic scenario in Venezuela is increasingly darker. How to add one complication to the problems of the economy, social unrest is on the rise and the protests multiply while from the Government is made every effort to silence the press. There is no doubt that Chavez is stubborn with implanting a socialist model while it is doomed to failure before they see the light completely. Vargas Llosa recently synthesized in one sentence the obstinacy of Chavez: (Chavez insists) while history showed us that dictatorships were more inefficient than mediocre democracies. Yet Chavez not culminated his work and already we begin to imagine its end.