July 6: The Right Direction

In an interview on Televen today, the vice-president for the economy, Rafael Ramirez, said that the Venezuelan economy was “heading in the right direction”:

… what we’re doing is heading in the right direction… Venezuela has all of the economic tools to get out of this situation.
(…)
The theme is the economy… [and] we know that is something that worries people. We’ve been… articulating and developing a strategy to face what we’ve called the economic war… there have been very important steps taken in the right direction to resolve the core issues that are affecting our economy.

Ramirez also argued that the PSUV has built an economic system “that gives us a lot of [economic] stability”, and characterized PDVSA as the backbone of the Venezuelan economy.

During the speech, Ramirez also blamed the current scarcity crisis on two culprits: contraband, and an “eternal network” of suppliers that siphon resources to street peddlers. Ramirez assured viewers that “40% of our national production, or the materials that we import, are leaving the country” in a clandestine manner.

Ramirez’s comments are at odds with those of private industry, who’ve been saying for the past several months that an inability to obtain foreign currency in order to pay for imports is at the heart of the scarcity crisis.

Perhaps most importantly, Ramirez said that Venezuela would soon merge it’s numerous foreign exchange systems into one in “the short term”. Currently, there are three different systems to exchange currency in Venezuela: SICAD I, SICAD II, and CADIVI (now called CENCOEX). The multi-faceted exchange system is a Kafkaesque nightmare, which makes dealing with foreign currency extremely impractical.

Four Killed in Catia Shootout

Four people were killed and several others were injured during a shootout in the Nuevo Horizonte area of Catia, a barrio in Caracas. Apparently, men armed with rifles opened fire on a congregation – which might have been a party – during the early morning hours. Two of the deceased – Yorman Acevedo (23) and Carlos Alberto Campos (23) died at the scene, while the two other victims died later in hospital.

Finally, a video from Tachira. The video shows an NTN24 cameraman named Gonzalo Ruiz filming a confrontation between security forces and demonstrators. Gonzalo is approached by a uniformed officer, who asks, “Where is [your network] from?”, and appears to shove Gonzalo around, preventing him from doing his job: