A carrier shows a bundle of bolivars, on March 12, 2021, in Caracas.RAYNER PEÑA R. / EFE
Braulio González looks after cars in one of the entrances to El Ávila National Park, which overlooks Caracas, Venezuela.
On a Sunday morning, he manages to collect two 50,000 bolivar bills - equivalent to two cents on the dollar - and three packages of cookies.
"People do not have a simple," he says resigned in reference to the tickets.
For this reason, González has his bank details written down on a piece of paper, available to those who are encouraged to make a transfer as a tip.
González, he says, lives off his job.
On the way to a new workday, Zoraida Chirinos, a resident of the working-class areas of Petare, stops at a bank: she needs cash to pay for the bus.
After a line of half an hour, you will receive a bill of 500,000 bolivars, about 25 cents.
These days, he says, ATMs often run out of cash.
Olga Bravo, 80, had to call her son to come to her rescue in the parking lot of a shopping center in the east of the city: she did not have cash and there were no electronic points for debit cards.
They only accepted "mobile payment", a mechanism that she was unaware of.
The shortage of cash in Venezuela, whether in bolivars or dollars, complicates the most basic transactions to the extreme and frequently produces scenes such as those of González, Chirinos or Bravo.
Hyperinflation has eaten away three families of banknotes issued in the last six years.
Today, cash pieces represent only 2% of all monetary liquidity in the country.
The official authorization for the use of the dollar has alleviated the shortage, but it has not solved the problem: it is very difficult to obtain changes for bills of 10 or 20 dollars.
Anyone who has a medium or large denomination bill should know that it is probably convenient for him to spend the entire amount, instead of what he needs.
“We have arrived at this situation because the Government of Nicolás Maduro has endeavored to finance the fiscal deficit of the State accounts through the issuance of inorganic money.
The creation of liquidity generates a kind of tsunami: in 2019, for example, it grew 5,000%, ”says Rodrigo Cabezas, an economist at the University of Zulia and former Minister of Finance for Hugo Chávez.
"Venezuela is the only economy in the world in hyperinflation at the moment," adds José Manuel Puente, an economist and academic at the Universities of Oxford and Salamanca.
"The issuance of the ticket itself, the ink and the security mechanisms to print them end up being more expensive than the face value of each piece," he adds.
Authorizing the use of the dollar has not improved things in an economy suffering from international sanctions and an oil industry bankrupt by waste and corruption.
There is no international transaction system in the country, such as Western Union, that streamlines remittances from the diaspora.
Faced with bottlenecks generated by its own inadequacy, the Maduro government has promoted digital payment systems, which are now widespread.
Some of them even work for state subsidy programs, such as the Patria system or the Mobile Wallet.
Added to them is the use of cryptocurrencies and internet payment systems.
Commerce has become accustomed to the system, with transfers credited with photographs that are sent by wasap.
The middle class meets their needs by making payments with the automated Zelle system of international banking.
"The economy produces few dollars, there is very little foreign investment in the country," says Leonardo Vera, a member of the Venezuelan Academy of Economics, adding: "There are countries where electronic money has advanced a lot and the cash requirements are low.
But in countries where the informal economy is high and there are problems with employment, the cash needs can be very high, and that is our case ”.
"Until the end of the last century and the first thirteen of the current one," says former Minister Cabezas, "the share of banknotes in the nation's total liquidity was 10%.
In Latin America the average is 14%.
The national economy lacks 64 billion bolivars in the issuance of coins and bills;
about 16,000 million pieces. "
For Víctor Álvarez, an economist and also a former minister under Hugo Chávez, "the dollarization that is underway is not an official process."
“It is not an absolute substitution of dollars for bolivars after a mathematical calculation.
These processes usually occur after an agreement with the United States Federal Reserve, which is the one who prints the bills once a nation decides to dollarize its economy.
Venezuelan authorities are sanctioned by the Treasury Department.
The dollars that enter Venezuela have a varied origin: repatriation of capital, remittances, private exports, the little that can enter through the production of gold and oil, and finally, what enters through money laundering. "
The Central Bank of Venezuela has just issued three new notes of 200,000, 500,000 and one million bolivars.
None of them are worth a dollar.
The Chavista government now encourages the entry of capital and makes the rules of the economy more flexible.
For former Minister Cabezas, it will not be enough.
"An improvement in the economy that allows us to stop the recession, stop hyperinflation and recover the oil industry will not be possible if there is no political change in Venezuela," he says.
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