Hugo’s price controls cause food shortages, and now comes the next step:
Venezuelan troops seize food
Venezuela’s top food company has accused troops of illegally seizing more than 500 tonnes of food from its trucks as part of President Hugo Chavez’s campaign to stem shortages.
The leftist Chavez this week created a state food distributor and loosened some price controls, seeking to end months of shortages for staples like milk and eggs that have caused long lines and upset his supporters in the OPEC nation.
The highly publicised campaign has also included government crackdowns on accused smuggling, with the military seizing 1,600 tonnes of food and sending 1,200 troops to the border with Colombia.
While Venezuelan oil exports decline, PDVSA has opened a new division called PDVAL, PDVSA Alimentos, to import food (faster than producing it).
As I have been mentioning for a while (since at least September of 2005 when I compared Hugo with Mugabe), property rights are a thing of the past in Hugolandia:
He also threatened to expropriate companies selling food above regulated prices.
“Anyone who is distributing food … and is speculating, we must intervene and we must expropriate (the business) and put it in the hands of the state and the communities,” Chavez said during the inauguration of a new state-run market in Caracas.
And expect the same in Bolivia, with its irriversible reforms.
After all, Hugo’s getting his coca paste directly from Evo
Chávez, who does not drink alcohol, added that just as Fidel Castro ‘”sends me Coppelia ice cream and a lot of other things that regularly reach me from Havana,” Bolivian President Evo Morales “sends me coca paste . . . I recommend it to you.”
But never mind that: Venezuela to sue U.S. at OAS over drug accusations
Venezuela’s government announced Tuesday that it aimed to sue the United States at the Organization of American States (OAS) over its “baseless charges” against Caracas’ drug-fighting efforts.
Gustavo Coronel has reasons to wonder whether there will be a lawsuit, or a complaint of some sort instead. So far, it’s only an informal complaint.
As I was posting on April of 2006, Venezuela has become the #1 transit hub for the drug trade.
The road to Communist hell is a downwards spiral.
