Attacks, extortions and kidnappings threaten the “small economic rebound” in Venezuela

Two men stopped his motorcycle on the afternoon of August 17 on Delicias Avenue, in Maracaibo. The backseat occupant got out, rushed into a nearby liquor store, pulled his gun and shot one store worker in the head and wounded another before fleeing. The attack was part of an extortion.

Inside the business, a pamphlet was found in which a criminal group led by a criminal nicknamed “El Yiyi” declared himself the intellectual author of the attack.

A mixed commission of military and police arrested in flagrante, 72 hours later, three men from the same gang who were about to carry out a similar attack against a business in the Grand Bazaar shopping center in the center of the city.

In their possession, they had a fragmentation grenade. The detainees were in charge of collecting information about the victims of extortion, calling merchants to force them to pay large sums of money and carrying out attacks, the authorities reported.

That murder in the liquor store is the top of an increasingly high mountain of insecurity events that impact businessmen in Zulia, the most populous state in Venezuela.

According to the digital newspaper the whistleextortionists blew up grenades in 11 businesses in the region, bordering Colombia, during the first eight months of 2022.

Two days after the homicide inside the liquor store, eight men threw a grenade and shot at the facade of a supermarket in Ciudad Ojeda, on the Eastern Coast of the Lake, dozens of kilometers from Maracaibo. In the incident, a police officer was killed.

Just four days after that event, another group of extortionists threw a fragmentary grenade at a recently opened hardware store in another Zulia municipality, Cabimas.

Kidnappings also undermine business activity. Last Sunday, armed men entered a supermarket in Cabimas to forcibly take away 48-year-old Asian merchant Xiaoyong Feng. He is the fifth abduction of the year in Zulia.

Last week, news broke of the kidnapping of another merchant in Puerto Cabello, in the state of Carabobo. Armed and uniformed subjects as military counterintelligence agents kidnapped Jovito Gómez, 58, in a still life. The head of the country’s scientific police, Douglas Rico, reported his release after “strong pressure” from the authorities.

the worst challenge

Insecurity is “the worst” of the challenges faced by businessmen in Maracaibo, according to the president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, Francois Galletti. “Some stop their activity when the risk is too high”, he assures the voice of america.

The vast majority of business owners continue to operate “despite these difficulties,” says the union spokesperson, who advises reporting extortion to the authorities to prevent it, on the contrary, from “growing” by yielding to the required payments. .

Venezuela was included among the most dangerous countries in the world and is the least peaceful nation in South America, according to a ranking published last year by the Institute of Economy and Peace think tank, which, however, noted that there was a reduction in its homicide rate and in the number of deaths due to the internal conflict.

According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, emigration and the economic crisis generated fewer opportunities for crime, at least until 2020. The year of the moderate upturn in economic variables, the current one, seems to be fertile for criminals.

The extortions and kidnappings against dozens of businessmen represent a major challenge to the continuity of the recovery process that commercial activities in Venezuela are experiencing this year, warns the economist and teacher Gustavo Machado.

They are a brake on economic “reactivation” and the action of the authorities to avoid these acts of insecurity is key, he says. Those violent threats add to other factors that hamper economic activity, such as frequent blackouts, he notes.

News about extortions and attacks against businessmen and their companies in regions such as Zulia refloat in a year in which multilateral institutions and private firms, such as the International Monetary Fund and ECLAC, take for granted that the Gross Domestic Product of Venezuela will rise in 2022 up to close to 10 percentage points.

Machado, professor at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences of the University of Zulia, clarifies that what some specialists have called “a small economic bounce begins to materialize after seven years of fall in 74% of the GDP of the South American country.

“The key point here is that any situation that is occurring in terms of insecurity and that affects the possibility of carrying out economic activity is going to affect an economy that still has a weak condition as a result of the hard process” of the crisis, he indicates.

rebound brake

This economic rebound in Venezuela has led to a greater availability of cash and, thus, increases the probability of theft, robbery and kidnapping, observes the economist and professor at the Catholic University of Táchira, Aldo Contreras.

“We returned to the use of cash. Up to 65% of transactions at the national level are made in foreign currency and, of that, about 40% is made in cash, with dollars, euros, pesos and grams of gold. This increases the possibility that in small cash registers of businesses, supermarkets, hardware stores, there will be high amounts in cash, ”he warns in an interview with the VOA.

He details that, years ago, Venezuela was a fertile land for the cloning of debit or credit cards or violent robberies at ATMs in banks. Now him modus operandi It consists of dusting off old practices such as extortion and kidnapping.

“We have to re-generate strategies to safeguard that money. With the increase in the amount of cash transactions this is coming back into the fore”, she remarks.

Ricardo Acosta Cedeño, former president of Fedecamaras Zulia and regional leader of the Fuerza Vecinal party, opposed to the government of Nicolás Maduro, assumes that in that state there is “an outbreak” of extortion, kidnapping and hired assassins.

The personal insecurity of entrepreneurs adds to other factors, such as slowdown in the economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of the economic sanctions against the Maduro government in oil regions, with Zulia in the lead, he says.

“If crime continues as it is, it is really difficult for there to be a real rebound in the economy. We hope that this will change in the short term”, says Acosta Cedeño.

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