The arrival of a Liberian-flagged freighter with Ukrainian, Arab and Filipino sailors spells one thing for Elena - dollars. And greenbacks are king in Venezuela, the year-old prostitute says. Within hours of hearing of the ship's imminent arrival, she has packed her bags and is heading to the crumbling city of Puerto Cabello. It is a kilometre journey from her home in the Western state of Zulia that Elena finds herself doing more often now as Venezuela's economy contracts, the bolivar slumps and prices soar.
Prostitutes more than double their earnings by moonlighting as currency traders in Puerto Cabello. They are the foreign exchange counter for sailors in a country where buying and selling dollars in the streets is a crime - and prostitution isn't. Greenbacks in the black market are worth 11 times more than the official rate as dollars become more scarce in an economy that imports 70 percent of the goods it consumes.
The benefits of the trade are stacked around Elena's room in the Blue House brothel - bags of rice, flour, sugar and cooking oil - products that other Venezuelans have to line up for hours to buy at regulated prices in shops, if they can find them at all. The bolivar has fallen to 71 to the dollar from 23 on the black market since President Nicolas Maduro succeeded his mentor Hugo Chavez in April The government tightened currency handouts to stem the outflow of foreign reserves, which are near a decade low.
The official exchange rate, reserved for imports of food and medicine, is 6. The dollar shortage is turning Venezuela into a two-tier society similar to the Soviet Union and Cuba, said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Those with access to dollars such as prostitutes, tour agents, airport taxi drivers and expatriates are able to shield themselves from inflation by trading their greenbacks at ever higher rates.
Those who can't are seeing their living standards decline. In a country where prostitution is legal, it is the black market in dollars that Maduro has called "perverse," saying it was designed by the bourgeoisie to destroy his Socialist government.
