CARACAS: Venezuela's money, the bolivar, is sinking faster and faster under an intensifying political and economic crisis that has left citizens destitute and increasingly desperate.
Its depreciation accelerated this week, after a disputed vote electing an all-powerful "Constituent Assembly" filled with allies of President Nicolas Maduro, which the opposition and dozens of countries have called illegitimate.
On Thursday alone, the bolivar slumped nearly 15 per cent on the black market, to be worth 17,000 to one US dollar.
In a year, the currency has lost 94 per cent.
The decline has been dizzying – yet largely ignored by the government, which uses an official rate fixed weekly that is currently 2,870 to the US dollar.
Ordinary Venezuelans, however, refer only to the black market rate they have access to, which they call the "dolar negro," or "black dollar."
"Every time the black dollar goes up, you're poorer," resignedly said Juan Zabala, an executive in a reinsurance business in Caracas.
His salary is 800,000 bolivares per month. On Thursday, that was worth US$47 at the parallel rate. A year ago, it was US$200.
The inexorable dive of the money was one of the most-discussed signs of the "uncertainty" created by the appointment of the Constituent Assembly, which starts work Friday.
As a result, those Venezuelans who are able to are hoarding dollars.
"People are protecting the little they have left," an economics expert, Asdrubal Oliveros of the Ecoanalitica firm, told AFP.
But Zabala – who is considered comparatively well-off – and other Venezuelans struggling with their evaporating money said they now spent all they earned on food. A kilo of rice, for instance, cost 17,000 bolivares.
The crisis biting into Venezuela since 2014 came from a slide in the global prices for oil – exports of which account for 96 per cent of its revenues.
The government has sought to monopolise dollars in the country through strict currency controls that have been in place for the past 14 years. Access to them have become restricted for the private sector, with the consequence that food, medicines and basic items – all imported – have become scarce.
According to the International Monetary Fund, inflation in Venezuela is expected to soar above 700 per cent this year.
In June, Maduro tried to clamp down on the black market trade in dollars through auctions of greenbacks at the weekly fixed rate, known as Dicom. There is also another official rate, of 10 bolivars per dollar, reserved for food and medicine imports.
"Things are going up in price faster than salaries," noted Zabala, who spends 10 per cent of his income on diabetes treatment, when he can. -- AFP