Everything seemed to be a joke, or perhaps the consequence of a reality that tends to unfold. The Mercedes, in one of the most affluent areas of eastern Caracas, had the Starbucks more ephemeral of the history of that cafeteria associated with the multinational Nestlé. Next to the Yeet! Supermarket, where products that very few Venezuelans consume are bought, the poster of the famous smiling mermaid representing the franchise. The poster was misleading: it was not accompanied by the proper name that distinguishes it.
The opening of the Starbucks fake However, it caused a furor in one of the areas where consumption has been boosted, in the heat of the de facto dollarization of the economy. They and they formed long lines in the sun thinking that, finally, Venezuela, plagued by US sanctions, it was in tune with global tastes.
But very soon the denial came from the outside. “We can confirm that we do not have the We Proudly Serve Starbucks® coffee program in Venezuela,” the firm said to end the confusion. YEET Marketplace acknowledged that “we are not a Starbucks store.” They had hardly acquired equipment to prepare the coffee and the product. As the culmination of the pantomime, this Monday the mermaid poster was removed.
A deeper problem
However, the case of the cafeteria is symptomatic of a deeper problem that occurs in Venezuela, where a former legislator, Juan Guaidó, still claims his status as “president in charge”, and where the deputies of the National Assembly (AN) who were in office until the end of 2019, they are still considered part of a legitimate Parliament that “meets & rdquor; in a hotel. But, in addition, Luisa Ortega calls herself attorney general in exile.
Almost two years ago Guaidó He proclaimed himself acting head of state very close to where the fake Starbucks operated. He immediately had the backing of the administration of Donald Trump and more than 150 governments. Guaidó did not fulfill the objectives that he proposed in Las Mercedes to displace Nicolas Maduro from the Miraflores Palace. His figure, on the other hand, eroded over the months. He only has the international support, as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has demonstrated days ago, by granting him custody of 1000 million dollars in gold from Venezuela that are deposited in the Bank of England.
Although the court case is not completely resolved, that is the only political victory that the former legislator can claim. Your “Foreign Minister”, Julio BorgesHe decided to leave the “interim government” with a loud slam of the door. Borges, leader of Primero Justicia, one of the opposition parties that participated in the recent regional elections, estimated that the experiment still led by Guaidó should “disappear completely” because it lacks “legitimacy” and its objective has been completely “distorted”, among other reasons, due to acts of corruption related to the control of Venezuelan assets abroad.
Be and seem
Related news
The caso Starbucks He did nothing more than stage the distance between things as they appear to be and as they really are in Venezuela. Almost at the same time as the opening of the cafeteria, a similar case took place with “Amazon Depot”. Queues were also formed in the vicinity of the business, which was nothing more than a warehouse with boxes of products that were never removed from Amazon’s central warehouses in the US and that the owners of the rogue shop decided to import from Caracas as trinkets. Pirouettes, in short, of a economy that fell 80% in the last eight years of a internal conflict with no horizon of resolution in sight, where the dollar functions as a price regulation factor over the national currency, the bolivar.
The country closes the year with a inflation of 576.3%, according to figures from Venezuelan Observatory of Finance. The central bank It must inject dollars into public and private banks to contain the price of the dollar and not further deteriorate the purchasing power of citizens. It is expected that during 2022 the hyperinflation begin to be left behind and the majority of the population will rise out of the poverty to which it has been condemned by the combination of a political and an economic crisis, with the aggravation of the pandemic. At the moment, the minimum wage, received by a good part of state workers, is equivalent to three dollars, a little less than what a cappuccino at starbucks, $ 3.25.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com