The Jim Bakker Show

Sanctioned for drugs, Venezuela vice-president slams U.S. ‘aggression’

By Andrew Cawthorne and Alexandra Ulmer

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s powerful Vice President Tareck El Aissami on Tuesday called his blacklisting by the United States on drug charges an “imperialist aggression” in the first bilateral flare-up under the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

“We shall not be distracted by these miserable provocations,” he added in a series of tweets. “Truth is invincible and we will see this vile aggression dispelled.”

The U.S. Department of Treasury on Monday sanctioned El Aissami and Samark Lopez, whom it identified as his associate, on accusations of masterminding an international network shipping drugs to Mexico and the United States.

Lopez also said the listings appeared politically motivated.

“Mr. Lopez is not a government official and has not engaged in drug trafficking,” he said in a statement on his website describing himself as a “legitimate businessman.”

President Nicolas Maduro’s government has frequently cast U.S. and opposition accusations of drug-trafficking, corruption and human rights abuses as a false pretext to justify meddling in Venezuela and a push to topple him.

Maduro, 54, narrowly won election in 2013 to replace the late Hugo Chavez, but his popularity has plummeted amid an economic crisis in the nation of 30 million people.

Though he frequently lashed out at former U.S. leader Barack Obama, the Venezuelan president has so far refrained from criticizing Trump.

The sanction on El Aissami will dent Maduro’s hopes Trump might avoid confrontation with Venezuela but could also help him by providing a nationalist card to play, said Tulane University academic and Venezuela expert David Smilde.

“This is a tremendous gift to Maduro as it ensures El Aissami’s loyalty. It essentially increases El Aissami’s exit costs and gives him a personal stake in the continuation of ‘Chavismo’,” he said.

“To be clear, El Aissami and others should be held responsible for their actions. However it should be understood this process has pernicious unintended consequences. I think we are effectively witnessing the creation of a rogue state.”

“CRIMINAL” STATE?

El Aissami, 42, whom local media report is of Syrian and Lebanese extraction, grew up poor in the Andean state of Merida and went on to study law and criminology, according to the ruling Socialist Party. He had been both a lawmaker and a state governor before being named vice president last month.

Venezuelan opposition groups have long accused El Aissami of repressing dissent, participating in drug trafficking rings, and supporting Middle Eastern groups such as Hezbollah.

The head of Venezuela’s Democratic Unity opposition coalition, Jesus Torrealba, said on Tuesday that the El Aissami case demonstrated the rotten and “criminal” nature of the state.

Another opposition leader, Henry Ramos, scoffed that Venezuela would no doubt claim drugs had been planted on officials “just like they plant evidence on Venezuelan opponents to make them rot in the regime’s jails.”

Venezuela is holding more than 100 activists in prison, according to local rights groups. The government denies the existence of political prisoners, saying all politicians in jail are there on legitimate charges.

A senior U.S. official said on Monday that El Aissami controlled drug routes by air and sea. The Treasury Department said he oversaw or partially owned narcotics shipments of more than 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds)from Venezuela on multiple occasions.

Another U.S. administration official estimated the value of property in Miami linked to El Aissami but now blocked was worth tens of millions of dollars.

The move was a departure from the so-called “soft landing” approach taken by Obama’s White House. At times it had clashed with efforts by the U.S. Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration, which worked with informants in Venezuela to nab influential officials for money laundering and drug trafficking.

Since 2015, the Obama administration had sought to use behind-the-scenes diplomacy to ease acrimony with Caracas and the fallout of a string of U.S. drug indictments against Venezuelan officials, such as Interior Minister Nestor Reverol.

“When the right wing attacks us, it shows we are advancing. Nothing and nobody will stop our victorious march to peace,” Reverol tweeted in defense of El Aissami.

(Additional reporting by Diego Ore in Caracas, Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by W Simon; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Venezuelan girl’s diphtheria death highlights country’s health crisis

a mother who lost her child in Venezuela due to disease and health crisis

By Alexandra Ulmer and Maria Ramirez

PARIAGUAN, Venezuela (Reuters) – Eliannys Vivas, 9, started to get a sore throat on a Friday last month in this languid Venezuelan town where papaya trees shade poor cinder-block homes.

Five days later, Eliannys was dead, likely a victim of diphtheria, a serious bacterial infection that is fatal in 5 to 10 percent of cases and particularly lethal for children.

Her death and a wider Venezuelan outbreak of diphtheria, once a major global cause of child death but increasingly rare due to immunizations, shows how vulnerable the country is to health risks amid a major economic crisis that has sparked shortages of basic medicines and vaccines.

Eliannys’ story is also one of misdiagnoses and missed signals worsened by government secrecy around the disease. Her family had never heard of diphtheria and local doctors did not immediately suspect it, despite the infection having affected hundreds of people just a few hours away in Bolivar.

After Eliannys was taken to a local hospital, doctors, thinking the disease was asthma, used a sort of inhaler on her.

But the usually chatty girl – “a little parrot,” in the words of her day-laborer father — kept weakening, so doctors transferred her to a larger government hospital once an ambulance became available hours later.

At El Tigre hospital, all the devices to examine throats had broken three years ago, so no one checked her properly, according to a nursing assistant.

“They said it was asthma, asthma, asthma,” said her mother, Jennifer Vivas. But as Eliannys struggled to speak, she was rushed to a third and then a fourth hospital in neighboring Bolivar state.

There, doctors discovered with horror Eliannys suffered from grossly inflamed throat membranes – the classic symptom of diphtheria.

But even the fourth hospital lacked adequate treatment for the infection, so she received only a half dose of antitoxins and no penicillin at all, according to a medical professional who treated her there.

As Eliannys’ airwaves blocked up, she suffered two successive heart failures and died on Jan. 18.

“If the diphtheria diagnosis had been made earlier and she had gotten antitoxins, she would have had a chance of surviving,” the source who treated her said, asking to remain anonymous because the government has banned health professionals from speaking to the media.

DIPHTHERIA RETURNS

Venezuela controlled diphtheria in the 1990s, but it reappeared in the vast jungle state of Bolivar in mid-2016.

At least two dozen children died last year, doctors say, and cases are now thought to have spread to a half-dozen other states.

Shortages of basic drugs and vaccines, emigration of underpaid doctors, and crumbling infrastructure have made it easier for diseases to spread, medical associations said.

Many poor and middle-class Venezuelans also have weakened immune systems because they are no longer able to eat three meals a day or bathe regularly due to product scarcity, reduced water supply and raging inflation.

Government secrecy has compounded the problem.

“The fact people don’t know (about diphtheria) helps the bacteria spread,” said Caracas-based epidemiologist Julio Castro, who has been tracking the diphtheria outbreak and who showed photos sent to him of patients with thick white membranes coating their throat.

The unpopular leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro said in October there were no proven cases of diphtheria and admonished those seeking to spread “panic.”

It has since informed the World Health Organization of 20 confirmed diphtheria cases and five deaths, and emphasized there is a major vaccination drive under way, but has yet to provide a full national picture of the disease’s effects amid a generalized clampdown on data.

The Information and Health Ministries, as well as the Venezuelan Social Security Institute, which is in charge of some drug distribution and hospitals, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Eliannys’ case and diphtheria more generally.

The only other country in the region with a significant number of confirmed diphtheria cases last year was Haiti with 33, the WHO said in December.

MORE ILLNESS AHEAD?

Doctors think diphtheria first spread from the rough-and-tumble illegal gold mines in Bolivar state, which is attracting poor Venezuelans as the minimum monthly wage languishes around $30.

After Eliannys’ family was forced to start skipping dinner in December, her father, Tulio Medina, decided to work in Bolivar’s yucca and yams plantation where he made more money but might have brought the infection home.

The disease has already spread to capital Caracas, where doctors say a 32-year-old mother died last year, and could yet affect more states.

With the Venezuelan pharmaceutical association estimating that roughly 85 percent of drugs are unavailable at any given time and in light of the short supply of vaccines, doctors are bracing for further increases in illnesses like malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Venezuela’s rate of immunization with the pentavalent vaccine, which protects children from five major infections including diphtheria, had slipped to 78 percent between January and November 2016, according to Health Ministry figures leaked to former Health Minister José Felix Oletta and seen by Reuters.

“At this rate, we’re going to see more illnesses, more deaths, more doctors leaving the country,” said pediatrician Hugo Lezama, the head of Bolivar’s doctors association, who himself earns only a handful of dollars a month.

“Those of us who stay are going hysterical trying to perform miracles so our patients don’t die.”

(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Christian Plumb and Matthew Lewis)

Peru to give visas to thousands of crisis-weary Venezuelans

Peru's president in press conference saying venezuelans will get visas

LIMA (Reuters) – Peru has created a temporary visa that will allow thousands of Venezuelans to work and study in the country, part of a migratory policy that aims to “build bridges” and “not walls,” the Andean nation’s interior ministry said.

President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s government issued 20 temporary visas to Venezuelan migrants in Peru this week. Kuczysnki, a centrist, has expressed concern about shortages of food and medicine in Venezuela, mired in a deep economic crisis.

Some 6,000 Venezuelans are expected to receive the permit, which will allow them to study, work and receive health services in Peru for a year, the interior ministry said late on Thursday.

Peru has enjoyed nearly two decades of uninterrupted economic growth and single-digit inflation, a sharp contrast to socialist-led Venezuela, where the ranks of the poor have swollen in recent years.

“We want to offer a different message on migration than what’s offered in other places. We want to build bridges that unite us and not walls to separate us,” Interior Minister Carlos Basombrio said in a statement.

The comment appeared to be a thinly veiled shot at the new U.S. government, which is traditionally an ally of Peru.

U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed a temporary entry ban on refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, and insisted that Mexico will pay for his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexican border to curb illegal immigration.

Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker and free-trade advocate who took office last year, has previously compared Trump’s proposed border wall to the Berlin Wall, and said he would oppose it in the United Nations.

Kuczynski and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said last week that they would stand with Mexico and seek to strengthen regional trade, in the wake of rising tensions between Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Trump.

(Reporting by Mitra Taj; Editing by Paul Simao)

Venezuela’s opposition revives push to end Maduro’s rule

Protesters in Venezuela hold sign that reads "Let us vote"

By Diego Oré and Anggy Polanco

CARACAS/SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela (Reuters) – Offering prized bags of flour to police and hurling empty medicine boxes on the floor, Venezuelan opposition protesters launched a new push on Monday to force President Nicolas Maduro from power and end 18 years of socialist rule.

Turnout for the opposition’s first rallies of 2017 was not massive, reflecting disillusionment over last year’s failure to bring about a referendum to recall the 54-year-old leader and successor to Hugo Chavez.

But those who did march in a string of rallies around the country turned creative in their complaints about the South American OPEC nation’s unprecedented economic crisis.

In the politically volatile western state of Tachira, long a hotbed of anti-Maduro sentiment, some demonstrators proffered flour – an increasingly scarce and expensive commodity during the nation’s three-year recession – to police, witnesses said.

In Caracas, where several thousand opposition supporters marched, some threw empty medicine cartons on the floor to symbolize shortages afflicting the health sector.

Security forces fired teargas in Tachira to stop protesters from reaching an office of the National Election Council, while in Caracas they used tear gas against people blocking a highway.

With many of Venezuela’s 30 million people skipping meals, unable to pay soaring prices for basic goods and facing long lines for scarce subsidized products, Maduro, who won a 2013 election to succeed Chavez, has become deeply unpopular.

Polls showed a majority of Venezuelans wanted a referendum last year which could have brought his rule to an early end and sparked a presidential vote. But compliant courts and election authorities thwarted the move, alleging fraud in signature collections.

“This government is scared of votes, and the election council is the instrument they use to avoid them,” said housewife Zoraida Castro, 46, during a march to the election council’s office in southern Ciudad Bolivar city.

The opposition Democratic Unity coalition is demanding dates for regional elections that are supposed to happen this year, and also urging Maduro to hold a new presidential ballot.

“It’s a day of struggle in Venezuela,” said coalition secretary general Jesus Torrealba, in Barquisimeto town to show solidarity with a Catholic archbishop whose residence was recently attacked after he criticized the government.

Maduro’s six-year term is due to end in early 2019.

Red-shirted government supporters, who accuse the opposition of seeking a coup with U.S. connivance, were also marching on Monday, a politically significant day for Venezuelans: the anniversary of the 1958 fall of dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.

They gathered at the National Pantheon building to honor leftist guerrilla Fabricio Ojeda, who was murdered in 1966.

(Additional reporting by German Dam in Ciudad Bolivar, Anggy Polanco in San Cristobal; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer and Paul Simao)

Deep in the jungle, Brazil struggles to battle drug trade

Brazil army soldiers on border with Colombia to combat drug trade

By Alonso Soto

VILA BITTENCOURT, Brazil (Reuters) – In an isolated army outpost deep in the Amazon jungle, Felipe Castro leads 70 soldiers on the frontline of Brazil’s fight against its biggest security threat: the drug trade.

Castro’s platoon patrols a 250 km (155 miles) stretch of the border with the world’s top cocaine producer Colombia in a bid to stem the flow of illegal drugs and arms that is fuelling a war between criminal gangs in Brazil.

“It’s a difficult job but not impossible,” said the gaunt 29-year-old, his face covered in green and black camouflage.

Watching from the bank of the murky Japura river, Castro directs his men as they use a metal speedboat to practise intercepting drug shipments on its fast-moving waters.

The river marks only part of Brazil’s porous border that stretches for nearly 10,000 kms, three times the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

After years of fragile truce, Brazil’s drug gangs have launched a battle for control of lucrative cross-border smuggling routes that has spilled into the country’s gang-controlled jails, sparking the bloodiest prison riots in decades.

More than 130 inmates have been killed so far this year.

In the vast state of Amazonas, the North Family gang has for years dominated the smuggling of cocaine that is shipped to Europe or sold in Brazil’s inner cities in a business believed to be worth $4.5 billion a year.

Brazil is the world’s biggest consumer of cocaine after the United States, according to United Nations data.

Machete-wielding North Family gangs decapitated dozens of inmates of the rival First Capital Command (PCC) in a New Year’s prison massacre that has sparked revenge killings across penitentiaries in northern Brazil.

President Michel Temer’s government is worried the prison violence could spill onto the streets of major cities such as economic hub Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, a major tourist destination.

Temer has vowed to improve military surveillance along the border, but senior commanders acknowledge drugs and arms will continue to flow in.

“Not even the United States has been able to stop drug trafficking along its border with Mexico,” said General Altair Polsin, head of the army’s ground operations command. “You have to tackle consumption to put an end to this.”

The military plans to increase its patrols on the Solimoes River, one of the main smuggling routes, and share intelligence with officials in neighboring Colombia and Peru.

Officers are putting their hopes in a technology upgrade to use infrared sensors and drones for border surveillance.

For this year, Brazil plans to nearly double its budget to about half a billion reais to finance a border technology program known as SISFRON, according to Defense Minister Raul Jungmann.

Updated technology is crucial for the 1,500 soldiers in the 24 garrisons posted along the Amazon border who divide their time searching for drugs with raids on illegal miners, loggers and hunters.

Other Brazilian security agencies fighting drugs and arms trafficking in this isolated swath of the jungle are also stretched.

Amazonas needs an extra 7,000 civil and military police to keep up with the increase in drug activity, according an internal report by the state security secretary.

“We are 30 officers overseeing an area the size of France,” said Marcos Vinicius Menezes, the federal police chief in Tabatinga, a city washed by the Solimoes that borders Colombia and Peru.

“If fighting the drug trade wasn’t enough, we also have to look after the world’s biggest tropical forest.”

(Editing by Daniel Flynn)

In Venezuela, lynchings kill one person every three days

A graffiti that reads "Get ready, thief, here we burn you. Regards, Kerdell" is seen at a residential block in Valencia, Venezuela, August 21, 2015. When a man they believed to be a thief sneaked into their parking lot in the Venezuelan city of Valencia, angry residents caught him, stripped him and beat him with fists, sticks and stones. They tied him up and doused him in gasoline, according to witnesses, in one of what rights groups and media reports say are an increasing number of mob beatings and lynchings in a country ravaged by crime. REUTERS/Alexandra Ulmer

By Andreina Aponte

CARACAS (Reuters) – Roughly one person is being lynched in crisis-ridden Venezuela every three days as frustrated residents take revenge on suspected criminals, a monitoring group said on Wednesday.

The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), which monitors crime, said mob killings have become a generalized phenomenon across the country, with 126 deaths reported in 2016 versus 20 last year.

“Due to being repeated victims of crime for more than a decade, and the feeling of not being protected, many people have decided to take justice into their own hands,” the OVV said in its latest annual report.

In the past, it said, lynchings of suspected murderers and rapists were relatively uncommon, but this year angry crowds have increasingly attacked petty criminals too, with police often turning a blind eye.

Venezuelans have long suffered alarming levels of violent crime, in part because of the widespread availability of guns, inadequate policing and a bribe-riddled justice system.

A crushing economic crisis has compounded crime.

The OVV, a group of academics who compile data from police sources and the media, said Venezuela, with an estimated 28,479 homicides this year – or more than three killings per hour – was the world’s second most murderous nation after El Salvador

That would represent 91.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants this year, up from 90 in 2015, it said. The OVV put the homicide rate at more 140 per 100,000 people in Caracas, making it one of the murder capitals of the world.

El Salvador had a rate of 116 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016, according to the Institute of Legal Medicine in El Salvador.

President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government rejects the OVV figures as inflated for political reasons. The last official murder rate it gave was 58 per 100,000 inhabitants for 2015.

Another researcher has also disagreed with the widely cited OVV data, criticizing its methodology and putting the 2015 figure at 70 murders per 100,000 people.

Whatever the right statistics, crime remains an all-pervasive worry for Venezuelans, especially in poor slums that are run by gangs and rife with guns. Numerous state security plans and disarmament drives have failed to curb the problem.

“Violence is killing the future of our country,” opposition leader Henrique Capriles said during a visit on Wednesday to rescue services in the Miranda state, which he governs.

“The government has spent 17 years without resolving the problem,” he added, referring to Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez’s rule since 1999.

(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Ford halting Venezuela production until April, executive says

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co <F.N> halted auto production in Venezuela last week and will not resume it until April, a company executive said on Tuesday, in another blow to the crisis-wracked country’s manufacturing sector.

“It is a measure to adjust production to demand in the country,” Lyle Watters, Ford’s president for South America, told reporters at an event in São Paulo, adding that the plant affected by the shutdown employs 2,000 workers.

Watters said the production freeze would not affect Ford’s consolidated results as operations in Venezuela are reported separately. Beginning in the first quarter of this year, Venezuela became the only wholly owned Ford unit with operating results that are excluded from the full company’s income statement.

In January 2015, Ford took a charge related to its Venezuelan operations that cut fourth-quarter net profit by $700 million. Ford is the only automaker still mass producing cars in Venezuela, even on a limited scale.

Vehicle production in recession-hit Venezuela is less than 8 cars a day, according to figures provided by the national automakers organization Cavenez. Ford produced 2,253 units out of a paltry national total of 2,768 in the year through November.

It takes less than two days for Ford at one of its larger U.S. plants to make as many vehicles as the company has made in Venezuela so far in 2016.

Ford in 2014 halted production for about a month due to a lack of foreign currency to import parts for assembly.

In mid-2015, Ford’s major U.S. rival, General Motors Co <GM.N>, stopped making vehicles in Venezuela altogether. GM had one plant in Venezuela.

(Reporting by Alberto Alerigi and additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Caracas, writing by Ana Mano; Editing by Tom Brown and Alistair Bell)

‘Santa Claus isn’t coming,’ recession-hit Venezuelans tell kids

A child walks in a toy store in Caracas, Venezuela, December 1, 2016.

By Andreina Aponte

CARACAS (Reuters) – As a harrowing economic crisis makes food scarce for millions of Venezuelans, many families cannot buy their children Christmas presents, decorate their home, or even host a holiday dinner.

The oil-rich country is suffering the third year of a recession that has sparked product shortages and galloping inflation. With a recent currency depreciation pumping up prices even higher, some parents are simply canceling Christmas.

“Last year I bought everything for my daughter,” said Dileida Palacios, a 40-year-old hairdresser dressed in black to mourn her son killed in crime-rife Venezuela a few weeks ago.

“This year I had to tell her everything is tough and Santa Claus isn’t coming.”

Like Palacios, about 38.5 percent of Venezuelans think this Christmas will be worse than last year’s, and 35 percent think it will be the worst ever, according to a poll by consultancy Ecoanalitica and Catholic University Andres Bello.

Several days of unrest over a national cash shortage have added to the grim national mood.

Once merrily decorated during the holidays, Caracas looks shabby. Many stores are empty, closed or selling cruelly expensive toys, Christmas trees, and holiday treats like “hallacas,” a cornmeal dish wrapped in plantain leaves.

Eight-year old Helen Ramirez, who lives in Caracas’ sprawling Petare slum, asked Santa for food for her family and pink roller skates from the Disney show “I’m Luna.”

But those skates are far out of reach for Ramirez’s family at about 400,000 bolivars, roughly $100 at the black market rate and about 14 times the monthly minimum wage.

“This year we didn’t decorate the house or anything,” said Ramirez’s grandmother, Nelys Benavides, during a charity-organized present giveaway in Petare. “We have nothing.”

President Nicolas Maduro’s leftist government accuses businessmen and rival politicians of seeking to stoke anger and ruin Christmas.

State media has feted the arrival of 200 containers of toys and food in Venezuela’s otherwise largely deserted ports, and Maduro lit a cross on Caracas’ Avila mountain in November to usher in early holidays.

His government confiscated 3.8 million toys from importer Kreisel, accusing the company of hoarding and price gouging.

Two Kreisel executives have been jailed, and Socialist Party committees have been distributing the toys to children.

“That’s what you call a reinforcement for Father Christmas, right?” the president laughed, stroking his mustache during a recent speech on state TV. “Saint Nicolas without a beard; Saint Nicolas with a mustache!”

(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer and Lisa Von Ahn)

Hundreds arrested in Venezuela cash chaos, vigilantes protect shops

People clash with Venezuelan National Guards as they try to cross the border to Colombia over the Francisco de Paula Santander international bridge in Urena, Venezuela

By Andrew Cawthorne and Corina Pons

CARACAS (Reuters) – Security forces have arrested more than 300 people during protests and lootings over the elimination of Venezuela’s largest currency bill, President Nicolas Maduro said on Sunday.

The socialist leader pulled the 100 bolivar note this week before new bills were in circulation, creating a national cash shortage on top of the brutal economic crisis overshadowing Venezuelans’ Christmas and New Year holidays.

After two days of unrest over the measure – including one death and dozens of shops ransacked – Maduro on Saturday postponed the measure until Jan. 2.

That helped stem violence, though there were still reports of more lootings in southern Ciudad Bolivar on Sunday.

The detainees include leaders and members of the opposition Popular Will and Justice First parties, Maduro said on state TV, accusing them of following U.S. instructions to incite chaos.

Venezuelan National Guards clash with demonstrators in La Fria, Venezuela December 17, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Eduardo Ramirez

“Don’t come and tell me they are political prisoners … They are the two parties of the ‘gringos’ in Venezuela,” he added, accusing President Barack Obama of wanting to engineer a coup against socialism in Venezuela before leaving office.

From Venezuela’s southern jungle and savannah to the Andean highlands in the west, groups of hundreds of protesters have been burning bolivar notes, cursing Maduro and decrying scarcities of food and medicines.

The worst looting was on Friday and Saturday, especially in El Callao and Ciudad Bolivar in the southern state of Bolivar, and police have used teargas to control crowds in some places.

Chinese-run shops have been particularly targeted, witnesses say, and a 14-year-old boy was shot dead in El Callao on Friday.

The governor of Bolivar state said there were 262 arrests there, with lootings from food shops to science laboratories. The local business group said 350 businesses had been ransacked in Ciudad Bolivar, including 90 percent of food outlets.

In Santa Elena de Uairen, near the border with Brazil, shopkeepers and inhabitants formed vigilante groups to join police and soldiers after six shops were ransacked on Saturday.

“We’re not lowering our guard, we’re forming protection brigades,” said local business group leader Gilmer Poma.

Food prices were reduced in some establishments in Santa Elena as a way to defuse tensions.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks next to children toys during his weekly broadcast “En contacto con Maduro” (In contact with Maduro) at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela December 18, 2016. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

‘CRUEL JOKE’

Maduro, a 54-year-old former bus driver and foreign minister who replaced Hugo Chavez in 2013, has seen his popularity plunge during a three-year recession. He justified the currency measure as a way of suffocating mafia on Venezuela’s borders.

But opponents say it is further evidence of disastrous economic policy in a nation reeling from runaway prices and shortages of basics. They want him to resign.

“The only person guilty of the chaos and violence of recent days is Nicolas Maduro,” the Justice First party said, accusing intelligence agents of taking advantage of the situation to frame opposition leaders with false evidence.

With the 100 bolivar bill originally out of circulation from Friday, many Venezuelans had found themselves unable to purchase food or fill up cars in the busy run-up to Christmas.

“As if we don’t have enough to cope with anyway, now they inflict this craziness on us,” said a grandmother in Caracas, Zoraida Gutierrez, 74, who spent a day lining up under the sun to deposit cash she had under her bed.

“It’s like a cruel joke.”

Despite Maduro’s suspension of the measure on Saturday, some businesses were still refusing the notes on Sunday.

Maduro has been urging Venezuelans to use electronic transactions instead of cash where possible, but 40 percent of the country’s 30 million people are without bank accounts.

State TV showed a plane arriving on Sunday afternoon with a first batch of new currency notes. Central Bank Vice President Jose Khan said they were 13.5 million 500 bolivar bills.

The government is introducing larger bills of up to 20,000.

With many people already skipping meals to get by and forced to sacrifice traditional Christmas food and presents, this week’s confusion has further exasperated many.

Maduro’s popularity recently hit a record low of under 20 percent, according to local pollster Datanalisis.

But Venezuelan authorities thwarted an opposition push this year for a referendum to remove him. That put Maduro on track to finish his term in early 2019 but increased the potential for social unrest due to the lack of an immediate electoral outlet.

(Additional reporting by María Ramírez in Ciudad Bolivar; Editing by Mary Milliken)

Pockets of protests, looting in Venezuela as cash dries up

Venezuelan National Guard members control the crowd as people queue to deposit their 100 bolivar notes, near Venezuela's Central Bank in Caracas, Venezuela

By Anggy Polanco and Maria Ramirez

EL PINAL/CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela (Reuters) – Small protests and looting broke out in some Venezuelan provinces on Friday due to lack of cash after the socialist government suddenly decreed this week that its largest banknote would be pulled from circulation in the midst of a punishing economic crisis.

President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday gave Venezuelans a few days to ditch the 100-bolivar bills, arguing the measure was needed to combat mafias on the Colombia border despite warnings from some economists that it risked sparking chaos.

Venezuela’s opposition says this latest measure is further evidence that Maduro is destroying the economy and must be removed. Authorities have blocked a vote against the leftist leader, however, leaving social unrest as a possible wild card in the volatile country.

With new bills, originally due on Thursday, still nowhere to be seen, many Venezuelans on Friday were unable to fill their car tank to get to work, buy breakfast, or get gifts ahead of Christmas.

Many cash machines were broken or empty, shops struggled to be paid, and tips vanished.

“We feel this is a mockery,” said bus driver Richard Montilva as he and some 400 others blocked a street outside a bank in the town of El Pinal in Tachira state near Colombia.

Maduro held up the new bills during a televised broadcast on Thursday night and said they would come into circulation soon. But there was increasing nervousness on the streets that the notes were not ready.

The circulation of the new notes “is a mystery to us too,” said a source at the central bank, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Outside the central bank in Caracas on Friday, thousands of Venezuelans queued up to swap their 100 bolivar bills before a final Tuesday deadline under the watch of National Guard soldiers. One orange and avocado vendor offered to buy them up for 80 bolivars.

Maduro’s shock decision is stoking anger among weary Venezuelans who have for years already stood in long lines for food and medicine amid product shortages and triple-digit inflation.

Six businesses in the isolated Bolivar state were looted on Friday after stores refused to accept the soon-to-be defunct bills, said the mayor of El Callao, Coromoto Lugo, who belongs to the opposition.

Maduro blames the crisis on an “economic war” waged against his government to weaken the bolivar currency and unseat him. Critics scoff at that explanation, pointing instead to state controls and excessive money printing.

“I want a change in government. I don’t care about changing the bills; they’re not worth anything anyway,” said Isabel Gonzalez, 62, standing in line at the central bank on Friday.

She said she had just enough cash to get a bus home.

(Additional reporting by Girish Gupta and Alexandra Ulmer in Caracas; Editing by Mary Milliken)

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