And greenbacks are king in Venezuela, the year-old prostitute says. Prostitutes more than double their earnings by moonlighting as currency traders in Puerto Cabello. Black market. 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 was 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.
The Blue House brothel is clean and well-kept, with a patio and kitchen where women get three meals a day. Outside, the squares and cobbled streets of the colonial centre stand in ruins, with the smell of sewage pervading the piles of garbage. The bolivar wages of my uncles and cousins barely mean anything now. They also help foreigners arrange rooms, telephone cards and taxis, charging them in dollars and then paying the landlords and drivers in bolivars.
Dollar stint. A typical stint with a dollar-paying foreigner would earn a prostitute about 6, bolivars in fees and currency exchange arbitrage in the black market. The same service paid in bolivars, which Elena and her friends would grudgingly accept as a last resort, would earn them 3, bolivars. The jump in prices, mounting shortages and a crime wave have fuelled three months of anti-government protests that have cost the lives of at least 42 people.
