The long lines to obtain fuel continued today in Venezuela, for the second consecutive day, with public transport paralyzed in Carabobo (center of the country) due to the lack of the promised subsidy and complaints of lack of gas at service stations.
“I had problems because some employees were unable to come because transport is paralyzed by the lack of fuel and because the Government announced that buses would have access to subsidized gasoline, which did not happen,” explained a Portuguese trader to the Lusa agency.
Manuel Neves runs a small food distributor in Carabobo that has paid limited attention to customers.
According to the daily El Carabobeño, the stops were full of users this morning, but buses will not leave the parking lot.
The president of the Voltante Syndicate, Adolfo Alfonzo, explained to journalists that the stoppage “is not a strike”, but a protest for the lack of fuel and why it is impossible to pay for gasoline at international prices.
“We are like a boat adrift. There is no fuel and there is a lot of uncertainty about the (subsidy) they promised us ”, he said, specifying that some service stations would work exclusively for that sector, which has not yet materialized.
In Venezuela, public passenger transport works mainly with drivers’ vehicles, which are allowed to explore different routes.
According to the local press, some drivers had to pay for fuel with US dollar bills, because the payment system only works with the state-owned Banco do Tesouro, Banco de Venezuela and Banco Bicentenário and the banks only dispense 200 thousand bolivars (0 , 90 euros) which gives just two liters of gasoline, at the current price.
In Caracas, the lines for refueling were now noticeably longer, in places like El Rosal (east of the capital) where cars passed through neighboring Chacaíto and reached Sabana Grande.
Still in the capital, in the municipalities Libertador, Chacao and Baruta, users complained to journalists that they had been waiting for gas tanks for five hours because some service stations were out of fuel.
Videos posted on social networks are against the moments when the population complained about the closure of fuel stations before the scheduled time.
In one of the videos, a woman yells at a military man who has been waiting since 3:00 am (8:00 am in Lisbon) and that the bomb was closed when his turn came.
Thirty kilometers south of Caracas, drivers blocked traffic on the Pan-American road (which connects Santo António de Los Altos and Los Teques to the country’s capital), requiring gasoline.
President Nicolás Maduro announced on Saturday that as of June 1, the price of fuel would be posted for the first time in US dollars, with subsidies for some sectors through the Fatherland Card, a situation that the opposition says is discriminatory. .
“The time has come to move forward with a new policy, a new reality,” said Nicolás Maduro on Venezuelan state television, indicating that public passenger transport would have a 100% subsidy.
The increase in gasoline occurs after several weeks of fuel shortages, due to the impossibility of local refineries to continue producing.
The shortage forced drivers to queue for three and four days to fill 20 liters of fuel, often without success.
Last week five ships with fuel from Iran arrived in Venezuela, an operation that was questioned by the United States for allegedly violating regional security.
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