This week, Venezuela's government raised the minimum wage by 26.3% to $240 a month, responding to protests over low pay and crushing inflation. Fletcher and Octavio use this moment to dig into how Venezuela, once one of Latin America's wealthiest countries, became a place where millions of people cannot afford to eat.
Esta semana, el gobierno venezolano subió el salario mínimo un 26,3% a 240 dólares al mes, en respuesta a protestas por los bajos salarios y la alta inflación. Fletcher y Octavio usan este momento para explorar cómo Venezuela, uno de los países más ricos de América Latina, llegó a ser un lugar donde millones de personas no pueden permitirse comer.
6 essential B1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| aguantar | to endure, to put up with, to hold | Los venezolanos tuvieron que aguantar muchos años de crisis alimentaria. |
| escasez | shortage, scarcity | La escasez de alimentos fue el problema más grave de Venezuela. |
| inflación | inflation | La inflación en Venezuela destruyó el valor del salario mínimo. |
| mercado negro | black market | Cuando no había comida en las tiendas, la gente compraba en el mercado negro. |
| expropiar | to expropriate, to seize | El gobierno decidió expropiar las haciendas más grandes del país. |
| bachaquero | food black market trader (Venezuelan slang, from 'bachaco,' a large leaf-cutter ant) | Los bachaqueros compraban arroz barato y lo vendían más caro en la calle. |
I want to talk about hunger.
Not the skip-breakfast kind.
The kind where you lie awake calculating whether you can afford cooking oil this week.
Venezuela subió el salario mínimo esta semana.
Venezuela raised the minimum wage this week.
Un aumento de casi el 26 por ciento, a 240 dólares al mes.
An increase of nearly 26 percent, to 240 dollars a month.
El gobierno dijo que fue una respuesta a las protestas.
The government said it was a response to the protests.
Two hundred and forty dollars a month.
And you have to understand, in a country where inflation has been running in the hundreds of percent per year for over a decade, that number lands very differently than it sounds.
Claro.
Exactly.
Y las pensiones subieron a 70 dólares al mes.
And pensions went up to 70 dollars a month.
Setenta dólares.
Seventy dollars.
Para un anciano que vivió toda su vida en un país rico, eso es humillante.
For an elderly person who lived their whole life in a wealthy country, that is humiliating.
That's the thing that keeps pulling at me.
Venezuela was not a poor country.
It was fabulously, almost absurdly wealthy for most of the twentieth century.
Largest proven oil reserves on the planet.
Sí.
Yes.
Y cuando yo era joven, los venezolanos viajaban mucho a España.
And when I was young, Venezuelans traveled a lot to Spain.
Había un dicho: 'Ta barato, dame dos.' Significa: está barato, dame dos.
There was a saying: 'Ta barato, dame dos.' It means: it's cheap, give me two.
Gastaban mucho dinero.
They spent a lot of money.
And now you've got pensioners trying to survive on seventy dollars.
What does that actually buy you in Caracas right now?
Muy poco.
Very little.
Un kilo de carne puede costar 4 o 5 dólares.
A kilo of meat can cost 4 or 5 dollars.
El arroz, la harina, el aceite, todo es caro porque la inflación destruyó el sistema de precios durante años.
Rice, flour, oil, everything is expensive because inflation destroyed the price system for years.
So seventy dollars gets you maybe fifteen kilos of the cheapest protein available, and that's before you buy anything else.
That is a food crisis, not a wage dispute.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y lo peor es que Venezuela tenía muy buena tierra para cultivar.
And the worst part is that Venezuela had very good land for farming.
Tiene de todo: montañas, valles, ríos, un clima perfecto para la agricultura.
It has everything: mountains, valleys, rivers, a perfect climate for agriculture.
Pero dejaron de producir comida hace muchos años.
But they stopped producing food many years ago.
This is the petrostate trap, and Venezuela fell into it harder than almost anywhere else.
When oil is worth enough, why bother growing your own food?
You just import it.
The problem is when the oil stops paying for everything.
Venezuela importaba casi el 70 por ciento de su comida cuando el petróleo era caro.
Venezuela imported almost 70 percent of its food when oil was expensive.
Cuando los precios bajaron en 2014, fue un desastre total.
When prices fell in 2014, it was a complete disaster.
No había dólares para importar y no había agricultura para compensar.
There were no dollars to import and no agriculture to compensate.
And I want to be clear about what 2014 to, say, 2018 actually looked like on the ground, because I think people outside Venezuela lost track of how extreme this got.
La gente hacía colas de horas para comprar comida básica.
People queued for hours to buy basic food.
Harina de maíz, leche, azúcar.
Cornmeal, milk, sugar.
Y muchas veces, cuando llegaban al frente de la cola, no quedaba nada.
And many times, when they reached the front of the queue, there was nothing left.
There were studies, serious epidemiological studies, showing the average Venezuelan lost eleven pounds of body weight in a single year.
They called it the Maduro diet.
It was not a joke.
No, no era un chiste.
No, it was not a joke.
Conozco a personas que salieron de Venezuela en esos años.
I know people who left Venezuela in those years.
Me dijeron que sus hijos comían una sola vez al día.
They told me their children ate once a day.
Una vez.
Once.
The emigration numbers from that period are staggering.
Something like eight million people left Venezuela between 2015 and 2025.
That's almost a quarter of the entire population.
And food, or the absence of it, was one of the main reasons.
En España, en Madrid especialmente, hay una comunidad venezolana muy grande.
In Spain, in Madrid especially, there is a very large Venezuelan community.
Muchos son profesionales: médicos, ingenieros, profesores.
Many are professionals: doctors, engineers, teachers.
Personas que tuvieron que dejar todo por no poder comer bien.
People who had to leave everything because they could not eat properly.
The brain drain is its own catastrophe, right?
You lose your doctors and your engineers, and then your capacity to recover collapses even further.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y el gobierno respondió a la crisis alimentaria con los CLAP.
And the government responded to the food crisis with the CLAP.
Son cajas de comida que el gobierno distribuye directamente a las familias.
These are food boxes that the government distributes directly to families.
Arroz, harina, aceite, pasta.
Rice, flour, oil, pasta.
The CLAP boxes.
I've read about these.
The government controls who gets them, which turns food distribution into a political instrument.
You support the government, you eat.
You don't, you wait.
Es un control muy poderoso.
It is a very powerful form of control.
La comida como política.
Food as politics.
No es nuevo en la historia, pero en Venezuela es muy visible.
It is not new in history, but in Venezuela it is very visible.
Las personas que criticaban al gobierno, a veces, no recibían su caja.
People who criticized the government sometimes did not receive their box.
That is a very old playbook.
I saw versions of it in places like Iraq and Syria.
Control the food supply and you control the population in a way that's much harder to resist than any army.
Y al mismo tiempo, apareció un mercado negro de comida.
And at the same time, a black market for food appeared.
La gente compraba productos en las tiendas del gobierno y los vendía más caros en la calle.
People bought products in government stores and sold them at higher prices on the street.
A estas personas las llaman 'bachaqueros'.
These people are called 'bachaqueros'.
Bachaqueros.
Where does that word come from?
Del bachaco.
From the bachaco.
Es una hormiga grande de América del Sur que puede llevar muchas veces su propio peso.
It is a large ant from South America that can carry many times its own weight.
Los bachaqueros hacían lo mismo: cargaban grandes cantidades de comida de un lugar a otro.
The bachaqueros did the same: they carried large quantities of food from one place to another.
That is a perfect word.
Whoever coined that was a poet.
A dark poet, but still.
Los venezolanos son muy creativos con el idioma.
Venezuelans are very creative with language.
Cuando la situación es terrible, el humor y las palabras nuevas ayudan a sobrevivir.
When the situation is terrible, humor and new words help you survive.
Now, the situation has shifted somewhat since those worst years.
Dollarization helped stabilize things a little.
You can walk into supermarkets in Caracas today and find products that simply didn't exist five years ago.
But that creates its own problem.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Ahora hay dos países dentro de Venezuela.
Now there are two countries inside Venezuela.
Las personas que tienen dólares pueden comer bien.
People who have dollars can eat well.
Las personas que no tienen dólares, y la mayoría no los tiene, siguen sufriendo.
People who don't have dollars, and most people don't, are still suffering.
And that's the bitter irony of this week's wage announcement.
Two hundred and forty dollars sounds like a raise.
But if you're paid in bolivars, as most public sector workers are, and inflation keeps eroding the exchange rate, that number can shrink by twenty percent before the month is even over.
Y Venezuela todavía no produce suficiente comida propia.
And Venezuela still does not produce enough of its own food.
El problema original, la dependencia del petróleo para importar, todavía existe.
The original problem, the dependence on oil to import food, still exists.
Cambiar eso necesita años de inversión en agricultura.
Changing that needs years of investment in agriculture.
Which raises the question I always come back to with these stories: what would it actually take to rebuild Venezuelan agriculture?
Because the knowledge has emigrated, the equipment has broken down, and the institutions have collapsed.
Es una pregunta muy difícil.
It is a very difficult question.
El campo venezolano tuvo muchos problemas durante el gobierno de Chávez.
The Venezuelan countryside had many problems during Chávez's government.
Hubo expropiaciones de haciendas grandes.
There were expropriations of large farms.
Muchos agricultores expertos salieron del país.
Many experienced farmers left the country.
I spent a week in the Llanos back in 2004, the great plains of Venezuela.
It was extraordinary country.
Cattle ranches the size of small European nations, some of the most fertile land in South America.
Two years later, Chávez started nationalizing them.
La idea era buena en teoría: dar la tierra a los campesinos pobres.
The idea was good in theory: give the land to poor farmers.
El problema fue la ejecución.
The problem was the execution.
Muchas haciendas productivas se convirtieron en tierras abandonadas porque los nuevos dueños no tenían recursos ni experiencia.
Many productive farms became abandoned land because the new owners had no resources or experience.
You cannot redistribute the land and then not follow through with credit, machinery, and training.
That's the lesson that got learned and ignored and re-learned across Latin America throughout the entire twentieth century.
Y ahora el resultado es que Venezuela, con tanta tierra buena y tanta lluvia y tanto sol, compra arroz de Brasil y pasta de Colombia.
And now the result is that Venezuela, with so much good land and so much rain and so much sun, buys rice from Brazil and pasta from Colombia.
Es una situación casi imposible de creer.
It is a situation that is almost impossible to believe.
Octavio, you used a phrase earlier that I want to go back to.
You said 'aguantamos,' talking about how Venezuelans cope with impossible situations.
That word does a lot of work, doesn't it?
'Aguantar' es un verbo muy español, pero en Venezuela tiene un significado especial.
'Aguantar' is a very Spanish verb, but in Venezuela it has a special meaning.
Significa soportar algo difícil durante mucho tiempo.
It means to endure something difficult for a long time.
'Aguantamos el hambre.' Aguantamos la situación.
'We endured the hunger.' We endured the situation.
Tiene mucha fuerza emocional.
It has a lot of emotional force.
It's interesting because the closest English equivalent might be 'to put up with something,' but that feels passive, almost resentful.
Aguantar sounds more like a quiet, deliberate act of will.
Sí, exactamente.
Yes, exactly.
'Endure' en inglés es similar.
'Endure' in English is similar.
Pero aguantar también puede ser físico: 'esta silla no aguanta mi peso.' O emocional: 'no aguanto más esta situación.' Sirve para todo.
But aguantar can also be physical: 'this chair cannot hold my weight.' Or emotional: 'I cannot take this situation anymore.' It works for everything.
So when a Venezuelan says 'aguantamos,' they're not just describing survival.
They're describing a whole posture toward life under pressure.
I'm going to use that word wrong within thirty seconds of trying it, aren't I.
Probablemente.
Probably.
Pero al menos no vas a decir que estás embarazado esta vez.
But at least you're not going to say you're pregnant this time.