Caracas (AFP)

A woman gets on the bus and hands a dollar bill to the driver who gives her change with a wad of bolivars: in Caracas, where liquidity in local currencies has almost disappeared, it is in the private buses that crisscross the city. town that the inhabitants stock up on.

"We have turned into a bureau de change!" Says Marcelo Morett, who drives his own bus.

In the absence of a public transport company, the service is in fact provided in Caracas by small entrepreneurs organized in cooperatives for each line.

It is now the only sector, for lack of an alternative, which still uses the local currency in cash.

The bolivar "only allows the bus trip (...) it's the only thing you can buy with", Lisbeth Leal, 39, confirms to AFP.

Both the passenger and the driver benefit.

By paying for the bus ticket costing 150,000 bolivares (9 cents of dollars) with a dollar bill, the passenger receives 1.3 million bolivars in change.

It thus ensures enough to pay for ten trips and avoids the endless queues in front of the banks.

The latter deliver at the counter only 400,000 bolivares a day, in a town where the vending machines are almost all out of service.

As for the drivers, faced with the difficulty of having access to bolivares, the exchange applied with the dollar is about 30% lower than the official rate, a godsend.

But behind the wheel, Marcelo Morett fears that sooner or later the lack of liquidity will make his work impossible: "Every time (the dollar rate) rises, we must return even more bolivars".

The currency has already lost 38.14% since the start of 2021, after falling 95.7% in 2020.

- Baguette -

Faced with this permanent tumble and inflation out of control, Venezuelans are turning more and more to the dollar.

This crisis of confidence in the currency is fueled by the worst economic crisis in recent Venezuelan history.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of the South American country, once one of the most prosperous in Latin America, fell by half between 2013 and 2019.

Faced with this informal dollarization of the economy, traders are forced to exclusively use electronic payment methods for sales in bolivares.

Even for very small amounts like the price of a baguette.

Inside the country, intercity buses charge for journeys in Bolivares using all kinds of digital tools, including payments by mobile phone.

But this type of transaction, where you have to type in your identity card number and then a password, is just impossible in the crowded buses of the capital, where passenger flows remain important despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

Socialist President Nicolas Maduro, who himself called dollarization a "valve" in the face of US economic sanctions, has promised a magnetic card system for payments on Caracas buses.

But for economist Jesus Casique, "that will not solve anything".

"The basic problem remains: the Central Bank continues to monetize the deficit (...) and the government, instead of correcting the imbalances in the economy, worsens them," he said to AFP.

While 65.9% of commercial transactions in Venezuela are now carried out in dollars, half of the population does not have regular access to the greenback, according to the Ecoanalitica firm.

The phenomenon, warns Jesus Casique, worsens social divides, knowing that four in five Venezuelans have insufficient income to buy food, according to a study by the country's main universities.

"There are passengers who barter (...), they give you a small kilo of rice. You make them pay the price of the ticket and you give them the difference" in bolivares, recounts Marcelo Morett.

© 2021 AFP