More on the Financial Blockade

Yesterday president Maduro again insisted that Venezuela is suffering a “financial blockade” by world markets.

“We have a financial blockade against Venezuela to block our access to the funds we need to overcome the decrease of oil revenues,” the president told supporters at the closing of the First Congress of Social Movements of the Great Patriotic Pole.

According to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias,  Maduro explained that “the mechanism of the blockade consists in the increase of the risk assessments of Venezuela by world market qualifying agencies, with the aim of obstructing the country’s access to foreign currency.”

Maduro complained that Venezuela is being asked to pay higher interest rates than countries “that are at war or suffering from the scourge of Ebola. (…) They want us to pay 35% when other countries pay 6%.”

The president also denied the existence of a black market dollar, instead he claimed that it is part of an “economic war” waged against Venezuela by “the right”: “the parallel dollar doesn’t exist in Venezuela’s economic reality, they want to impose it on us an instrument of the financial, monetary, psychological, and political war,” declared Maduro.