More and more economic war

President Maduro arrived in Caracas yesterday from his trip to China, Russia and several OPEC countries and declared that the opposition had attempted to sabotage his tour: “I knew that the right would go crazy once I had announced the tour. The first thing they tried to do was to sabotage the tour. [But] I had to do this tour, (…) the oligarchic right was not going to sabotage it.”

Maduro also assured that, in face of the economic war the government claims is being waged against Venezuela, the country needs to make “an economic transition to a productive socialism.” He therefore announced that he would be calling wholesale distributors to the presidential palace of Miraflores to make them sign an “ultimatum” to force them to stop hoarding basic products.

The web page Runrunes has published an interesting graphic showing the number of times the “economic war” has been mentioned.

According to Lisseth Boon from Runrunes the first time the term was mentioned was by Chávez in June 2, 2010. At that time the term referred to an economic war that would be waged against the bourgeoisie by the government. The term faded from use during 2011 and 2012 but resurged from January 2013 on. Since then the “economic war” has been mentioned 288.

The Runrunes graphic is very good because it puts the times the “economic war” has been mentioned against a timetable with the main economic data for the different periods. However it’s very difficult to pinpoint what constitutes a “mention” of the term because, as can be seen in previous posts of this blog, many government officials of very diverse levels make declarations about different aspects of the “economic war”. Also, public media, such as AVN and the government funded Telesur, mention the term often.