President Maduro
ordered on Sunday, December 11, that the 100Bs bill, the highest
denomination bill in Venezuela, be taken out of circulation within 72 hours.
The reason behind the measure is a complicated conspiracy theory which involves
the US Department of Treasury, the Colombian government, “Money Mafias”
operating in the Colombia-Venezuelan border, unnamed NGOs, and the local
opposition.
Here are some of the explanations
of this conspiracy as given by government officials and the State media apparatus.
The Popular Power
Minister for Interior Relations, Justice and Peace, Mayor General Néstor
Reverol Torres, has been put by President Maduro in charge of the “money
exchange” operation involving the 100bs bills. He explained that the US
Department of Treasury has hired local NGOs to “extract” Venezuelan money in
order to destabilize its economy.
Reverol quotes from research
which, according to him, shows that “huge amounts of cash” has been taken out
from the country with the aim of “draining all the circulating money and suffocating
the national financial system.” The local NGOs (funded by the Treasury
Department) hire local criminal gangs that take out the 100Bs bills through
Colombia. These bills end up in storage facilities in Europe. Switzerland,
Poland, Ukraine, Spain, Germany, and the Czech Republic are some of the countries
in which, according to Reverol, these money stockpiles have been detected.
The Minister also
explained that this same conspiracy has been active before against countries
such as Libya and Iraq, “in order to bring down their governments through a
non-conventional war. The [the conspirators] call it the Redemption Operation.”
News outlet Telesur backs this claim by entitling their report in English on
the issue “Currency
War in Venezuela Also Used Against Iraq and Libya.”
The conspirators seem
willing to take on huge losses in order to destabilize the Venezuelan economy.
Reverol said that there is an agreement between the local NGOs and the
conspirators that, once the Venezuelan government is toppled, “for every 100Bs
bill they [the NGOs] take out, they [the conspirators] give them [between] 80 dollars
cents to 1,30$.” Individual citizens get payed less, according to Reverol, “for
each 100Bs. bill they take to Colombia, they are deposited in their accounts
120Bs. This is also part of the destabilization plan.”
The conspirators
however are able to cut losses by turning the 100bs bills into counterfeit dollar
bills. This is possible, according to the government, because of the high
quality and durability of Venezuela’s paper money.
The chief of the pro-government
block in the National Assembly, PSUV deputy, Hector Rodríguez, has congratulated
the President for the measure and claimed that already today (December 12) “we
are witnessing the fall of the big mafias.” He also said that “the people have
complete knowledge of how these cash mafias operate and how they affect the
economy, and of the need to take measures in order to defend the people against
sectors of the right who are waging this economic war.”
President Maduro also
announced that the Venezuelan-Colombian border will remain closed for the next
72 hours (since December 12), in order to avoid what he said are the “repatriation”
of cash attempts by the mafias. “These mafias have all gone like crazy. Just
this morning, in the early hours, we captured 64 million bolivars coming into
the country by back roads; this is why I have decided to again close the
frontier with Colombia for 72 hours.”
Colombia plays and
important part in this cash conspiracy, according to Venezuelan officials and
State media. A press
release issued yesterday by the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry asking the
Colombian government to derogate its “Resolution 8”, which according to the
Venezuelan government allows for the operation of money exchange houses on the Colombian
side of the border and the existence of a “double
exchange system” in Colombia.
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