Statistics can describe an economic collapse, but they cannot show what it feels like to live inside one. This episode of Counting the Cost, from Al Jazeera, tries to do that. It reports from Venezuela at the height of its crisis, when the country was being described as the world’s worst economy, and it follows ordinary people through the routines that had become impossible: buying food, paying rent, getting medicine, holding a job. Venezuela was once one of Latin America’s richest countries, thanks to vast oil reserves. By 2019, it had fallen into hyperinflation, collapsing production, and shortages of food and basic goods. This chapter is about life inside those statistics, and about how people built a parallel economy to survive the official one.
The first thing to understand is what happened to money itself. A minimum wage that once supported a family stopped meaning anything, because prices rose faster than any wage could follow. Workers were paid in bolivars, and by the time they reached a shop, the price had changed. A salary that looked adequate on paper could not buy a week’s groceries, and savings set aside for years became worthless. People learned to spend money the moment they received it, to buy anything that would hold value, and to avoid holding cash at all. That is not a sign of carelessness. It is a rational response to a currency that loses value by the day. When money stops working as a store of value, people stop trusting it, and they look for something else to trust instead.
Queues, Shortages, and the Bachaqueros
The second part of daily life was the queue. Food and medicine were scarce, partly because price controls made it unprofitable to produce them, and partly because the government could no longer afford the imports that had filled the shops. People waited for hours outside supermarkets and pharmacies, often without knowing whether anything would arrive. Those lines became a feature of Venezuelan life, and a symbol of the crisis around the world. They also created a new economy of their own. The bachaqueros, named for the leaf-cutter ants that carry loads far larger than themselves, bought subsidized goods at controlled prices and resold them at a profit. To the government, they were speculators and criminals. To many buyers, they were the only reliable source of food and medicine. The line between survival and the black market blurred, and most people crossed it without thinking of themselves as criminals.
That black market was not limited to food. It covered almost everything, from dollars to medicine to gasoline, in a country that sits on the world’s largest oil reserves. People who could get dollars, usually through relatives abroad, could buy what bolivars could not. People who could not were left with the official economy, and the official economy had less and less to offer. The result was a two-tier society. Those with access to foreign currency, to a relative in Colombia or the United States, or to a job that paid in dollars, could live reasonably well. Those without that access fell into poverty. That divide cut across the old class lines. Teachers, doctors, and engineers, people who had once been securely middle class, found themselves poorer than street vendors who could earn dollars.
Dollars Under the Mattress
Dollars became the real currency of Venezuela, even though the government tried to control them. People kept dollars under the mattress, in a jar, or in a bank account abroad, and they used them for the transactions that mattered: rent, medicine, food, and school fees. The bolivar remained the official currency, and it was the currency in which the government paid its workers, but it was not the currency in which people planned their lives. That shift was a vote of no confidence, not in a political party, but in the monetary system itself. A government that prints money to pay its bills teaches its people to distrust its money, and once that trust is gone, it is very hard to restore. The film shows that process in the small details of daily life: a shopkeeper quoting prices in dollars, a family counting cash at home, a worker asking to be paid in something other than bolivars.
Remittances became a lifeline as well. Millions of Venezuelans had left the country, and many of them sent money home to parents, children, and siblings who stayed. That money paid for food, for medicine, for a bus ticket, and sometimes for the journey out of Venezuela itself. It also meant that families were divided by migration, and that the people who stayed depended on the people who left. The film follows that thread, showing how a family spread across two or three countries tries to stay together through phone calls and wire transfers. Remittances kept people alive, but they also revealed the failure at the center of the crisis. A country should not need its exiles to feed the people who remain, and a government that depends on remittances to prevent starvation has lost control of its economy in a basic sense.
A Parallel Economy, and What It Teaches
The parallel economy that Venezuelans built was creative, resilient, and deeply unequal. People traded goods, swapped services, grew food in backyards, and found ways to earn dollars through online work, through selling crafts, or through jobs in the informal sector. That creativity kept many families alive, and it is a testament to the resourcefulness of ordinary people. It also had a cost. An informal economy does not pay taxes, does not provide pensions, and does not offer the protections of a formal job. A person who survives by buying and selling on the street has no health insurance, no retirement, and no guarantee that tomorrow will be like today. The parallel economy was a survival strategy, not a solution, and the film is clear about that distinction. It honors the people who built it, and it does not pretend that it could replace a functioning economy.
The lesson of Counting the Cost is that an economic collapse is not an abstract event. It is a series of daily decisions forced on ordinary people: whether to stand in a line or pay a bachaquero, whether to spend a wage immediately or watch it lose value, whether to stay or to leave. Those decisions, repeated by millions of people, created a new Venezuela, one in which the official economy and the real economy were two different things. The government could announce a minimum wage, a price control, or a new subsidy, but the people who lived inside the crisis judged those announcements by what they could buy with them. That judgment was the real verdict on the system. Venezuela’s worst economy was not worst because of its statistics, although those were bad enough. It was worst because it made ordinary life impossible, and it forced ordinary people to invent a new economy just to survive.