CARACAS (Reuters) – The largest goods market in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, is in the midst of an exacerbated COVID-19 epidemic, but traders who lose cash refuse to avoid food promotion for the city’s five million residents, many of whom are starving.
Three days a week, compared to six before the pandemic, some 10,000 people, adding up shops and consumers, pack their bags at the state wholesale car market. The products are transported by truck to the city’s supermarkets, offering a lifeguard amid Venezuela’s six-year economic crisis.
“Caracas has this market,” his manager Walter Rivera said in an interview, adding that about 17,000 tons of goods are sold a month.
But the outdoor bazaar, where others pay little attention to social estrangement even though most are dressed in masks, is interrupting the government’s efforts of President Nicolás Maduro to prevent an increasing number of coronavirus cases from overloading Venezuela’s deteriorating fitness system. So far, the government has shown 20,206 instances and 174 deaths, the opposition and medical NGOs warn that the evidence is insufficient.
On July 29, the government limited the opening hours of the capital’s wholesale markets between 2pm and 2pm.
Car is a “potential for strong contagion” due to its lack of social estrangement, José Manuel Olivares, fitness advisor to opposition leader Juan Guaidó, said in an interview.
Maduro ordered serious lockout measures in March that curbed the spread of the virus, but the shortage of raw materials forced many investors to return to wholesale markets for a living.
“If you don’t pass out every day, you don’t eat,” said Moses Rojas, 23, who sells carrots, potatoes and onions to Car.
Rojas, one of 3,500 employees on the market, said that in the days leading up to the pandemic, it could sell only 3 bags of five-kilogram carrots. Now you can sell five kilos.
Some traders who carried bags and pushed cars into the market said they feared they were infected, but were more involved in the government preventing them from working.
“It would be for us,” said Angel Serrano, who spent 32 of his 44 years promoting there. “He supports us all here.”
Car Manager Rivera said 4,500 rapid antibody tests had been conducted in recent weeks, with a positive result. “We’re running to keep them out of the final market,” he said.
Written through Angus Berwick; Edited by Brian Ellsworth and Richard Chang
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