Venezuelan Prostitutes Earn More Selling Dollars Than Sex

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-09/venezuela-prostitutes-earn-more-selling-dollars-than-sex.html



-------------------------------------------

The benefits of the trade are stacked around Elena’s room in the Blue House brothel -- bags of rice, flour, sugar and cooking oil -- products that other Venezuelans have to line up for hours to buy at regulated prices in shops, if they can find them at all.

----------------
The dollar shortage is turning Venezuela into a two-tier society similar to the Soviet Union and Cuba, said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Those with access to dollars such as prostitutes, tour agents, airport taxi drivers and expatriates are able to shield themselves from inflation by trading their greenbacks at ever higher rates. Those who can’t are seeing their living standards decline.


Prostitution has become the only boom industry in Venezuela’s biggest port. The Blue House brothel is clean and well-kept, with a patio and kitchen where women get three meals a day. Outside, the squares and cobbled streets of the colonial center stand in ruins, with the smell of sewage pervading the piles of garbage.

Prostitutes in Puerto Cabello charge sailors a fixed rate of $60 per hour. They also help foreigners arrange rooms, telephone cards and taxis, charging them in dollars and then paying the landlords and drivers in bolivars.

Dollar Stint
A typical stint with a dollar-paying foreigner would earn a prostitute about 6,800 bolivars in fees and currency exchange arbitrage in the black market. The same service paid in bolivars, which Elena and her friends would grudgingly accept as a last resort, would earn them 3,000 bolivars.