Source: Anibal Barreto, Correo de Caroni, via Feathers

In the slums of Caracas, Chavista grocery patrons are now being branded on their bellies (food goes into your belly, right?) with indelible ink by store personnel to ensure that they do not buy more chicken than the government arbitrarily allows.

Since at least the beginning of the year, Venezuela’s groceries have been wracked by food shortages due to Chavista price controls and controls on foreign currency. Beef, sugar, pork and coffee have disappeared from store shelves. Meanwhile, at state-controlled Chavista stores, known as Mercal, poor people have been buying up Chavez’s below-market rate foods and selling them at street stalls at their real value according to market demand, something that brings them a profit. Not surprisingly, many Mercal store shelves are empty.

That’s where this belly-branding scheme comes in. Some Chavistas functionaries are angry at the market forces that drives these shortages and have decided to take control. That’s why they’ve decided to force poor people, like cattle, to submit to a sort of ink branding on their bellies, to control just how much chicken they purchase. It probably goes for other products, too.

What it really amounts to is the first steps toward rationing of food, the logical consequences of turning Venezuela’s once-abundant agricultural production (the Venzuelan Agriculture Department is now under the control of Cuban party hacks) into the same disaster Zimbabwe is.

But although this dynamic resembles the exact same failed socialist policies of old, there’s something new and unique about it, this branding policy is spectacularly degrading. Stalin never came up with this. Castro never did either. But the thuggish government of Hugo Chavez has. It’s like marking people as cattle. I’ve never seen anything so disgusting. Chavez is treating the poor he champions …. literally …. like animals.

If you can read Spanish, the original item and photo can be read through the link here or here.

And check out Citizen Feather’s blog’s excellent take on this new repulsive low in Chavista food economics here.