Venezuelans Offer Rent-a-Baby Service to Skip Shopping Lines

[Bacchus4.0]

http://panampost.com/sabrina-martin/2015/02/09/venezuelans-offer-rent-a-baby-service-to-skip-shopping-lines/

Lining up to buy basic goods in Venezuela is no longer just a daily routine: it has also led to a new, creative way of making money. Local media have reported various new examples of entrepreneurial spirit amid the scarcity, including families setting their children to work as a “passport” for people to hire and use to skip lines.

On Thursday, it came to light that that many Venezuelan parents are bringing their kids to stores to “rent out” their talents for tantrums. Police or military officials guarding the entrance to thinly stocked supermarkets then feel obliged to let parents carrying crying babies past. Apparently wailing newborns are in particularly high demand, whose skill in helping their “parents” skip the line can fetch their real family up to US$2 a time.

Ruth Palma, president of the municipal council for children’s rights in Girardot, Aragua State, said on Thursday that there are several legal norms that punish those who use their children as “tools,” including the loss of custody and up to three years in jail.

Shopper Nohami Guzmán meanwhile told local daily El Siglo, with her baby in her arms, that she’d brought him to the line for several reasons, not least because she had no one to look after him. “This is a quicker way to get in, and we have some privileges in the lines,” she said. “And whenever I go to buy diapers they always ask me for the birth certificate,” the young mother added.

[Judi Lynn]

1. How wonderful this is for their own children. What kind if people are they, anyway? Ugly. n/t

[Bacchus4.0]

2. People that are desperate for food. What kind of people are chavistas that ignore

the urgent need of the people to acquire basic necessities?

[Judi Lynn]

3. You don't traumatize a baby or small child by renting it out so it can get upset & pitch tantrums.nt

[Bacchus4.0]

4. well, if there was adequate supply of food, they wouldn't have to n/t

[hack89]

5. Desperate people do desperate things.

and there are a lot of desperate people in VZ. Don't you agree?

[Bacchus4.0]

6. Its a situation exclusively created by the government. One can't live on the current $1/day salary

or afford to wait in line for 8 hrs like JL thinks they should.

I would suggest that Venezuela up their purchases of products from their two biggest trading partners, Colombia and the US in order to be able to adequately provide their people with basic needs. Seizing bank accounts of corrupt chavista officials, raising gas prices, and the resignation of Maduro and the chavista leadership would be a good start. The government that comes in after Maduro is going to have a monumental task of restoring governance in the country after what the inept criminal chavista regime and their pendejo supporters did.

[Marksman_91]

7. The only thing that worries me is how long exactly it'll take to recover

Chavismo has done a lot of damage, especially in the last couple of years under the Nincompoop's "leadership." Hopefully when a new government that doesn't threaten to arbitrarily seize people's property and businesses, and doesn't implement such harsh exchange rate controls, the tens of thousands of well-prepared and educated Venezuelans living abroad will return and start an unprecedented wave of restoration.

[Bacchus4.0]

8. Lets hope Venezuela returns to stability and sanity n/t