THE queue is perhaps a thousand people long. It snakes around the dusty, rubbish-strewn back lot of a giant supermarket in the heart of Caracas, Venezuela’s cap

THE queue is perhaps a thousand people long. It snakes around the dusty, rubbish-strewn back lot of a giant supermarket in the heart of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. ... “I came here for milk,” says a young mother from El Valle, a working-class district a few kilometres to the south-west. “In El Valle, there’s nothing.” She is carrying a tiny baby, while her four-year-old daughter helps with the modest purchases she has managed to make. Today the Bicentenario has sugar, maize flour, chicken and toilet paper at giveaway, government-controlled prices—but no milk. It is 9.30am and customers who began queuing at six o’clock are just emerging. Hundreds more wait outside a narrow gate in the 3-metre-high railings around the lot. Uniformed police keep order; most customers seem resigned rather than belligerent. http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21640395-government-offers-no-solutions-mounting-economic-crisis-empty-shelves-and-rhetoric http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21640395-government-o...