Latin Correspondent | Venezuelan state ‘pop-up shops’ offer affordable food staples – if you can catch them
Every three days or so, a line of people forms behind a semi truck in Plaza Vicente in the western Venezuelan city of Mérida. On a recent Tuesday, palettes stacked with ultra-pasteurized milk, flour, sugar and other essentials were unloaded from a Hamburg Süd cargo container and sold on the street for about half the supermarket price.
This isn’t the work of contraband smugglers, though. It’s all completely legal, brought to the community by the Venezuelan Production and Food Distribution (PDVAL) network.