Venezuela triples minimum wage to 86p a month as inflation soars 25,000 PERCENT

President Nicolas Maduro said workers would also receive 2.2 million bolivars in meal tickets, taking total minimum wage compensation to 5.2 million bolivars — around $1.98 per month on the black market.

The once-prosperous OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) country’s annual inflation is now nearly 25,000 percent, according the opposition-run legislature, and citizens face chronic shortages of food and medicine.

With the country’s prospects continuing to deteriorate, troops have now been deployed to 100 food markets in an effort to counter the “economic war” it says is being waged against its people.

President Nicolás Maduro has said sellers are charging over the odds for price-controlled items, but blamed international sanctions and “greedy businesspeople” for the shortages.

He said: “The take-over of the municipal markets has been a huge success. A great number of mafiosi, wholesalers, thieves and capitalists have been arrested.

“We found everything there, even prostitution.”

The “economic war” in Venezuela is now at the apex of a socioeconomic and political crisis that Venezuela has undergone since Hugo Chávez’s tenure.

Between 2013 and 2017, the oil-rich nation’s gross domestic product contracted more aggressively that the economies of the US during the Great Depression, and the fall of Communism in Russia, Cuba, and Albania.

During 2016 the scarcity of food and basic goods led to an approximate 800 percent rise in consumer goods, while job losses and a fall in industrial output shrank the economy by over 18 percent.

According to study published on 2018 by three Venezualan universities, almost 90 percent of the Venezuelan population now lives in poverty and as the economic downturn bites, the murder rate of 90 per 100,000 people, remains on the rise according to the Observatory of Venezuelan Violence.