Caracas, Aug 24 (EFE).– Shoppers have been banned from lining up overnight in front of Caracas supermarkets because many among them are speculators who cause product scarcities in regular stores, make illegal sales at inflated prices, and sell contraband to Colombia, the head of government of the Capital District, Juan Dugarte, said.

“Standing in line outside of store hours is now forbidden,” because managers, cashiers and other supermarket employees, along with food-product distributors, tip off speculators beforehand about upcoming deliveries of consumer goods, which by law must be sold at low prices,” Dugarte told Televen on Sunday.

The official, however, did not say when the measure would take effect.

All this is part of the “economic war” that, he said, the opposition has declared against President Nicolas Maduro and that to deal with it, “people’s brigades have been formed” to impose “permanent supervision.”

The Venezuelan opposition, which blames the problem on the authorities’ inefficiency and corruption, is accused by the government of seeking to spread so much unrest that it will spark a popular uprising.

In Venezuela it has become customary to see long lines of people waiting to buy goods produced domestically and those imported by the government or by business owners who obtain foreign currency from the state to do so, and that 40 percent of those products are smuggled out of the country to Colombia, officials said.

For that reason and others, including the current surge of citizens’ insecurity, Maduro closed last Wednesday a stretch of the border with Colombia, which he said will only be reopened when both nations agree on new regulations for border crossings of people and legally traded goods.

Dugarte told Televen that he is also the civil head of the “Joint Chiefs of Staff against the Economic War,” a team recently created by Maduro, and in that position he will “make it understood once and for all that the people may not exploit the people.”

“There are many factors that lead to scarcities and contraband and we cannot criminalize those who sell (in illegal markets what they acquired in legal markets), and we also have to see who sold the goods to them, who lent themselves to doing it,” Dugarte said.

A number of measures have been adopted or will be adopted “to attack the corruption that has been growing within this war,” which includes selling “out the back door” of markets, Dugarte said. EFE