The bachaqueros, Venezuela's army of black-market shoppers, descend every day at dawn on Caracas's biggest stores.Named after the bachaco leaf-cutting ant that carries several times its weight, they queue in their hundreds for food, nappies, milk and other basic goods.They stand for hours in the blistering heat, motivated not by hunger, but profit. Half-empty shelves means goods bought at government-controlled prices can be sold at a significant mark-up.Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's president, has described them as "human beings turned savage". But with hyperinflation quickly making the cash in people's pockets worthless, it has become the only way to survive."It happens more frequently now," sighed Juan Carlos Bacalhau, a marketing manager who lives in Caracas. "There's a lady that I pay 1500 bolivars (about R2356) a day to clean my house but recently she told me she'd rather queue and buy and sell products."It wasn't always this way. Diego Moya-Ocampos, senior political risk analyst, said the current crisis was the result of years of "economic mismanagement" by the ruling socialist party.Led by Hugo Chávez, the late firebrand president, Venezuela embarked on an expropriation and redistribution wave with the charismatic leader offering cut-price appliances and even new homes to the poor. Chávez wanted to create a socialist paradise, an ideology that has been reinforced by Maduro following Chávez's death in 2013.The oil price collapse a year later served as a wake-up call for a country that chose profligacy over prudence in the hope that a rainy day would never come. Oil accounts for 98% of total exports and 59% of fiscal revenues, but Moya-Ocampos said the price slide was not the only problem."Even under Chavez and $100 a barrel oil, debt was rapidly rising and there were already food shortages. This is ultimately to do with an interventionist model that is not sustainable and has reached a tipping point," he said.Maduro's declaration of a fresh three-month state of emergency has sparked fears that the government will try to seize control of private companies. Many Venezuelans have already left, including Francisco Flores."Venezuela has taken good working companies, given them to the poor but not equipped them with the skills to run them so they go bankrupt," he said. "That's just a recipe for destroying a country."The therapist, who now lives in London, said the regime was based on a principle of keeping everyone "equal but poor".Venezuela is suffering from a deep recession and hyperinflation as the government prints money to try to plug a gap between revenues and spending that is on course to hit 25% of GDP next year. The International Monetary Fund believes growth will not get back to positive territory until the next decade, but inflation is on course to hit 4505% in 2021.Venezuela is one of the most unfriendly places in which to do business, ranking 186th among the 189 countries on the World Bank's Doing Business index.Bacalhau, 40, is one of the lucky ones. The father of two is paid in dollars which protects his family from rapid price rises. Like many middle class Venezuelans, he admitted paying bachaqueros.Although the government regulates factory gate, wholesale and consumer prices, nobody pays attention."You know how much this cost me?" asked Bacalhau, waving a plastic bag filled with toilet rolls. "9000 bolivars".The average monthly salary in Venezuela is 15000 bolivars.The government is desperately trying to reduce its imports in order to close the massive black hole that has opened up in the country's public finances. Its efforts have surprised everyone."We've had a 40% year-on-year contraction in the first three months of this year, which takes the first quarter back to the same level of imports we had in 2004," said Alejandro Arreaza, an economist at Barclays."If we keep on going at this pace that would represent a contraction of almost £20-billion. These are very aggressive cuts."..