By Dean Graber
As part of an offensive against the black market for dollars, President Hugo Chávez urged supporters to use Twitter to blow the whistle on currency speculators and warned that illegal trading sites could be shut down the Associated Press reports.
"Venezuelan authorities began raiding currency trading offices last week and arrested a man who posts black-market rates for currency on the Internet," the AP's Christopher Toothaker reports. "Jaime Renteria, 52, is apparently the first person arrested for illegal currency trading under Chavez's new crackdown, which has been prompted by a sharp decline in the free-market value of the bolivar."
Chávez urged Venezuelans to use his Twitter account to report people who offer dollars at other prices, the official Boliviarian News Agency says.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
