The delegate of my constituency often receives complaints from his constituents, who send him the names and addresses of businesses that do not comply with the price ceilings for food products such as chicken or others. He sends them to the deputy municipal superintendent in charge of the economy; with a little luck, the inspectors go there, issue fines, and a few days later he receives the same complaint again, even from the same place.

It’s like a war of attrition to see who gets tired first. And to be honest, it looks like the vendors are winning the battle.

The recent national exercise to prevent and combat crime, corruption, illegalities and social indiscipline, organized by the Ministry of Finance and Prices (MFP) during the last week of March, showed the magnitude of the problem. In just six days, almost 39,000 price violations were detected and more than 36,000 fines were imposed, amounting to more than 131 million pesos. And this was a war with a warning! Because in most of the stores it was known that this was the week of the «operation».

The reality is that there is not enough consistency in these enforcement efforts. For example, in evaluating this national exercise, the MFP rated the detection of retail price violations as «weak» in more than half of the provinces.

Not even for this week-long combat raid was it possible to get more than 60% of the 7,332 inspectors in the country to participate. What were those absent doing for so many days? We do not know. Unfortunately, we do not count on the very negative criteria that exist in many places about the performance of these inspection bodies.

In this scenario, citizens must continue to be the first and foremost resistance. It is true that most of the time we are hostages of a captive and undersupplied market, which puts us in the hands of our own victimizers, who cheat us with their abusive and speculative prices. But whenever possible, we must punish them for the only reason they seem to understand: if you steal from me without compassion, I won’t buy from you. And I tell them so. So they won’t be surprised when the next inspection comes.