ML-Implode News - Venezuela's Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama

On his lunch breaks from the hardware section, Mr. DÃaz, 60 years old, does more than anyone else to set the price of everything from rice to aspirin to cars in his native Venezuela, influencing the inflation rate and swaying millions of dollars of daily currency transactions.
How? He is president of one of Venezuela's most popular and insurgent websites, DolarToday.com, which provides a benchmark exchange rate used by his compatriots to buy and sell black-market dollars. That allows them to bypass some of the world's most rigid currency controls.
...
Mr. DÃaz is a U.S.-trained retired colonel, and he indeed tried to overthrow Mr. Maduro's predecessor, Hugo ChÃ¡vez, by participating in a short-lived coup in 2002. Mr. DÃaz, who had been deputy security chief to the businessman who briefly took power in the ill-fated overthrow, said his conspiring days are over.

Now, he said, he is fighting for economic freedom and for Venezuelans' access to information in a country that makes financial and other data secret. Venezuela is undergoing a brutal recession that has made it hard for most of the country's 30 million people to find enough food and medicine.

"It's ironic that with DolarToday in Alabama, I do more damage to the government than I did as a military man in Venezuela," said Mr. DÃaz, a short, soft-spoken man with a gray mane.

Relevant:

Venezuela's Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama