Gustavo Díaz
Gustavo Alberto Díaz Vivas (born c. 1956) is a former Venezuelan army officer, CEO of an automobile distributor, and the founder of DolarToday.com, a website accused of undermining the monetary policy of that country's socialist government.
Diaz is the son of former Venezuelan navy admiral Manuel Diaz Ugueto, who headed the security detail for former president Rafael Caldera. He graduated 75th in his July 1979 class from the Academia Militar de Venezuela and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
As a colonel in the army, Díaz joined his superiors in staging a military coup against then-president Hugo Chávez in 2002 and was assigned to new president Pedro Carmona's security detail. The new government was swiftly forced out by soldiers loyal to Chavez, however. Though the country's "Supreme Tribunal" reversed criminal charges, Díaz lost his commission. He joined the massive group of protesters occupying Plaza Altimira to protest Chavez's nationalization of the country's oil production and published numerous writings critical of the government. For his activism he was declared an "enemy of the state" and received frequent threats of retribution. The stress led his wife to divorce him in April 2003. He was subsequently offered the position of CEO for the Nissan distributor Internacional de Automoviles 2100 CA in Valencia, Venezuela in June 2004.
Díaz fled Venezuela after surviving an assassination attempt by car bomb on June 17, 2005. He moved in with a brother living in Tuscaloosa and was granted political asylum by the United States in October of that year. He took a job in a factory on Rice Mine Road. He has since become a naturalized U.S. citizen and has been rejoined by his wife and step-daughter and by his son (a U.S. citizen born in Kentucky). The family now resides in Hoover where Díaz works at Home Depot and part time as a Spanish translator for the Hoover Municipal Court. He is a fan of the Birmingham Barons.
DolarToday.com was founded in March 2010 by Díaz with two partners, José Altuve, a real estate executive living in Doral, Florida and Iván Lozada-Salas, a supermarket technology worker in Sammamish, Washington. With the help of various sources in Venezuala and Columbia, they calculate and report an average rate used by informal currency traders to exchange Venezuelan bolivars for U.S. dollars or other hard currencies. Originally published on Twitter, the partners created a website in order to publish independent news items critical of Venezuela's socialist government and to place advertisements to offset the costs of operating the site, which is frequently targeted by Venezuela-backed hackers.
Because private importers must often finance the purchase of foreign goods with hard currency bought in unsanctioned markets, they rely on the website's posted exchange rates to set prices for their goods, in defiance of Venezuela's official monetary policy. The government blames the site for fueling inflation and has accused its publishers of profiting from the devaluation of Venezuelan currency. Some economists, such as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C. concur that DolarToday.com supplies an "economic war" against the government, now headed by Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela's central bank filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in United States federal court alleging that the site was engaged in cyberterrorism. The suit asked the court to bar the site from publishing unapproved exchange rates and to force the owners to place any profits from the site into a trust for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.
References
- Banco Central De Venezuela v. DolarToday LLC (2005) United States District Court for the District of Delaware
- Feeley, Jef (October 23, 2005) "Venezuela's Central Bank Sues to Block Black-Market Website." Bloomberg News
- Morton, Jason (January 23, 2006) "A new life in Tuscaloosa" The Tuscaloosa News
- Meza, Alfredo & Batiz, César (August 21, 2015) "La venganza más célebre del exilio se llama dolar today." La Bitácora de Pedro Mogna
- Weisbrot, Mark (March 18, 2016) "Venezuela: Dismantling a Weapon of Mass Destruction." Dollars & Sense
- Kurmanaev, Anatoly (November 20, 2016) "Venezuela’s Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama." The Wall Street Journal