Gustavo Díaz

Gustavo Díaz (born c. 1956) is a former Venezuelan army officer and the founder of DolarToday.com, a website accused of undermining the monetary policy of that country's socialist government.

As deputy security chief for Pedro Carmona, Díaz participated in a short-lived coup against then-president Hugo Chávez in 2002. He was granted political asylum to move to the United States in 2005 and has since become a naturalized U.S. citizen. He and his family live in Hoover where he 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 by Díaz with two partners, a real estate executive living in Miami, Florida and a supermarket technology worker in Seattle Washington. With the help of various sources in Venezuala and Columbia, they calculate and report an average rate of exchange being 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 the Venezuelan government and to place advertisements to offset the costs of operating the site, which is frequently targeted by Venezuela-backed hackers.

Because importers must often finance the purchase of foreign goods with hard currency bought in unsanctioned markets, they rely on the website's posted value to set prices for their goods, in defiance of Venezuela's official monetary policy.

References

• Kurmanaev, Anatoly (November 20, 2016) "Venezuela’s Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama." The Wall Street Journal