Oriroco. You mean you arrived in 1989? So we experienced the same thing. Shining Path on the doorsteps of Lima, boms going off. I married a Peruvian girl, so I regularly come back there. Things have improved a lot since then.

At the time I had the luck to receive my salary in dollars. So I went daily onto the street to change 10 or 20 dollars for Inti's. The dollar took over as the stable currency and you could find money changers on every corner of the street. I went to the most expensive restaurants of Lima to spend $10 dollars. Couldn't afford such restaurants today. The restaurants were empty. The economy became disfunctional. We bought cooking equipment for the comedores in the "suburbs" of Lima, because those local popular kitchens were the only way to survive for the poor.

In 1993 and 1994 I was in Zimbabwe under hyperinflation. Even in the small, local store there was one person fully ocupied to change the price of the articles for sale twice a day.

Now, I don't know where the dividing line between high inflation (10-30% per year?) and hyperinflation exactly is, but I expect the US Government to change the currency before high inflation turns into hyper-inflation.