Gunmen attack voters in antiMaduro ballot
CARACAS: Gunmen on motorbikes attacked Venezuelan voters lining up for an oppositionorganized ballot challenging President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday, killing a 61-year-old woman and wounding three other people, according to prosecutors.
Television footage of the attack showed a panicked crowd running and screaming while gunshots were heard. Many sought refuge in a nearby church.
The armed assault occurred in Catia, a working class neighbourhood in the west of the capital Caracas.
Prosecutorssaidaninvestigation had been opened.
The opposition coalition blamed ‘paramilitary groups’ linked to Maduro’s government.
The violence confirmed fears surrounding an electoral tussle between the opposition and Maduro, focused on the beleaguered president’s bid to rewrite the constitution.
It also fed into nearly four months of protests during which almost 100 people have died.
Energized by the massive vote, the opposition mulled yesterday how to escalate protests and block a new congress it fears may enshrine Socialist Party hegemony.
They promised “Zero Hour” in Venezuela to demand a general election and stop the leftist Maduro’s plan to create a controversial new legislative super-body called a Constituent Assembly in a July 30 vote.
We don’t want a fraudulent Constituent Assembly imposed on us. We don’t want to be Cuba. We don’t want to be a country without freedom.
Opposition tactics could include lengthy road blockades and sitins, a national strike, or possibly even a march on the Miraflores presidential palace, similar to events before a short-lived coup against Maduro’s successor Hugo Chavez in 2002.
“Today, Venezuela stood up with dignity to say freedom does not go backwards, democracy is not negotiated,” Julio Borges, who leads the opposition-controlled legislature, said shortly after midnight when the referendum results were announced.
“We don’t want a fraudulent Constituent Assembly imposed on us. We don’t want to be Cuba. We don’t want to be a country without freedom,” he added, promising further announcements on opposition strategy yesterday.
Maduro, whose term is due to end in early 2019, dismissed Sunday’s opposition event as an internal exercise by the opposition with no bearing on his government.
“Don’t go crazy, calm down,” he said on Sunday in a message to the opposition, vowing his Constituent Assembly would bring peace to the volatile nation of 30 million people.
Though polls show the opposition has majority support and his foes repeatedly call for a free and fair election as their No. 1 demand, Maduro insists they are US pawns intent on sabotaging the economy and bringing him down through violence.
The president urged the opposition to “come over to peace, to the constitution,” telling officials who were setting up his July 30 election that differences “must be resolved in peace, with ballots, not bullets.”
To detract from the opposition vote, Maduro’s government held a dry-run simulation on Sunday the Constituent Assembly election.
Most Venezuelans oppose the Constituent Assembly, which will have power to rewrite the constitution and annul the current opposition-led legislature, but Maduro is pressing on anyway for the vote in two weeks’ time.
In three questions at Sunday’s event, opposition supporters voted overwhelmingly - by 98 per cent - to reject the proposed new assembly, urge the military to defend the existing constitution, and support elections before Maduro’s term ends, according to academics monitoring the vote for the opposition.
Sunday’s nearly 7.2 million participation compared with 7.7 million opposition votes in the 2015 legislative elections that it won by a landslide and 7.3 million votes for the opposition in a 2013 presidential poll narrowly won by Maduro.
“The result is a remarkable show of force for Venezuela’s opposition,” New York-based Torino Capital said in a research note, noting the vote was only called two weeks previously and participation meant openly defying the government.
“We can assume that the number of people voting was less than that which would turn out to vote in a regular election .. The results seem to confirm that the opposition would easily defeat the government in any election.”
The political turmoil has taken a heavy toll on Venezuela: 95 deaths in unrest since April, thousands of injuries, hundreds of arrests, and further damage to an economy already in its fourth year of decline.
Several Latin American countries and the Catholic Church have criticized Maduro’s move to a new constitution, which the opposition says is a bid by Maduro to concentrate dictatorial prerogatives. — Reuters
Julio Borges, leader of the opposition-controlled legislature