SHORT OF OPTIONS!

Adozen activists alight surreptitiously from cars, walk determinedly towards Venezuela’s heavily-guarded Food Ministry, and dump two bags of garbage at its front entrance. Soldiers quickly form a cordon and a young opposition lawmaker pounds their riot shields with his fists as government supporters appear from nowhere, throwing punches at the protesters. The activists, who use garbage to symbolise how people are scavenging for food because of Venezuela’s economic crisis, chant “The People Are Hungry!” and “Democracy!” After a few minutes, they are chased back to their cars by a fast-growing crowd of supporters of socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

The mid-morning fracas in a working-class district of Caracas is the latest of near-weekly “surprise” protests by the opposition this year intended to embarrass Maduro, galvanise street action and highlight Venezuela’s litany of problems. “Three million Venezuelans are eating out of rubbish today,” said the 28-year-old legislator Carlos Paparoni, nursing a few bruises after the Food Ministry protest. “No one can shut us up. We will fight wherever we have to.” While the small, flash protests briefly paralyse streets, turn heads and provide colourful photo ops for journalists tipped off in advance, they are little more than a minor irritant to Maduro.

In fact, they have only been on the rise this year because of the failure of traditional mass marches in 2016.

A year of marches, which peaked with a million-person rally in Caracas, did not stop authorities blocking a referendum on Maduro’s rule that could have changed the balance of power in the South American member of Opec with 30 million people.

Instead, they led to a short-lived Vatican-championed dialogue that helped shore up the unpopular president and divided the opposition Democratic Unity coalition, leaving rank-and-file activists demoralised.

With Maduro’s term due to finish in early 2019, authorities are now delaying local elections and making opposition parties jump through bureaucratic hoops to remain legally registered.

“We’ll have to stop conventional rallies and use the surprise factor to make the government see it must respect the constitution,” said opposition leader Henrique Capriles, whose First Justice party is a main promoter of the flash protests. After traditional-style marches around the country on January 23 were again blocked by security forces, Capriles debuted the new strategy the next day with a surprise protest that briefly immobilised vehicles on a highway.