Demonstrators use makeshift weaponry in clashes with police
CARACAS, Venezuela — Hands straining at a giant elastic exercise band, three young protesters form a giant human slingshot to hurl a jar filled with feces at Venezuelan officers firing tear gas at demonstrators who are in the streets to demand new elections.
Farther down Caracas’ main highway, other youths mass behind wooden shields bearing medieval decorations or images of the South American nation’s blue constitution book, which socialist President Nicolas Maduro wants to rewrite. Some protesters wear swimming goggles to protect their eyes from the stinging gas. Others use gas masks fashioned from soda bottles.
In a country where finding even a Tylenol can be a weekslong ordeal, protesters are employing every scrap of material they can find as makeshift weaponry or to protect themselves while confronting police and national guardsmen who fire tear gas and rubber bullets at them.
“We are using these devices to protect ourselves — to prevent there from being more injuries than there have already been,” Juan Andres Mejia, an opposition lawmaker, said this week as a friend held a wooden shield above his head.
Mejia was later hit on the head with a tear gas canister, but remarked: “Thanks to my helmet, it wasn’t too serious.”
At least 38 people have been killed and hundreds injured in protests that erupted after the Supreme Court issued a ruling March 29 nullifying the opposition-controlled National Assembly, a decision it later reversed amid a storm of international criticism.
Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to castigate Maduro’s administration, which they claim has become a dictatorship responsible for triple-digit inflation, skyrocketing crime and crippling food shortages.
The government’s response to the demonstrations has drawn international condemnation.