Tens of thousands take to streets in Venezuela
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelans on both sides of the nation’s bitter political divide took to the streets Saturday after two weeks of mass protests that have President Nicolas Maduro scrambling to squash an increasingly militant opposition movement.
In Caracas, tens of thousands of opponents of Maduro filled several city blocks in their biggest rally to date against his 10-month-old government. Across town, at the presidential palace, Maduro addressed a much smaller crowd of mostly female supporters dressed in the red of his socialist party.
The dueling protests capped a violent week in which the government jailed Leopoldo Lopez, a fiery hard-liner who roused the opposition after its defeat in December’s mayoral elections, and dozens of other student activists.
The violence has left at least 10 people dead on both sides and injured more than 100.
Rising crime, inflation
At the opposition rally, in wealthier eastern Caracas, two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles urged supporters to keep pressuring the government to resolve problems ranging from rising crime to galloping 56 percent inflation in the oil-rich nation.
“If you (Maduro) can’t, then it’s time to go,” an impassioned Capriles told the crowd, many of them dressed in white and wearing baseball caps in the red, blue and yellow of Venezuela’s flag.
Capriles has frequently criticized Lopez’s strategy of taking to the streets without much support beyond the opposition’s middle-class base. He downplayed those differences Saturday. Recalling his own four-month confinement in 2002 in the same military prison where Lopez is being held, he vowed to fight for his fellow opposition leader’s release.
“We may have our differences, but there’s something bigger than us all that unites us, which is Venezuela, damn it!” Capriles told the roaring crowd. Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, was at his side.
After the opposition rally broke up in the late afternoon, in a pattern that has been seen in past demonstrations about 1,000 stragglers erected barricades of trash and other debris and threw rocks and bottles at police and National Guardsmen. The troops responded with volleys of tear gas to prevent the students from reaching a highway and blocking traffic. No injuries were reported. The current political turmoil in Venezuela was sparked Feb. 12 by opposition marches that killed three people — two opposition members and a government supporter.
Authorities blamed opposition leader Lopez for fomenting the violence and jailed him on charges including arson and incitement, prompting anger from his supporters at home and criticism from abroad.
The opposition accuses the National Guard and armed militia groups of attacking protesters and firing indiscriminately into crowds, as well as beating up and menacing some of the hundreds of activists who’ve been jailed nationwide.