Miami Venezuelans show support
Hundreds of Venezuelans and their allies gathered in a suburb of Miami Saturday to support their loved ones back home. Cars draped in the Venezuelan flags streamed into J.C. Bermudez Park Saturday in Doral, where thousands of Venezuelans have resettled over the last decade, earning the city the nickname “Doralsuela.” Organizers said they wanted to keep the spotlight on the opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The participants dressed in white. Similar demonstrations took place Saturday in dozens of cities across the globe.
— Associated Press
Venezuelans on both sides of the nation’s bitter political divide took to the streets on 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 President Nicolas 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 following 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.
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 on 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 reach a highway and blocking traffic.
No injuries were reported.
Elsewhere in the capital, government backers filled a wide avenue in a boisterous march to the presidential palace accompanied by sound trucks blaring music and slogans. The crowd made up mostly of women danced in the street to live music and carried photos of the late president Hugo Chavez while vendors hawked calendars emblazoned with his image.
Maduro said he won’t pull security forces off the streets until the opposition abandons violence and accepts his invitation for dialogue.
“This elected president, the son of Chavez, is going to keep protecting the people,” he said while holding up what he said was an improvised explosive device used by protesters to attack government buildings and security forces. “Nobody is going to blackmail me.”
The opposition protest in Caracas coincided with marches across the country, most of which also ended peacefully.
The current political turmoil in Venezuela was sparked on Feb. 12 by huge opposition marches that killed three people — two opposition members and a government supporter.
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.
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