CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s government and opposition blamed each other yesterday for a violent melee at a campaign stop by presidential candidate Henrique Capriles in which several people were injured by bullets.
The flare-up in a poor neighbourhood of Caracas underlined the potential for trouble during what is shaping into a close-fought race for the Oct 7 election where Capriles wants to end President Hugo Chavez’s 13-year rule.
Capriles’ camp said red-shirted members of Chavez’s ruling Socialist Party opened fire when Capriles and supporters were walking through Cotiza neighbourhood. Two supporters, including the son of an opposition legislator, were injured, they said.
With Chavez in Cuba for cancer treatment, senior government officials called that a lie, saying Capriles’ security guards began Sunday’s shooting and injured four people.
Both sides repeatedly played footage of the incident on their TV stations to back up their version, with the crack of bullets sounding as people are seen fleeing.
“While this government debates with weapons, we debate with ideas,” Capriles, the centre-left 39-year-old governor of Miranda state, said after the incident.
“What are they scared of?”
Interior Minister Tareck El Aissami promised an investigation but said Miranda state police, operating without permission outside their state, had attacked government supporters involved in another activity.
“They were the promoters of the violence,” he said. “They decided to mount this show during the dull activity of the candidate of the right, who could not even draw 10 people.”
Added to the deep political polarization under Chavez, Venezuela has one of the worst crime rates in the world, meaning arms abound – especially in poorer areas like Cotiza – and the potential for violence is always high.
Another opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, had shots fired at her entourage in November while campaigning in a Caracas shantytown ahead of the opposition Democratic Unity primary that Capriles won in February.
Private, pro-opposition TV channel Globovision – long a hate figure for Chavez supporters – said its crew was attacked and equipment stolen during Sunday’s fracas in Cotiza.
While Venezuelan politics are constantly dogged by low-level violence, the South American nation has also seen major unrest at various points in the last few decades.
Hundreds were killed when Chavez himself protagonized a failed coup attempt in 1992. Ten years later, he was briefly ousted from the presidency after opposition protests ended in bloodshed, killing more than a dozen people, outside his Miraflores palace in Caracas.