CARACAS (Reuters) – Anti-government demonstrators put up barricades and set fire to trash in Caracas yesterday despite calls from within the opposition to rein in protests that have led to 13 deaths in Venezuela’s worst unrest for a decade.
Traffic in the capital slowed to a crawl and many people stayed home as protesters burned trash and piled debris along main avenues a day after opposition leader Henrique Capriles called on them to keep demonstrations peaceful.
“We know we’re bothering people but we have to wake up Venezuela!” student Pablo Herrera, 23, said next to a barricade in the affluent Los Palos Grandes district of Caracas.
Authorities in the convulsed border state of Tachira confirmed another death: a man who fell from his second-storey apartment after being hit by a bullet from a nearby protest.
The demonstrations are the biggest challenge to President Nicolas Maduro’s 10-month-old government, though there is no sign they could topple him or affect the OPEC member’s oil shipments. Venezuela is Latin America’s biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world’s largest petroleum reserves.
The government says 529 people have been charged over the unrest, with most given warnings but 45 kept behind bars. About 150 people have been injured, authorities say.
Capriles, 41, spurned an invitation to meet Maduro in the afternoon as part of a gathering of mayors and governors that some had hoped would open up communications between both sides.
“This is a dying government … I’m not going to be like the orchestra on the Titanic,” he told reporters. “Miraflores (presidential palace) is not the place to talk about peace, it’s the center of operations for abuses of human rights.”
Capriles and other opposition figureheads are demanding that the government release imprisoned protest leader Leopoldo Lopez and about a dozen jailed student demonstrators.
