Venezuelan police have fired tear gas on protesters demanding President Nicolas Maduro’s resignation as security forces claim some demonstrators were dressed in military fatigues and were carrying plastic explosives.
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Víctor Guilarte, 45, a mechanic from a Caracas suburb, said his work had vanished because his neighbors had became so poor they could not afford vehicle repairs.
But an effort to collect signatures calling for a recall referendum has run into opposition from the national electoral council (CNE), which is controlled by Maduro loyalists.
Images and eyewitnesses said it was among the largest marches in recent history, turning dozens of blocks into a rippling white mass of discontent.
The government instead appeared to be cracking down on opponents.
The country’s defensive measures will last through Monday September 4th.
They are pushing for a recall vote of Maduro, and they want it before January 10, to ensure a snap election if Maduro loses.
His support plummeted as the economy continued to deteriorate to the point that analysts warned that Venezuela was at risk of becoming a failed state.
Maduro joined his supporters in the afternoon, singing on stage and pumping his fist in the air.
Government supporters also held a countermarch Thursday in a section of Caracas closer to the Miraflores presidential palace. The Venezuelan flag was everywhere – on hats, shirts, skirts, rendered in face paint.
Maduro tried to mock his opponents’ show of force, saying they had failed to amass more than 30,000 supporters and joking that he and First Lady Cilia Flores would go the movies at a shopping mall near where they were gathering. A simultaneous protest was being in Venezuela. Some marched bare-chested and in loincloths while carrying spears.
If it happens this year, new elections will be called, she said.
“Sometimes I want to kill myself”, she said. “We’re exhausted of the insecurity, of scarcities, of inflation”. “We want change, we are hungry”.
If there was one sentiment that Rivas, Hernandez and other protesters expressed it was frustration – frustration over having water or electricity service cut off, frustration for hyperinflation that that destroys the value of their wages.
Also invigorating the opposition is a government crackdown. There were reports of clashes on social media between police and demonstrators on the Francisco Fajardo Highway at Las Mercedes.
But on Thursday, Maduro told supporters in central Caracas that authorities had dismantled a “camp of Colombian paramilitaries” who he alleged would have participated in the coup, arresting 92 people. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group based in NY, said Wednesday that at least six journalists, including two from Al-Jazeera and one from the French newspaper Le Monde, were barred from entering the country at the airport.
“Recall now. The government can’t stop it”.
“This country that has so many natural resources is living through the worst poverty”, he said.
“We are here at the call of our president, to defend the revolution”, said 37-year-old housewife Carolina Aponte at the pro-government rally.
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President Maduro said on Tuesday that the political party Voluntad Popular, led by the imprisoned leader Leopoldo Lopez and his wife Lilian Tintori, is behind a coup plot against his government.
